From Player to Coach: Managing the Job You Used to Hold

The regional sales manager with the best numbers in the company gets the regional vice president job. The people who now report to him are regional sales managers. He held that title three weeks ago. He knows which principals will push back on the new multiplier and which agency is about to lose its best spec salesperson, and he knows it before his RSMs do, because he was better at their job than they are. That is why he was promoted.

Eighteen months later, the territory is flat, the RSMs have stopped bringing him problems, and the principals have learned that the fastest way to a factory decision is to call the man who used to have the job. He is still the manager.

Most promotions require someone to learn a job they have not done. This one requires someone to stop doing a job he has mastered, while watching other people do it worse. Almost nothing about the promotion encourages it.

Why This Promotion Is Different

A salesperson promoted to manager is at least disoriented, and unfamiliarity is a form of protection: he cannot do his reps’ jobs for them because he does not know how. The RSM promoted to RVP has no such protection. Every regional review puts him across from someone doing the job he just left, making a call he would have made differently. The instinct to reach in is always justified on the merits, and every time he acts on it, the RSM learns the job a little less.

The new RVP is not learning a job. He is being asked to stop doing one he is better at than the people he now manages.

Benson, Li, and Shue, studying sales-force microdata across 131 firms, found that companies systematically promote on current performance even though it poorly predicts how well someone will manage, and that the people underneath those promoted stars do worse as a result. Their study covers salespeople becoming first-line managers; one level up, the same selection logic produces an executive who is better than his reports at the work he is supposed to hand them.

The channel sharpens the trap. An RSM’s standing with agency principals is personal. It was built by knowing their line card and their open specs, and by getting the factory to move on lead time and pricing. When that RSM becomes RVP, the principals keep calling him. The new RSM inherits a relationship in which he is the second call, and every time the RVP takes the first call he confirms the arrangement.

The principals did not get the memo about the org chart. They keep calling the man who used to answer.

Three Behaviors That Mark the Transition

• Delegating outcomes, not tasks. Assigning an RSM a list of agencies to visit keeps the RVP in charge of the method. Making the RSM accountable for spec hold rate and the condition of his agencies, then staying out of how he gets there, transfers ownership. Without it the RSM is the RVP’s field assistant.
• Coaching to the process, not to the deal. The former RSM’s instinct on every regional review is to fix the deal in front of him: call the principal, adjust the multiplier, talk to the specifier. Coaching means asking the RSM what he would do and working on the pattern behind the answer. That deal may close worse. The next forty close better.
• Tolerating a worse short-term result. An RSM allowed to handle a rep termination, a pricing exception, or a national account escalation without the RVP stepping in will, the first few times, handle it less well than the RVP would have. The RVP will know exactly how much worse, which is what makes the cost hard to pay. It is the price of a management team.

The RVP will know exactly how much worse his RSM handled it. Carrying that knowledge quietly is the job.

Three Traps That Pull the Executive Back

• The rescue call. An agency principal is unhappy with a decision the RSM made and calls the RVP, whom he has known for twelve years. The RVP fixes it. After the second or third of these, every agency in the territory understands that an RSM decision is provisional until the RVP confirms it.
• The hero close. The largest account in the territory reaches final negotiation and the RVP steps in to run it, because he is better at it. The RSM who managed the account for a year learns that the finish belongs to the executive, and the customer learns who decides.
• The ride-along that becomes a takeover. The RVP joins an RSM on an agency visit and ten minutes in has taken over the planning session with the principal. The RSM goes quiet. The principal concludes, correctly, that the real decision-maker is the one who showed up. A ride-along is the manufacturer’s best coaching mechanism, the argument made in When Enough Is Enough. When the RVP rides along, the person being coached is supposed to be the RSM. Used as a stage for the executive’s own relationships, it teaches the agency to route around the manager.

The ride-along is the factory’s best coaching tool and its most common takeover. The agency remembers which one it was.

What the Comp Plan Is Telling Him

The executive’s instincts are half the story. The other half is the system he was dropped into, which typically rewards the behavior the transition requires him to give up.

The usual RVP plan pays the former RSM on total territory volume, with no component tied to RSM development, bench depth, or how many decisions got made without him. A plan that pays the RVP the same whether his RSMs grew or he grew the number for them has told him what to do. The dashboard compounds it. The KPI Trap made the case that activity metrics mask process failure. For a new executive, it is worse: agency visits and pipeline reviews look identical whether the RSM ran them or the RVP did, so the dashboard cannot see the problem.

The replacement set is small:

Benson and colleagues note that technical organizations have long used split career ladders, advancing top individual contributors in pay and title without moving them into management. The channel has an obvious version one level up: the senior RSM or national account executive who is paid at vice president level, keeps the relationships he built, and is never asked to manage the job he used to hold. Not every great territory runner wants to build a management team, and those who do should not have to fail at it to prove it.

A dashboard that cannot tell whether the RSM or the RVP ran the review cannot see the problem it was built to catch.

The Fair Objection

The objection is that these relationships are the manufacturer’s standing with the agency, and handing them down carries real risk with a principal who has 150 other lines to think about. A principal who can no longer reach the person he trusts may move the line down the list.

The answer is for the RVP to stay visibly in the room while the RSM holds the decision. The principal can still see the RVP. What the principal cannot do is get a pricing exception, a sample commitment, or a territory answer from him. Those come from the RSM, even when going around him would be faster. Presence transfers slowly. Decision rights transfer on day one, and they are what teach the agency who the manager is.

What the Transition Looks Like

The RVP who makes it across has a calendar built around his RSMs’ regional reviews rather than his own agency visits. When a principal calls him directly, he listens and routes the decision back through the RSM. The agencies in the territory describe his RSMs as people who can get the factory to decide, the only reputation that makes a regional manager worth anything to a principal.

An RVP chosen for how well he did the RSM job and measured on total volume will keep doing the RSM job. The question to ask at the twelve-month mark is not whether the territory made its number. It is whether any RSM did something this year that he could not have done last year. If the answer is no, the RVP is still the best regional manager in the company, and the company has not yet given him a reason to be anything else.