5 Leadership Necessities for Successful Home Improvement Managers

Many organizations focus on onboarding and training individual contributors but forget how to empower their managers to drive those people forward.

What tools and support do they need to be successful? These five core principles create a strong foundation.

1. Be Present (don’t hide)

One of the biggest lessons I've learned through my own experience, is that when things get tough, leaders hide. They go to their office or sit in meetings with other leaders. As a result, everyone creates their own narrative.

That narrative goes on to control your organization, and that can be dangerous.

When things are hard, you have to be present. You have to be visible. You have to be communicating (maybe even more than you normally would). It's easy to get in front of your team when things are great and rally everybody up, but it's hard when things are unsure.

2. Communicate Vision and Purpose

Your team needs to know where you're going. If they don't, how do you expect their behavior to be aligned with the organization? Vision sets the framework for the behaviors and actions that happen in your business.

In March 2020, we furloughed 90% of our team due to overnight covid restrictions for in-home visits. We informed the remaining 10% that friends, colleagues, and even family members were no longer here. It was a huge risk, but the reality was that if we did well, we could bring those people back. There was a ton of uncertainty in the market and in our business about what homeowners would want and how the state would allow our business to operate, but overnight we were declared essential workers. This was the beginning of a new mission for our team.

The mission and vision that we gave our sales team was if the business does well with every sale, we're closer to bringing back your friend, your business partner, your coworker.

I will never forget how powerful that was. We broke records every day, every week, and every month. They cared so much about other people, and it pushed their performance to a level we could have never expected. Efficiencies tripled. The business was stronger and healthier than it had ever been.

Set the vision, align it around a purpose, and push your team toward that. And anyone who doesn't fit can't be on the bus. You need to have zero tolerance for poor culture fit as they will be the demise of your organization and team health.

3. Initial Training is Not Enough

I see so many organizations excel at the hiring process, receive better candidates, train them, and then they hit the field and fall flat. Or some of them kill it, and five months later, they're the worst performer on the team. Managers then scratch their heads confused because they trained the rep and they should know how to do their jobs now.

Initial training and onboarding is not enough. I can't express how important that is. It's never enough. You need a plan for 30-, 60-, 90-, and 120-day post-training check-ins. Riding along with your reps to see what they are actually doing, not just taking their word for it, is one of the best ways a manager can spend time with their team.

Ongoing weekly training sessions are extremely important for consistent improvement over extended periods of time. They should be based off field observations from ride alongs. These rides allow you to see the malfunction in the sales process or something amazing your rep might be doing that you want to share with others.

What did you learn? What is not working? What do we need to calibrate?

If I invest that time with my new hire over the first six months of their career, they're probably going to stay, be more productive, and be happier long term feeling supported by leadership.

When I ask organizations about sales training frequency, and they say, “We don't do that. Nobody wants to do it. They hate it.” I say, “Well, we need to look at the training and maybe take some responsibility that we did not make it engaging enough, or maybe we were not prepared or organized for the session.”

Getting feedback after each session on ways you can improve is key to making sure the reps enjoy the training. Don’t forget to leverage your top performers to help run training sessions with the team. They are on the road with the reps every day and it is powerful for individuals who are struggling to see examples of success on a regular basis to build their belief system.

As leaders, you won’t have time to do it all, but you do need to make sure your team is supported and always ready to take advantage of the next opportunity your company provides them. Leveraging other players on your team and in your company is a great opportunity to empower your team and build them into teammates that help grow the organization and build a bench of future leaders.

Find ways to get them excited, have them create, update the coaching session. Take your best reps, performers, and marketers and ask how you can improve training.

As leaders, you won’t have time to do it all, and you shouldn't, but it's a great opportunity to empower your team and build them into leaders that help you.

4. Remember Your Two Customers

As a leader, you have two customers: the internal team and actual customer.

Listening to what both say is critical to consistently improving both your internal employee experience and your external customer experience. If there’s one thing if I can preach forever, it’s not to get far from your individual contributors. The further you go, the further removed you are from the people who meet face-to-face with your customers.

And if you don't conduct skip level meetings, find a way to do it.

5. Operational Efficiency

Operational efficiency is where the rubber meets the road. Many organizations look at the wrong KPIs, too many KPIs, or nothing at all. Even worse, sometimes there’s an assumption that an employee does exactly what you train them to do without any oversight. Your team needs one-on-ones and opportunities to share proposed changes or strategic planning. It's important to give people the time and space to talk about challenges.

In marketing, the KPI is leads. In sales, it's net sales per lead issued, which is the total volume that your salesperson sold divided by the leads you gave them. If you boil it down to those two things and focus on how you can improve them, you will build a healthier sales and marketing team. It really can be that simple.

A quote I live by is, “You have to inspect what you expect."

An actionable way to work with your team is to present an observation from sales performance data as an area for discussion. To accomplish that I might say “Hey, I noticed that your conversion rate's dropping a bit. It's 10% lower than what you typically hang at. We're not meeting our goals this month. What's going on? Why do you think that's happening?” Give them space to explain what they think is going on with their performance and the cause for it before explaining what you think. It is more important to understand where they think they are going wrong so that you can guide them where you need them to go. Reps are more likely to work harder on things they believe will help drive performance and sometimes they just need a conversation to get their heads right.

Many organizations don't share data with their teams, so teams are unaware they're underperforming. Don’t be afraid to put out numbers in front of your team on a daily or at a minimum weekly basis. It is important to know where they stand and what they need to do to get to their goals.