Mar/Apr 19 - ChannelVision Magazine

The vision the leader has and the path to get there must be clearly defined to the team and all members must know their role in that path to success and how they contribute to it. This becomes their driving force as they have a clearly identified path and a clearly identified understanding of their part to the team’s success. The leader is tasked with projecting a vision of opportunity for success and must minimize the obstacles for fail- ure. Obstacles for failure are count- less; leaders must maintain a vision for the path to success and in many instances must find the successes in the face of failure. In my time as a leader, my teams have had wildly successful years and other years that it appeared we were going up in flames. These failures taught me that it’s necessary to keep the out- look of my team pointing upward (and occasionally there’s need for a fire extinguisher) and to keep the outlook for the future positive, which would ultimately maintain the culture that had been building. Success is easy to identify and is certainly the path of least resistance in belief in the culture. Unfortunately for anyone in leadership, failure is inevitable and can cause the team to question the path, the vision, the cul- ture and, most importantly, the leader. Failure is a team member losing their way, losing a big sale, missing a rev- enue projection; failures are endless. Whatever business you operate in, failure will happen. Ultimately, it lands on the leader’s shoulders to show the people they lead where success is hiding amongst failures. If the leader fails to do so, the team will be left to create their own stories. Often, these stories are not the stories the leader would want to tell. When the leader shows the successes in the face of failures, the leader continues to build the positive culture and momentum for the organization they are leading. This positive momentum has a snowball effect that will continue to grow and get bigger, as long as you are executing on the vision and path to success, feeding the culture the positive nutrition it needs and continu- ing to build upon the cornerstone at- tributes of trust and respect. Now, as the director of sales at Telesystem, I am happy to say that I have learned a lot of lessons over my career – lessons worth repeating and lessons worth forgetting and never ever repeating. I use every experi- ence, positive or negative, as lessons with something to learn and use in my continued journey of leadership. I was once told that advice is learning the lesson without experi- encing the pain. Use other’s lessons learned as an opportunity to get ahead in leadership without having to experience the pain. o Robert Martin is the director of sales at Telesystem. He has 13 years of telecom leadership experience managing direct and indirect sales professionals. channel management Flexible plans, smart shared data usage. Count on Dynalink's competitive pricing and reliability from trusted major providers. Enjoy flawless enterprise mobile communication. Business Mobile and managment Advanced 833.396.2546 • Dynalink.com VOICE DATA MOBILE HOSTED TRACKING Dynalink aims today for the technology of tomorrow, so that your business is always prepared for new frontiers. 97 March - April, 2019 | Channel Vision