A recently appointed sales manager at a big financial institution, found herself unable to make sales calls for fear of failure. As a result, she was in danger of having the lowest performance in her team. Coaching was suggested to help her overcome it.
Sarah has just moved to a new role running a corporate sales team for one of the large banks. This was an exciting opportunity for her to develop her career and she was looking forward to the challenge of running a new team. Yet, she still had to make sales calls. This was not something she was comfortable with. In fact, the very idea of it filled her with fear. The thought of failing to make a sale was somehow the problem. That fear meant she was putting off calls and it was adding to the worry.
This was becoming a big problem for her because not only did she have her own sales targets, she could not afford to be the lowest performing individual in the team. She wanted to lead by example and this was not a good one. Her boss had noticed the low performance and in a review meeting had suggested coaching. She was embarrassed about the problem and knew something had to be done about it. Although she was a little apprehensive about the coaching session she was also relieved that she was going to be able to talk to someone who could help.
James Stokes
Founder, CoachingCloud
The thing about fear is it doesn’t come from nowhere. You have to think about things in a particular way to get your brain responding and creating enough of the right kind of chemicals for you to have a fight-or-flight response.
The first thing I would do here is to get Sarah to have a clear idea of what she wants instead. Ask: “Would you like to be able to look forward to making sales calls?” For someone to answer this question they have to imagine what it would be like to do it.
The next thing is to work out what made fear the right/correct response.
I don’t mean justifying why she should be afraid, I mean what was going on to cause her to be afraid – what was she thinking about?
I’d find out what has to be there for her to start to feel afraid. I’d ask questions like: “Are there some calls you make and you are happy to make them?”; “How do you know when to be afraid?”; “What do you think about before making the call?”
Sometimes people say they have a “fear of failure”. I’d set Sarah a challenge to make a bunch of calls where her job is to find as many ways as someone can to say “no”, and to find what the criteria is for making a decision and what stops them. She is not allowed to make any sales while doing this, or she fails the task.
The strategy is simple. If she makes any sales she has “failed” and has started to build a new generalisation about feeling good while making these calls. If she makes no sales she will be successful, but it also breaks the generalisation and she starts to build a useful strategy for asking questions.
Alison Whybrow
Chartered psychologist and coach
Sarah presents a potentially complex and multi-layered coaching situation. Viewing this through a Cognitive Behavioural Coaching (CBC) lens gives an opportunity to explore the intrapersonal and interpersonal dynamics, building Sarah’s full awareness of how some of her own assumptions and personal drivers might be adding complexity and stress. CBC offers some useful strategies and techniques that Sarah can start to experiment with immediately to increase her resilience and resourcefulness in the face of this and future performance challenges.
It might simply be enough to support Sarah to become fully aware of the impact of this emerging situation. The starting point would be to ask her to recall a specific occasion recently when she experienced the fear described in relation to making or even thinking about making a sales call. The BASIC ID framework (Lazarus, 1989; Palmer, Cooper & Thomas, 2003) or the SPACE framework (Edgerton & Palmer, 2005) offer a means of exploring the multiple consequences of this fear on Sarah, such as on her behaviour (including how she interacts with others), her emotions, her beliefs and ideas, as well as stress responses she is experiencing physiologically.
I would then clarify what Sarah’s goals might be. How does Sarah want to interact with others? How does she want to feel? What does she want to be doing? With this greater level of awareness, and a platform providing a future focus, Sarah can choose how and what to move forward with.
COACHING AT WORK, VOLUME 9, ISSUE 5