Old style, hierarchical leadership practices which were fundamentally based on the adversarial top-down management system are increasingly breaking down due the complex nature of the modern management systems.  In order to combat,rectify or at least understand the complex nature of this communications breakdown, the talents of  outside agencies, the primary one being mediation management, would be required.

Mediation management would seek to identify and resolve various “confrontational” areas such as  the following:

• Interpersonal Conflict Resolution which specializes in mediating conflicts between people who must maintain ongoing relationships – at work, in their neighbourhood, community group, school, or professional association.
• Workplace Conflict Resolution when mediation of disputes between individuals and groups at work is required. It should be strongly noted that chronic, contentious conflict in the workplace can bring productivity to a halt and damage the health and well being of those involved.
• Organizational Conflict Resolution which helps organizations address conflicts that is blocking progress within the company organisation as a whole.

Whilst mediation management will undoubtedly identify and address the “current” root cause of the conflict or company unrest, it will most certainly move on to ensuring future conflict eradication by introducing and implementing various employee coaching strategies some of which would require the use of team building consultants.

This training initiative would need to directly address these following personal and group skills in order to eradicate all possible confrontational attitudes re-occuring in the future:

• Leadership development.
• Team building.
• Community leadership.
• Conflict resolution and management skills.
• Emotional intelligence.
• Facilitation and collaboration skills.

Unknown to many people is the fact that success coaching – especially in corporate settings – is completely linked to effective goal setting.

To understand the link between success coaching and effective goal setting, it helps to first clarify that goal setting is considered effective only when the goals set are achieved, or at least seriously acted upon. Goal setting, contrary to what many people think is not just about stating what you want to achieve after such and such a period. Effective goal setting is a two (main) point process – starting with the definition of what you want to achieve – and then more importantly, taking the steps required to achieve what you want to achieve and ultimately achieving it – or at least learning why you didn’t in case it fails to work out, with what you learn in this case serving as guidelines for future goal setting.

Further, to understand the link between success coaching and effective goal setting in a corporate setting, it is essential to clarify that an organization is the sum of all its members. This means that the success of an organization is the sum of the individual successes of all its members, while its failure is the sum is sum of the individual failures of all its individual members. There is no better place to see the demonstration of this fact that in a football pitch – where the individual members of the organization in question, namely the players of the team in question, individually contribute to the success or otherwise of the organization and where the a slight failure by one member of the organization (a player) can often cost the team a victory, since games are usually won on very small margins. Of course, every team comes with a leader called a coach whose brief is to teach the members of the organization (the team) goal achievement strategies.

And although a business organization works in pretty much the same way as a football team, not many business leaders – be they supervisors, managers or chief executives – like to see themselves in a coaching role. Many of them describe themselves as business leaders (of course using whatever corporate title their climb has given them), but they don’t go as far as defining what that business leadership constitutes – which in essence should be success coaching.

In fact, it can be argued that the success or otherwise of a business organization depends on the extent to which the people in leadership positions in it see themselves as coaches, specifically coaching the people working under them success skills, seeing that, as mentioned, it is the sum of the individual successes of the individuals who make up the organization (in the diverse small roles in the organization) that will ultimate lead to the success of the organization. Of course for this to come to pass, the organization has to start by inculcating a sense of ownership of the organization to its members – so that they can come to own it the way football players feel the ownership of their team, hence their playing for ‘our team’ to win, as they usually refer their action.

The nature of most organization’s business is such that their overall success depends on the success of their sales force. An organization’s sales force is its face to the public – and a well motivated sales force can just as easily create a formidable brand as an ill motivated sales force can irreparably break a thriving brand.

It is in recognition of these facts that many organizations are increasingly investing heavily on their sales force incentive programs.

The main aim of launching a sales force incentive program is to keep the force highly motivated, aware of the damage an ill-motivated sales force can do to an organization. The underlying goal of a good sales force program is to get the sales force to have a sense of ownership of the organization they happen to be working for, so that they can see its success as their own success and its failure as their own failure. The opposite to this is having a sale force that doesn’t have a sense of ownership of the organization they are working for, where they get the idea that they are working for their bosses for instance, often leading to disastrous results. This is because in keeping with intrinsic human nature, they might often feel the urge to avenge on wrongs they feel their bosses might have done them during their sales missions, thereby doing the brand they happen to be promoting irreparable damage.

Most sales force incentive programs also seeks to exploit the competitive tendencies that are deeply ingrained in our psyches as human beings. Now this is only possible after first getting the sales force to have a sense of ownership of the organization and the brand. Having gotten to this step, the sales team coach can now get the members of the team to start competing in terms of how much they deliver in terms of sales units, for instance.

The financial incentive plays an important role in most sales force incentive programs too. This is generally implemented through a commission scheme – where the members of the sales force earn a commission on an incremental basis, depending on their delivery. Here we can have, for instance, a member earning commission at the rate of 5% per unit for every 1000 units, with the same rising to say 7.5% per unit for every 2,000 units and 10% per unit for everything above3,000 units sold. A common mistake made with regard to commission schemes however is to set too high targets for the various commission figures. When you do this, the people in question just give up on the whole commission thing – and decide to wait for the retainer (if you offer one) or to go looking for another job if no retainer is being offered.

Beyond the financial incentives, most modern sales force incentive programs also incorporate psychological incentives – where sales force members who are delivering are made to know that their stellar contribution is highly appreciated and that they matter to the organization and the organization’s fate rests with them (where that happens to be the case). And insignificant as this might seem – it sometimes proves to be even more effective than the financial incentive only, especially when properly implemented.