Gayle Charach

Tap your sales leaders. They should be coaching the players, not only the plays and will have insights that are invisible oftentimes to the Ops team. Consider the impacts of stress and burnout in sales. They can have a dramatic effect on performance, and ultimately on deal slippage. Ops/enablement teams, when alerted can seek out/build support programs that can address these challenges.

If work/life balance is a goal, be sure to seek out a mentor who has mastered that ability. Discuss strategies of how to achieve a work/life balance with your mentor, and observe how they make it work in their lives. Ask your mentor to be your accountability partner in ensuring you stick to the strategies you put in place. Regularly revisit with your strategies with your mentor to tweak as needed!

The best Change Management I've engaged in has been when leaders have been fully embedded in making the decision to change, equally as embedded in the process of how the change will happen and fully engaged in the delivery of the change down to their teams. Without reinforcement, change doesn't *stick*. To be most effective, that reinforcement needs to come from those who are looking for the desired change in their people, not the consultants/enablers/project managers to whom those people do not report!

Sherri Mandell, author of The Road to Resilience, from Chaos to Celebration writes "We experience resilience when we are enlarged rather than diminished by our challenges, when facing adversity causes us to change, grow and become greater." A leader's support in promoting overall well-being is critical. Part of that support is to guide towards & nurture lessons learned from a period of adversity. An authentic leader will hold space and provide the psychological safety an employee needs to become accustomed to the change through understanding what the change taught and how the lessons learned can be applied moving forward.

Sales enablement is extremely rewarding, but it can be taxing as the workload can quickly get very heavy in an operational way. Learning to set reasonable boundaries, whether you are a team of one or managing a full is really critical. If more and more continues to be added to the plate there should be three asks: 1- Do these additional asks align to business goals? Which ones? 2- At what priority would they set these new asks and why? 3- What will be taken off the plate to account for time and energy to be refocused?

Shed any judgement and your generational bias. We are often mentoring people younger than ourselves. Be careful not to bring an age-bias to the mix. Recognize the demographic of your mentee, and what age they grew up in. As a boomer, I respect that the millennial experience is vastly different from my own - I raised a millennial and learned much from her. If there is a generation I am less familiar with, I ask lots of questions to gain perspective. Most importantly, never, ever judge.... you won't earn anyone's trust by imposing your own judgement and trust is fundamental in a successful mentoring relationship.