When managers stop managing

There is a scene many will recognise.

At 8:32, a sales manager opens their laptop. A CRM field is wrong. A client is waiting for an answer that should have arrived yesterday. A salesperson is hunting for whoever can fix a delivery problem. A new procedure has just been announced, before anyone has understood the last one.

By 6:47 p.m., our manager has been useful, responsive, available, at times heroic. They have not managed.

They have not prepared a client visit. They have not listened to a salesperson handle an objection. They have not helped anyone qualify a deal better, defend their margin, or get their breath back after three rejections.

They have repaired the organisation.

Which, over time, becomes a full-time job. And then the company is surprised that its teams lack support. It is a bit like hiring a head chef, handing them the plumbing, then blaming them for not seasoning the sauces enough.

Let's talk about the people who really matter: frontline sales managers

This is not about sales directors or business unit heads. They have their own problems, their own committees and sometimes their own slide decks. But it is not the same job.

The subject here is frontline sales managers. The direct managers. The ones with a team to grow, salesperson by salesperson, week after week.

Their mission should come down to a few verbs: give direction, arbitrate, coach, grow people, demand, encourage.

In other words, turn a strategy into concrete actions.

Because sales performance does not fall from the sky, even if some leadership committees still study it like a weather phenomenon. It is built in the preparation of a meeting, the quality of a diagnosis, the discipline of following up, the courage to ask an uncomfortable question, and the ability not to drop the price the moment the client raises an eyebrow.

That is where the manager should be. Not in the third email thread about an IT ticket that should have been closed on Monday.

The manager has become the organisation's after-sales service

The problem is not some mysterious disappearance of managerial vocation. It is far more mundane.

In too many companies, the frontline manager has become the shock absorber for every flaw in the system.

One reorganisation is not finished before another begins. A tool is rolled out, then "improved" in a hurry, which is usually a diplomatic way of saying it did not work. A process meant to streamline the work adds three approvals, two tracking spreadsheets and one person cc'd who has no idea why they are there.

Each time, someone has to keep the client from leaving and the team from giving up. That someone is the frontline manager.

They become the entry point for every malfunction: tools, data, coordination, disputes, business rules, decisions with no owner. They no longer develop their team. They keep it from sinking with the ship, which is a valuable skill, but a fair distance from sales coaching.

McKinsey observed that frontline managers spent between 30% and 60% of their time on admin and meetings, then 10% to 50% on non-managerial tasks. In some of the organisations studied, area managers devoted just 4% to 10% of their time to coaching their teams.

These figures are old, but their mechanics have not aged a day. When a company does not deal with its problems at the source, it pushes them up to the frontline manager. Then it offers them a leadership training course.

That takes some nerve. You could just as well teach someone to swim while filling their pockets with stones.

KPIs are useful. Their worship, much less so.

Let's not pretend: KPIs are essential. A sales team without indicators quickly looks like a rugby team playing with no touchline, no referee and no real idea where the try line is.

So the problem is not revenue, margin, average basket, coverage rate or cross-sell. The problem starts when you confuse the measuring instrument with the act of management.

Revenue is a result. Margin is a result. Conversion rate is a result. You do not coach a result.

What a manager can actually work on are the behaviours that make those results more likely: preparation, targeting, the quality of questioning, listening, the ability to secure a meeting, the way to defend value, the rigour of follow-up.

A manager who sees a conversion rate drop should not only ask: "Why are we below target?" They should go and look at the deals lost, listen to the meetings, analyse the decisions made too early, the proposals sent too fast, the objections mishandled or the decision-makers never met.

It is less comfortable than a dashboard. It is also much closer to the job.

A study published in Personnel Psychology establishes a link between the quality and frequency of managerial coaching, on one hand, and salespeople reaching their targets, on the other. It is not a promise of miracles. It is simply a useful reminder: a team does not improve because you show it its results in a bigger font.

Remote work did not create the problem. It made it easier to hide.

