CONNECTED: A Guide for Leading in a More Human Way is a book about leadership in business. Author Jami Varela offers commentary on an oft-encountered but somewhat overlooked scenario—the sales rep promoted to a senior position, who then finds their sales skills do not fit them for people management—and offers much sound advice for dealing with the situations that come one’s way in such circumstances.
In this, Varela draws on personal experience. A self-described “superstar sales rep,” she initially struggled when first placed in charge of a team of sales reps. After a prolonged period of absence due to poor health, however, she transformed the team from the third worst in a company with nationwide reach to the best. Varela puts her success down to some simple maxims; she values what she describes as “authentic human leadership”—in other words, truly caring about the people under one’s aegis and helping them to not merely hit quotas but feel good about their contributions while doing so.
Weighing in at just 80 pages, it’s a slim volume, but this works to Varela’s advantage. Unlike other authors in the genre, she has no pseudo-scientific approach to promote, and the book works best when narrowly focusing on sales teams and their needs. The section on streamlining messaging for a team—drawing as it does on lessons learned during the early days of the COVID pandemic (when every team’s sales figures were slipping into the red, and Varela successfully pushed for a wholesale modification to management communications on sales targets)—is particularly instructive, underlining the need to cut one’s coat according to the cloth where one’s employees are concerned. So too is the need for every manager to rein in emotional responses from time to time—to be a good “supporting actor,” as Varela puts it, and avoid foregrounding their own insecurities.
On the other hand, Varela overreaches on occasion. The point about empathy and understanding the emotional issues all members of a workforce regularly deal with is inarguable, but the extended metaphor of the “unlicensed therapist” may not be the best way to go about making it. Varela’s advice to seek out support from colleagues, rather than employees or bosses, is less than sound. It simply may not apply, either because one’s colleagues simply aren’t that emotionally receptive, or conversely because one can indeed feel able to confide in a boss one is particularly close to—something Varela dismisses as a possibility because it would be “political or career suicide.” She is on far firmer ground when advocating for the use of employee assistance programs, and indeed acknowledges that team members’ “deep needs” can ultimately only be met by health professionals. There’s little in CONNECTED that is revelatory, but, within the field of sales, its clinical yet accessible approach to management issues is worth reading.
Jami Varela’s CONNECTED: A Guide for Leading in a More Human Way works well as a short but highly accessible book, narrowly focused on sales managers and the challenges they face in effectively leading their teams.
~Craig Jones for IndieReader