How to Get Your Team to Do the Work They Keep Avoiding Without Micromanaging: A Sales Manager Case Study
If you've spent your career in a male-dominated industry, you already know the unspoken rule that comes with being in the minority: work twice as hard, say half as much, and hope someone notices. For a lot of women, and especially women of color, "not playing politics" becomes code for staying quiet, staying small, and letting other people take credit for work you did.
I coach women who are done with that self-defeating loop. They don't want to play the game. They want to lead in a way that's honest, that earns positive influence, and that doesn't cost them their integrity to get it.
Here's a case study of what that looks like in action and words.
The Before: Doing the Work, Missing the Credit
Naomi spent years as a top performer in sales. She prospected hard, closed deals, and consistently delivered results. But when it came time for credit, or commission, she kept coming up short. Deals she sourced and closed got split with, or handed to, people who did less of the actual work.
As a woman of color in a male-dominated industry, she started to internalize it. Systemic bias meant the system favored people who didn't look like her, and she started to feel like the problem. Not as "something is broken in how this workplace was built," but as "maybe it's me. Maybe there's something wrong with me."
That's where we started working together. In the free hour-long consultation, she described it to me as misplaced agency. I told her that her agency had never left the room; she'd unintentionally allowed certain choices to persist without realizing the choice was hers to make all along. Systemic bias can cloud our perspective like that. Naomi said, "Whoa, I'd never seen it that way. But it makes a lot of sense to me."
The After: New Job, New Anxiety
As our coaching continued, she landed an opportunity to join an inclusive organization as a sales manager, in a role where the comp structure actually reflected the work she did. Better terms. More equitable credit. A solid win.
But the role came with something new: she now had to lead and coach junior staff. And that stirred up new anxiety in her in a way closing million-dollar deals never did.
This is common. Women who are excellent individual performers often assume leadership will feel like an extension of that excellence. Without a new perspective and intentional choices, it can instead trigger impostor syndrome: "Who am I to do this?"
The Line That Was Quietly Working Against Her
As she got into coaching her junior team, she noticed the real gap: none of them liked prospecting. Cold research, cold outreach, the slow grind of building a list. Naomi, being genuinely empathetic, felt inclined to tell the team exactly what she felt: "Yes, I know the pain. Building the list is the worst part, and it takes a long time."
All true. But true isn't the same as useful. Every time she said it, she trained her team to dread the one activity that actually makes them money. She also made her own job as a leader harder, without even realizing it.
In our 1:1 coaching session, she later shared something completely different about the exact same task. She'd tell herself, "The money is in the list," as she motivated herself through the hours of list-building. Also true. Completely different effect.
Same task. Two sentences. One deflates a room, one lights it up.
The Tool: Reframing
In coaching, this is where I taught her reframing. The idea is simple: how you introduce something shapes how the other person experiences it, before they've even started doing it. You're not lying. You're not spinning. You're choosing the perspective to lead with.
So instead of opening with "this is the worst part," we built a new opener for her to use with her team: "Together, we are going to make a lot of money. And I'm going to show you exactly where the money is. It's in the list."
Same task. Same effort. Completely different frame.
Why This Works
A good reframe does three things at once:
It sets an expectation of winning, instead of an expectation of suffering.
It changes what the list means, from a chore to the actual source of the payoff.
It generates motivation toward something, instead of motivation away from discomfort.
That third one matters most. Moving away from pain is short-lived. Moving toward a clear, exciting goal is sustainable. It's the difference between "I have to do this" and "I get to do this for a reason that’s clear and compelling to me.”
She Didn't Have to Become Someone Else
What I loved most about working through this with her: she didn't need a personality transplant. She didn't need to fake enthusiasm she didn't feel, or perform a version of leadership that wasn't hers.
At the start of this story, Naomi thought her agency had gone missing. Not because she lost it, but because a system built without her in mind convinced her it was never really hers. The work of coaching wasn't to give her agency. It was to help her see she'd had it the whole time.
Leadership is the same work, aimed outward. Naomi didn't just reclaim her own sense of control. She learned how to hand that same clarity to her team. She stopped asking her staff to grind through "the worst part" for her sake, and started showing them what was in it for them: their commission, their skill, their own name on the deal. That's agency, reclaimed and multiplied.
Ready to Lead Without Losing Yourself in the Process?
If this resonates with you and you're ready to lead with intentionality and integrity, you're invited to book a free consultation with me. I'll help you break out of the draining frames, reclaim your agency, and learn how to activate it in everyone who's counting on you to lead them well.