Excerpt from LeadingAST, Chapter 1. All learnings are shared from the POV of different characters.

Leadership is a decision, it is a choice and it has nothing to do with hierarchy. Just because someone holds a title, such as Sales Vice President, it does not mean they are a leader. In fact, I have exited my fair share of employees who held a “leadership position”, from a hierarchy point of view, but were not leaders. 

James, the new UK Sale Director, has a unique story about the moment that he chose to be a leader.

James enjoys telling the story of when he made the decision to move from sales rep to sales manager. He had been leading a virtual team that worked at a large bank. As a team, they had grown from four people to 65, and his role had evolved from sales rep to team leader. 

In that virtual manager position, he found that he enjoyed the coaching aspects of the job – working on the individual goals of each team member, creating shared goals, and facilitating team success. As the role expanded, he began discussing, with his manager and mentors, a possible transition to management. 

One summer Saturday afternoon, as James’ family was enjoying a leisurely afternoon in the backyard, his wife started a conversation about their future.  

“Is this it?” she asked.

James was surprised. “Sorry, but I’m not sure what you’re asking?”

“Is this it? Are we going to do this for the rest of our lives and then die?”

Looking around, James could not help but believe that “this” was pretty good: pool in the backyard, summer golfing, skiing in the winter, house paid for, and two beautiful children. He sensed that her question was not about their surroundings; that there was a more profound question.

James responded: “What are you’re thinking?”

His partner voiced that they should seek opportunities to live and work internationally, catching James by surprise. 

Over the coming weeks, the more they discussed the idea, the more excited he became about working abroad.  James researched expat assignments and discovered that living abroad was a complex undertaking. He also determined that if they wanted to make a move with his current company, he would need to be at the Director level and have an international network to find opportunities within the company. 

In partnership with his partner, James laid out the steps to achieving the goal of living and working abroad:

1. Develop the skills and connections required for a management position.

2. Get to the Director level at the current company, preferably within a global team.

3. Network internationally to identify opportunities and gain support.

4. Win an international Director position and prepare to move abroad.

He started by building a plan to develop his management skills. It included attending various courses that the company offered, meeting with colleagues who had worked abroad, reading and studying across a spectrum of topics, using everything from books to videos.

James tackled books on leadership, coaching, people development, organizational design, and anything that Harvard Business Review wrote or TED Talks had to offer. The two books that had the most significant impact on him were:

• Becoming a Manager by Linda Hill – a step-by-step handbook on transitioning from individual contributor to manager. To this day, whenever James has a colleague or teammate approach him about making a move to management, he gives them this book and tells them to schedule a 1:1 after they have read it. He wants them to make the decision eyes wide open. 

• The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins. Every time James takes on a new role, he re-reads this book as he builds a 90-day plan to accelerate success. His original copy looks like a textbook that has gone through fifty students, well-worn and much appreciated.

Three years later, he and his partner achieved their international goal as he earned the opportunity to lead his 2^ndsales transformation in the UK.

James shares that while building his development plan, he began to realize that a knowledge gap existed for sales leaders. 

While Watkins did a great job of explaining how to build a 90-day plan, James was unable to find a book that provided a comprehensive, end-to-end view of how to successfully lead and transform a sales organization, in other words, a sales transformation guide.

James chose to be a sales leader, and in the process, identified a gap – no one was writing about how to lead a sales transformation.

That realization was the start of this book.