Chad glows every Monday morning as he sits in Conference Room A, studying the format and layout of the sales report for his division. He's proud of his creation. This homegrown report displays a brilliant snapshot of his sales team's performance. And that's not just his opinion. Other division bosses and senior management at the company have praised the way Chad cobbled together this succinct, powerful combination of spreadsheets and graphics.

This morning, he beams again at his baby. This reporting mechanism was originally a duty for his sales manager, Jody. She put together a functional set of spreadsheets after Mike made the request, well within the deadline they agreed upon. But it was a very vanilla way to track sales progress. It took Chad and his team 20 to 30 minutes of rigorous discussion in these Monday sales meetings to figure out where everything stood.

Chad isn't disappointed in Jody for creating such a pedestrian reporting mechanism. Spreadsheet manipulation is not a part of her job description, and it isn't in her core competency. Jody's strength is her insight into the sales process, and Chad depends on her judgment. Though Chad has a severe weakness in his leadership communication skills, no one complains that he's unfair. He's not one to force unrealistic expectations upon his employees.

There was no reason to chide Jody for her report. Still, he felt his division and his company deserved something more dynamic. So he decided to take the initial spreadsheet template from his sales manager and make it sing. Jody didn't mind. She, along with everyone else, realized Chad was a wiz.

He unveiled his new creation after just a few weeks of sweat during early morning hours and between appointments. Using detailed formulas, tie-ins, and some heavy duty math knowledge spread across a wide variety of cells, he created a customized, brilliant sales activity tracking tool. The result is a simple, clear, and dynamic spreadsheet and graphic report that helps anyone, even those who don't work in his division, to understand the progress of each sales team member and each prospect in the sales activity process. Chad quantified all of the ongoing sales activities, from cradle to grave, with color codes for each grouping. The report cross-references every member of Chad's sales team member with every task they are responsible for. There's a running month-to-date, year-to-date percentage, and the actual numbers total for each activity total against budget figures for the division. It's the result of a deep set of formulas and databases Chad has created. The final pages of the report contain a series of pie charts and graphics that make the numbers jump off the pages. They look great, not cheesy, and are easy to grasp. Chad's team members keep track of all their activities, sometimes by the hour, on his report. It's easy to use.

When Chad completed this super-template earlier in the year, he had everyone buzzing. The automation and the sophisticated reports looked like something you'd get from a massive customer relationship software project that would have cost at least six figures in consultant fees and taken a year or more to implement. That's why the company never invested in this type of stuff, even though they knew the result would be very helpful.

Chad, the brainiac at software and business measurement tools, is now in the process of helping all the other departments copy his success—all during his off time. He's happy to do it. Sure, it makes him look good, but that isn't the biggest reason Chad is pleased that his sales tracking spreadsheet is being implemented. His system is brilliant because it is efficient, and Chad loves efficiency.

Flipping through the pages, he can't help patting himself on the back. He knows he shouldn't keep congratulating himself; but damn, this is some good stuff. Chad looks forward to his 8:15 sales meeting, which, of course, he is 14 minutes early for.

Chad's cool sales template hasn't been created for Mike's division yet. The big bosses don't want to abuse Chad's goodwill and desire to help others. So the implementation of his innovative program is moving slowly through the company. That means Mike is going over his very ordinary sales reports that he and Louis created. The members of his team file into Conference Room B. Everyone takes a seat, laughing and joking, as usual.

Mike should have been there in his conference room a little earlier, or at least studied the report before this. He kicks himself again, the second time this morning, for not being prepared (the wallet and the coffee was the first time). Less than 72 hours ago, during his 360, his employees and bosses gave him a clear directive to tidy up his act. Less "seat of the pants" leadership is one of the comments he remembers.

Now Mike has fallen behind already. As a result, he has a lot of unanswered questions about the data he sees. Keeping his head down, he studies quickly and is ready for the meeting. He recovers from not budgeting the time to look at the sales report earlier. This is the reason Chad likes to call Mike "Golden Boy." It isn't that he doesn't fail: He does. But he always seems to recover so quickly.

Chad stands up from his seat and calls the meeting to order. No one else in the conference room has taken a seat yet. They know better. Someone told Chad a few years ago that, back when Rudy Giuliani was the mayor of New York, he had his entire staff stand during every morning briefing. Chad loved the idea immediately. He made no secret of the fact he thought sales people whined too much in meetings about client's objections. He wanted more discussion of results to get the numbers where they needed to be.

So, when Chad became boss of the division, he had everyone stand up around the table, chairs pushed aside, during the weekly sales meeting. The unspoken rule was you could sit down before the sales meeting, like Chad had done reading the report, but you had to stand up once Chad did. However, in practice, no one on the sales team wanted to take a chance on crossing Chad. So, even if they got in the room a minute or two early, they just stood and made some quiet small talk. There wasn't much good karma in the room, but it was very official looking.