Blaming remote work would be tempting. It would also be very convenient: it is modern, invisible and does not answer emails.

Yet the available studies do not let us conclude that hybrid work mechanically degrades performance. A controlled experiment run at Trip.com, published in Nature, even shows improved retention and satisfaction with no drop in performance.

So remote work is not the ideal culprit.

It can, however, make a managerial drift more convenient: running a team through the dashboard, the team meeting and the Teams invite titled "quick check-in", which lasts an hour and ends up justifying the word "quick" only by contrast with the previous ones.

At a distance, the manager has to do more intentional management. They have to create time for feedback, for practice, for opportunity reviews and for conversations about the real work.

Otherwise, distance becomes a perfect excuse to replace support with control.

Meanwhile, salespeople are doing less and less selling

The phenomenon does not stop at managers.

Salespeople too spend a growing share of their time doing something other than selling: filling in tools, hunting for information, chasing a delivery, fixing an incident, coordinating departments, reassuring an unhappy client, making up for a promise that was not kept.

All of this is useful. Taking care of a client is nothing to be ashamed of. But there is a more uncomfortable question to ask: does the salesperson solve the problem because they are building a quality relationship, or because they are the last line of defence against a failing organisation?

Salesforce reported in 2024, based on a survey of 5,500 sales professionals across 27 countries, that respondents spent 70% of their time on non-selling tasks.

This figure obviously does not mean that every salesperson has stopped selling. It does, however, point to a heavy trend: selling capacity is being eaten away by everything that piles up around the sale.

The salesperson becomes the last-line infantry. They do not fix the client's problems out of a taste for organisational tinkering. They do it because they see the consequences of an unhappy client at once: a deal lost, a relationship damaged, a bonus that vanishes.

And there is another, more delicate truth. Solving an internal problem can sometimes be psychologically more comfortable than prospecting, following up, negotiating or taking a rejection. The failing organisation then offers an ideal way out: it gives you an enormous amount to do and, sometimes, a good deal less to sell.

You can end up exhausted without having practised your profession. It is even one of the most widely shared specialities of modern working life.

A team without a coach does not become autonomous. It becomes alone.

When the manager is absorbed by emergencies, salespeople do not become autonomous. They become alone.

Autonomy requires a framework, feedback, clear expectations and the right to learn. Being alone, on the other hand, leaves everyone to improvise with their own habits, doubts and blind spots.

The most seasoned find a way. The least experienced burn out. Between the two, a large part of the team progresses more slowly than it could, because no one really has the time to watch their work and help them refine it.

Gallup estimates that the manager accounts for up to 70% of the variation in engagement within a team. They obviously do not single-handedly carry quality of work life, pay, tools or strategy. But they remain the main point of contact between a real company and the speeches that, without them, often stay at the brochure stage.

So asking a team for more engagement when its manager no longer has time to manage is like demanding a better harvest after forgetting to water. You can always hold a committee meeting about the weather.

The answer is not one more training course

The usual answer is to launch a coaching training programme.

Why not. But training a manager in a posture they have no time to practise is, at times, a form of organisational poetry.

Before adding a training course, you have to remove some noise.

You have to look, very concretely, at what fills sales managers' days. Which problems come back every week? Which topics should be handled by the tools, the processes, sales administration, support or the functional departments? How many hours go to developing the teams, and how many to making up for flaws the organisation already knows about?

Then you have to complement result indicators with a few effort indicators: the time actually spent on support and feedback; the quality of opportunity reviews; practice on the key sales skills; observable progress in selling practices; the irritants removed for good, rather than worked around every week.

So the real question is not: "How do we ask managers to manage better?"

The real question is: "What have we put in their day in place of management?"

As long as that question goes unanswered, companies will keep asking for engagement from salespeople left alone, and coaching from managers busy bailing out water.

It is not, first and foremost, a problem of goodwill. It is a problem of work design.