3 Things Leaders Do To Hurt Sales Rep Relationships Sometimes, there are 3 things leaders do to hurt sales rep relationships and most times, they do it unintentionally. This is especially hard because sales leaders and sales reps spend a lot of time together. A bad leader can negatively affect how a sales rep makes his sell. While a good leader helps how sales reps can improve their sales.  Marc Levine founded his ImprovMySales business four years ago. The company is dedicated to creating wonderful and profitable places to work. Before this business venture, Marc was part of a sales team as a national account executive and technology and professional services. For the last 16 years, he has been developing leaders and teams, teaching people communication skills, selling services to certain companies including Citibank, Prudential, and Best Buy.   3 Things leaders do to hurt sales relationships There are probably more, but let’s focus on just the three things for now.  A leader does not create a psychologically safe environment The leader forgets about humanity  The leader is emotionally unintelligent August has been a leadership month and people have been talking about the important things to become a good sales leader. This involves setting a vision and becoming a good coach. It’s about creating a culture where sales reps can thrive and succeed.  When a leader fails to create that safe environment, the sales relationship takes a hit.  By definition, psychological safety was a term coined by the social psychologist, Amy Edmonson. Google did a two-year study and analyzed the qualities of its most effective teams. The results of the study have shown that teams promoting psychological safety produced better revenues and their team members stayed in the work longer than others. Psychological safety is a team norm that says it’s safe to take risks, to be vulnerable, to ask for help, and to disagree with the rest of the team.  When you do, you won’t be ostracized for disagreeing but instead, you’ll be honored and validated.  An environment where sales leaders can thrive As a parent, when your kid doesn’t understand something, you want your kid to feel safe to come to you and ask for help without getting embarrassed. The same is true in sales. As a leader, you need to develop a team where your members can be honest and can come forward when they don’t understand something.  You want your team members to come to you about their problems early on in the sales cycle rather than at the end of it where the deal is falling apart. This is the essence of psychological safety.  It’s an environment where people can ask for help, be vulnerable, take risks, and be supported  Create a psychologically safe environment  This doesn’t happen overnight. It happens when your sales reps come to you asking for help and instead of reacting, you validate and support them. Do it a couple of times for the team members to realize that you want to help them.  Sales leaders also need to stop blaming the team members. Blame and accountability are two different things.  Blaming makes the blamed feel bad and threatened. It’s when sales leaders bombard the reps with questions like:  Why didn’t you hit the quota last month? Why did you lose that sale? Why aren’t you doing this? These questions foster negativity. Accountability helps you raise the team’s standard without making the reps feel bad. It’s more like saying, “Hey you didn’t hit your quota last month and I know you're disappointed. Let’s talk about what happened that may have contributed to this and let’s figure out the solutions.” Build an environment where your members can be comfortable in having a dialogue.  As a sales leader, you also need to admit your own mistakes. Research shows that when you admit your mistakes, the people around you will come close and will open up about theirs as well.  There’s power in vulnerability and when you use that power, you will see your sales team come closer and op