Chad opens with some upbeat comments about the first four color-coded parts of the report. All the steps leading up to the initial prospect calls are right on track for this quarter, and the prospective qualification quadrant showed great activity last week, which means that the team is ahead of projections. They did their homework and now have plenty of leads to pursue. Chad goes over this quickly and then looks up from his sheets and pauses.

He's still smarting from last Friday's 360. He'll show them he knows how to be a good leader and that he cares about their success.

"Great job, guys, on the sales prep activity. This is very helpful. Thank you for your hard work," Chad smiles. He meant it.

Maryellen jabs Paul, who is standing next to her. She turns her head slightly and whispers, "No whipped cream on the Mocha Frappuccino this morning, but you can still make sure it's a Grande."

"Whatever," Paul returns under his breath. "Stop hustling me with Chad's meetings. I'm tired of losing. It's not fair. You've got some type of psycho Chad radar."

Maryellen turns slightly to Paul and winks—not coquettish, but cocky and arrogant. It is an "I own you" wink.

Everyone in the division knows Chad is furious about his 360 on Friday. He's never circumspect about his performance reviews. A competitive guy doesn't hide it when things are going well or poorly for him—he reasons. Therefore, Maryellen and the others could predict Chad would use the words "thank you for your hard work" in the sales meeting at some point in time. It's his feel-good catch phrase for when he feels the need to demonstrate that he is a caring boss. He'd never back it up with specifics of the toughness of the challenge someone had overcome. He just smiles broadly and says the generic "thanks for your hard work" when he sees a number that pleases him.

They all had heard it over and over again, so many times that it had become meaningless, and even funny, to them. When he was out of earshot, they would mimic Chad.

"Thank you for your hard work on those copies, Bill; they are really collated well."

"No, no, no . . . thank you, Stuart, for your hard work in washing your hands before you came out of the restroom. I'm glad you know hygiene is important." Everyone nearby would laugh.

This morning, as they were getting set in their cubicles, the playful Maryellen boldly predicted to Paul that Chad would say "thank you for your hard work" within 120 seconds of the start of the meeting. Paul agreed that Chad would default to the meaningless phrase soon enough, but he couldn't imagine he'd cough it up that quickly. It was just too transparent, even for Chad, who could never be accused of subtlety when it came to boss-employee communication.

Maryellen and Paul shook hands, sealing the bet. To the victor, a Grande drink from Starbucks of the winner's choosing. A few minutes later in the conference room Paul held up his watch ever so slightly, allowing Maryellen to see it. He clicked on the stopwatch function as soon as Chad stood up, signaling the start of the meeting. At 94 seconds, Chad belted out his encouragement cliché; and Paul knew he would be buying this morning. Maryellen cheered her insight into Chad's management style. Neither of them focused on the sales process of their division.

Louis calls the sales meeting to order. Mike doesn't run his sales meeting; Louis, his sales manager, does. Louis sits at the head of the table every week. Mike positions himself at the side of the table, usually toward the end away from Louis, in a different position every week. Louis doesn't have sales prep information that Chad's team has access to, so there is no discussion of it. They usually go over all leads information once a quarter, whereas Chad's team covers it every week. Mike knows what Chad is doing, and he envies the information about leads. Once they had the benefit of Chad's template, they would look at it weekly and adjust.

This isn't Louis's fault. In the past year since Mike became the boss, he never emphasized the possible prospect or lead "universe" part of the sales process for his division. He felt what they had in place worked well enough for now and could be tweaked later. Instead, he coached Louis to focus on bringing home current prospects and proposals. Mike told the team they'd attack stronger prospecting measurement tools in the months ahead. Now, the entire focus was on turning proposals into contracts.

This concentration worked. Mike's division had strong sales, even minor growth, despite the economy. And he admitted he would have even better performance with a stronger early stage sales preparation process. Organization is one area Mike needs to work on. He lets too many important tasks, seemingly minor ones, slip between the cracks.

"Okay, wins and losses this week," Louis belts out, nodding toward Dave. "Go ahead, Dave."

"Well, as for wins, we had a great meeting at Freed-Johnson. It was very positive all the way around. They seem to really like us and what we can do for them. We were there for an hour and a half. It was a great meeting," Dave smiles. "As for negatives, we did not get short-listed on TransBell. No shock there, but I was hoping they would give us a shot."

"Okay, Gina, you're up."

