You Weren't In The Room

A shift schedule where one name never appears alone.

That was my schedule. I hired a beertender and then kept them paired up, week after week, never trusted with a solo shift. Nothing they did behind my bar earned that. The bars they came from did. I’d decided those places didn’t train anyone properly, so I also decided they hadn’t been trained, and then I made them re-earn a résumé they had already lived.

I did it again with a candidate I never hired. Two stops on her résumé, neither long enough (in my math) to have survived the grunt work. The keg that kicks mid-rush. The close that runs an hour long. The regular who needs managing more than serving. I did the math and skipped her. I’ll never know if the math was right.

What I was actually measuring was my own attendance.

I hadn’t watched them do the work, so the work didn’t count. Everyone you meet walks in carrying years of reps performed in rooms you weren’t standing in. Closes you didn’t close. Calls you didn’t sit on. A few rounds of interviews won’t cover that distance. An interview is a highlight reel the candidate edited and you watched with your arms folded … a show on both sides of the table.

So leaders wait. We call it ramp up, which is a very polite way of saying until I’ve watched enough. It feels like diligence. It wears a lanyard and carries a clipboard. Mostly it’s a toll the new person pays in weeks while the idea they walked in with goes stale in their pocket, and the customer pays it again later, when that idea finally gets heard.

The fix is small and a little uncomfortable. Ask to see more instead of waiting to see more. Ask the beertender how the close ran at the last place and what they’d change about yours. Ask which calls they’ve sat on and what they heard. Then put them in the room.

I’ve been on the good end of this. A sales team once pulled me into their calls and their strategy conversations without asking me to prove I’d done the sales grunt work somewhere else first. I had. They assumed it. That assumption bought all of us months.

The fear underneath the waiting is mostly fiction. Put someone in a little before you feel ready and one of two things happens faster: they succeed or they fail.

And in my career so far, there are very few rooms where an unprepared person stumbles and the damage ripples across your whole life. It feels that way the afternoon you hand over the keys, sure, but a rough solo shift is a bad night, not a permanently closed bar.

Buyers run the same schedule on products. Demo, second demo, the can-you-run-it-again-for-our-VP demo. All show, all waiting. The product has thousands of reps in rooms the buyer will never visit, so a fourth, shinier demo won’t close the gap. Hand them something to ask instead. The customer they should call. What broke in month one. Give them a way to stop waiting.

Stay Positive & Who’s Still On Your Ramp?