The Failed Manager

How has moving a top performer to sales team leader impacted your sales?

In sales, top performers often get promoted into management. It makes intuitive sense on paper: reward the person who hits their number with more responsibility. And yet some of the best individual contributors (ICs) turn out to be genuinely bad managers. Some of them even begrudge having to accept managing others in order to make more money.

Worse, sometimes they make less.

This video below put a name to this pattern: the Failed Manager. It comes down to control, specifically, the belief that nobody can do the job as well as they can.

To be clear, this isn't about attacking anyone. It's about recognising when someone has the wrong personality type for a role, regardless of how good they are at the job itself.

One of my favourite managers told me on day one: "My job is to be a roadblock remover." And he meant it. He respected his team's abilities and believed in hiring people who were more skilled than him in their own areas, then helping them make the most of that skill while continuing to grow. That’s a great leader.

I’ve spoke with a lot of companies over the past nine months and few respond well to questions around quota attainment. (Because they don’t want to admit inconsistent attainment). They are however, interested in the impact of AI - hoping AI can magically save their sales challenges. Most of the conversation around AI is about efficiency. Not enough of it is about efficacy. And AI becomes genuinely dangerous when a Failed Manager is running your sales team. They don't care about the personas of the individuals on their team, Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) of their team or their team’s clients, or the Challenger Sale, as much as they care about their number. Specifically, their own number, often at the expense of everything else.

If you have high turnover on your sales team, it's probably not because you're hiring the wrong people, though it's possible you have a genuine talent for running multiple rounds of interviews and still landing on the wrong hire every time. More likely, you have a management problem. Frequently driven by a sales leader who isn't empowering the team: not removing roadblocks, not coaching, not helping people become more efficient and effective.

But they think they are. They think that commanding is leadership. They think they’ve ‘seen it all before’ and that their reps can’t possibly know anything they don’t - or they’d be the leader. They take over meetings because they’re more important. Ultimately, the Job that matter most to them is: make money. Specifically, their commission.

This is where Jobs to Be Done theory comes in. Beyond understanding the functional jobs of a sales team, a manager who also understands the social and emotional jobs of their people can unlock real growth. The problem: many Failed Managers in sales leadership share a common pattern. Their inner voice says: nobody can do this as well as I can. So they stop listening to anyone.

Their team hears: "Listen to me." What's underneath it is: I won't listen to you.

Many CEOs, founders, and MDs who promote a top performer into management reason: she's my best salesperson, if her team isn't performing, they must not have the right skills, mindset, or network.

That's absolutely possible. It's statistically unlikely, though, if you're constantly hiring, firing, or backfilling people who've resigned.

Now flip the lens. A top sales performer wants to make money. That's their functional job. Often, they're better off staying an IC and continuing to drive revenue. As their employer, you should absolutely study how they succeed. But if they're not empathetic to their team, not a team player, not good at delegating, and ultimately controlling, they will struggle to build a high performing team.

This matters even more in 2026, as AI reshapes how people work and how buyers buy. B2B research has shown for years that buyers increasingly do their own research long before they engage a salesperson. The paradox is that what buyers want more of, not less, is a trusted advisor. That means sales teams need empathy, adaptability, and the ability to understand the jobs of every stakeholder in the buying process. You need sales leaders that can sell but that also know how to bring the best out in the rest of the team. Sales leaders who can identify and work around the emotional and social jobs of their team to bring the best out in them. Customers have different personalities and so should your sales team. The modern day enterprise sales leader can incrementally improve their team’s performance, attainment, retention and client sastisfaction.

A controlling manager tends to tune out exactly those details. They want to run the show.

So, in the words of Mel Robbins: let them. Let them be an IC.