A book review of Colleen Stanley’s Emotional Intelligence for Sales Leadership.
June 30, 2021
Ultimately, I would love it if I could wholeheartedly recommend each book I read to my friends and colleagues. In some cases I do; in others, my network will benefit more from an abridged version.
When it comes to Emotional Intelligence for Sales Leadership: The Secret to Building High-Performance Sales Teams by Colleen Stanley, the executive summary is definitely in order. I read this book—so you don’t have to.
Stanley offers many valuable insights into effective leadership and development in sales. However, the book is poorly organized. It is imperfectly edited and lacks systematic reference citations, so it’s impossible to track down quoted studies and sayings (at least one of which is probably fake). It also features lapses in logic.
For example, in one chapter Stanley conflates having emotional intelligence with understanding the neuroscience behind emotional intelligence. Understanding science does not guarantee effective behavior in emotional situations any more than knowing the law guarantees that lawyers will not commit crimes.
It also isn’t entirely clear whether the book is primarily about emotional intelligence at all. Emotional intelligence is a fraught topic because psychologists aren’t fully agreed on what it is. At the same time, studies have definitively demonstrated that whatever it is, emotional intelligence improves job performance in sales. Stanley does not spend time trying to give a useful working definition of what emotional intelligence is. The closest thing to a definition comes on page 214, when she lists the following skills:
For most of the book, Stanley blithely conflates emotional intelligence with “soft skills.” She’s not the only one to do so; much of what Adam Grant talks about in the first pages of his 2014 article “The Dark Side of Emotional Intelligence” is what earlier ages would have called “rhetorical skill.”
So the result is a book full of tips around developing a sales team and management style that excels at the soft skills just as much as at the hard skills of sales. This isn’t a bad thing; it’s just not the kind of carefully researched psychology and statistics we like to rely on at the Maestro Group. In the following pages, I’ve assembled some of the most useful tips so that you can learn the good advice Stanley does have to share (whether or not it is about emotional intelligence).
Learning is not an easy process, and Stanley highlights two aspects of this particularly effectively. Failure is an essential part of learning, and salespeople who are afraid to fail are basically shying away from opportunities for growth. She discusses the J shape of the learning curve, where activities actually become harder and less effective during the early stages of learning a new skill. However, once you pull through that initial skid, you then accelerate much faster than before.
The other key point is how unhelpful multitasking is to learning. Learning, along with a number of other deep thought activities like writing, requires focus and attention to be truly successful. Constant interruptions from smartphones and other distractions result in poorer quality information recall and skill acquisition. She discusses various strategies for prioritizing and setting aside time for activities that require deep thought, in order to protect them from interruption. (For more resources on this topic, consult Deep Work by Cal Newport.)
I’m not totally on board with Stanley’s definitions of empathy. She preaches a radical empathy where the important part is reading between the lines of what someone is saying, and identifying how they are feeling. However, an additional step is necessary for someone to be left with a positive feeling from a correct identification of their emotions: supportive actions.
Stanley discounts the expression of empathy through supportive actions, which can in some cases lead to callous-sounding recommendations. I don’t care if the cable company customer service rep feels my pain; I care if I am ever going to get my service install. I’d rather have a refund or discount than kind words followed by continued lack of internet, because the latter implies their words were empty and they didn’t care enough to do anything about my problem.
Where Stanley does get empathy right is in describing how it depends on focus and attention, and encouraging sales leaders to deploy it internally with their team as well as externally to actively listen to prospects and clients. In fact, this may be her most important lesson of all: that many of the skills that are essential to sales are also essential to sales leadership, just used in a different way.
Self-awareness and self-regard are aspects of emotional intelligence that are less widely known than empathy. Now, we’re not talking about being the kind of stereotypical salesperson who is totally full of himself. Rather, self-awareness and self-regard mean putting in the work to understand your strengths and weaknesses, grow beyond your weaknesses, and avoid self-limiting beliefs such as imposter syndrome. Understanding how you work best and cultivating your abilities through deliberate practice is the goal of Maestro’s 40/20 Rule.
Many salespeople do not have confidence that they can speak to the C suite or that their product is better than the competition. These are doubts that can often be solved by better practice and learning about differentiators. Confidence that is based in deep learning is one of a successful salesperson’s most effective tools.
“Control what you can control” is one of Maestro’s two pillars of sales professionalism, and this mantra also came up in both The Biggest Bluff (the last psychology book I reviewed for this blog) and Emotional Intelligence for Sales Leadership.
Stanley connects controlling what you can control to two psychological concepts: locus of control and stress. It’s important to mitigate stress in a career as demanding as sales. And it is true that following the precept “control what you can control” leads to reduced stress. Stanley also points out that people with a high internal locus of control do better in sales. Locus of control is a concept we’ve discussed here before—in fact, in the review of The Biggest Bluff.
Where Stanley errs is in connecting a high internal locus of control to reduced stress. People with a high internal locus of control improve their success by taking responsibility and finding solutions where other salespeople with external locus of control are passing the blame and feeling frustrated. But the most important thing for stress reduction is assessing what you can control accurately. It’s certainly not a stress reducer to try to control things that you actually have no influence over.
In the end it comes down to self-awareness. An accurate and curious assessment of what you can control leads to a better reference framework for trying to control what you can control. When you control the things you can actually control, you reduce stress and amplify success.
Is there a secret to building high-performance sales teams that can be solved by emotional intelligence? Not in so many words. If you restate the premise as “interpersonal communication skills are essential in a field like sales,” it becomes the most “duh” concept ever.
However, not every person who is selling thinks of themself as a salesperson. Sales engineers may think soft skills are not as important as hard product knowledge. Customer service reps may lack assertiveness and not see a path forward to learning how they can contribute to renewals. Personable salespeople who get promoted to leadership may not see the value to applying the same empathy skills with their sales team. It is worthwhile for the whole organization to contemplate the value of soft skills—and to keep exploring the data around success with emotional intelligence, even as we continue to debate what the heck it is.
Finally, for leaders who are looking for ways to think deeply about these soft skills with their teams, Stanley includes lists of questions on a number of topics ranging from hiring to taking control of one’s circumstances. The lists of questions may be worth the $10 I spent on the book, so if you are looking for conversation-starters throughout your work as a sales leader, you may want to buy it after all.
The Phoenix Sales Method grew out of repeated failures. Maestro Group is ready to guide your sales team on their learning journeys and help them control what they can control. Talk to us today at Mastery@maestrogroup.co.
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