Leading with Empathy

Anna Rofsky is a Senior Sales Manager at HubSpot. She was an individual contributor for many years before being thrust into a management position at a startup with little guidance. In a culture that presented a lot of challenges, she over-indexed on empathizing with her direct reports and lost the accountability that is necessary when leading a team. Over the years, she’s learned how to strike the balance between being a leader that is both empathic and operational. 

‍In this session, Anna shared ways to identify your values as a manager, set expectations with your team and lead with data.

Identify Your Values

Defining your values helps serve as guiding principles when making decisions. Both managers and their teams should go through this exercise and share with each other. 

Values Exercise:

• What are my non-negotiables?
• What are my principles/values? 
• What principles/values do I want my team to have?
• What are my non-negotiables for my direct report relationships? 
• Resources: NLW Defining Values Worksheet, Principles by Ray Dalio

Learning/Coaching Styles

It’s important to know how your team best learns and receives feedback so you can coach accordingly.

How do you like to receive feedback? 

• Communication channels and qualitative 
• When do you like to receive it? (ex: immediately, face to face, over call) 
• Establish follow up and reinforcement

How do you best learn? 

• Visual? Kinesthetic? Audio? (See resource below) 

Share YOUR coaching style

• Identify your strengths & weaknesses
• Encourage to manage up

Establish TRUST via shared agreements 

• Resources: 7 types of learning styles and how you can to teach them

Lead with Data

Before delivering instruction/feedback understand:

• What behavior are you trying to encourage? 
• Is it a team or an individual? 
• What have you identified needs to change/reinforce?
• What are the roadblocks in getting you there?
• Find the data to support it

Why data? 

• Can’t argue with it 
• You can play the middlewoman card (in a good way) 

Bring it back to their why

• On or in danger of a PIP? 
• President’s Club, over performance? 

Exercise: 

• What is an example from your manager's life? 
• What kind of data can we use? 

Resources: 

Sales Management Simplified (Mike Weinberg), Simon Sinek Starts With Why

Set Expectations 

Leading from Within

• Mission Statement/team values to rally behind
• Expectations from the team, based on values

Forum to Set Those Expectations - Team Culture - Setting Expectations

Ex: create a team culture form and have your DRs fill it out. Questions could be:

• What are 3 things you’d like me to know about you professionally and personally?
• What do you want our team to be known for?
• What does your ideal team look like?
• How would you describe our team culture today?
• What would you want our team to start/stop/continue?

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