"Win: We closed on Duo Canal. Didn't get quite the price we wanted, but a win nonetheless. We were at an impasse for about 15 uncomfortable minutes and then I suggested we meet in the middle. They agreed and it's done," says Gina as everyone gives an exaggerated golf clap—part of the culture Louis brought to the sales meetings. Louis knows it's important to recognize success, but he finds rah-rah cheering or bell ringing patronizing for bright professionals. The semi-facetious golf clap does the trick. It's fun and lighthearted. Everyone looks forward to giving as well as receiving the sales golf clap.

"As for a loss, we've got a one-quarter delay on Perkins. They want to make sure they get paid from a major client that's piled up a large balance before they go ahead with us . . . disappointing . . .. I thought we'd have it as a bigger win than Duo Canal. We're stuck 'doing the time warp again.' There's nothing we can do."

Gina's report pleases Mike and Louis. She has a win that is real and a disappointing delay that she acknowledges. Both are important to the performance of the team. Recognizing that Perkins is dead in the water for now means Gina will waste no effort chasing this prospect for a month or so. This realization will help her to focus on closable prospects.

Also, Gina made a good call with Duo Canal. Louis allowed Gina and everyone on the team the leeway to make pricing decisions in the field: on-line, real time, whatever the buzzword was, with the clients. They would still make a reasonable margin on this deal, despite the fact she lowered the price.

One by one, all six members of the sales team give a 60-second "wins and losses" report. This sets the tone for the following full-fledged rundown of all the closes, proposals, and meetings, as well as the upcoming activity for this week. To a visitor, this weekly routine looks casual and easy flowing; but it's actually tightly planned. Mike pushed for all his meetings to start with headlines and then proceed to the details. After they deliver the headlines, each salesperson has four to five minutes apiece to go over their activities in greater depth. Mike taught Louis the protocol, and Louis adopted the format, then he added his own touches, like the golf clap.

Chad glances at his BlackBerry for the tenth time in the last 14 minutes. He's learned to turn the thing on silent, and he's stopped pounding on it in meetings after a strong bust in the chops from his boss last year. Lynne, his boss, told him in front of the other district managers "No e-mailing in meetings, Chad . . .. Your inattention to me and everyone else is sucking the life out of this room." The situation was embarrassing. He learned his lesson.

Certainly no harm, however, in keeping it on the conference table at one of his meetings, just within his line of sight. He doesn't even have to touch it to see the messages pop up; and there is nothing from Phil yet. Sure, it is only 5:26 am Pacific time, but he was hoping Phil might have been up early and responded to that terse e-mail.

The tinny BlackBerry ring tone of Mozart's "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" fills Mike's empty office for 18 seconds before voice mail clicks in. Earlier he slipped his BlackBerry in the docking cradle, next to the computer. Mike never brings his BlackBerry to meetings in the office. Instead, he carries a moleskin notebook and a hardcover bound calendar. Unlike almost every other manager in the company, he isn't addicted to his "CrackBerry." While he loves having the powerful communications tool, he doesn't find it helpful—as so many others do—to have it at his side every second. It isn't some protest against the intrusion of technology; he just feels that checking e-mail more than four times a day is terribly inefficient. He also learned that it ruined his focus and his ability to succeed in meetings.

Here's the voice mail Mike will hear in a few minutes when he returns to his office:

A minute or two later, the e-mail with the projections will hit the Outlook Inbox on Mike's computer. A minute after that, it appears on his BlackBerry.

As his sales team discusses what they did last week and what they have coming up, Chad carefully measures all sales activity against the numeric goals outlined in his outstanding report template. Every time the right number hits the goals on his spreadsheet he gives a proud thumbs-up. If not, he usually says something obvious like, "We're off goal. We have to hit our numbers to succeed." His sales team members nod. They agree; they just don't know what exactly Chad thinks they should be doing to get to the goal.

Today he's not happy with the number of proposals in the pipeline and upcoming initial meetings. However, he notes that formal closes are right on the money for the month, so it's easy to be encouraging. He thanks all in the room for their hard work—for the second time—and dismisses them.

But Chad's sales manager, Jody, thinks that he made a mistake in concluding the meeting so quickly. Chad called one thing right: It was a good week for closes, and for that Jody is happy. But she knows the weak pipeline is trouble. She has a good nose for the sales process and worries the division is off track more than Chad realizes. Some of those proposals, already too few in number, are probably less real than the members of the sales team owned up to. She sweats the fact that more than a few have less than a 50 percent chance of succeeding. Future actual revenue won't keep pace with what today's projected close numbers show. Jody knew some questions would help get to the real number. But she didn't interject; and Chad didn't ask her to offer an opinion.

Maybe, she thought, Chad didn't want to rock the boat this morning. Even if that's the case, she thinks that he made the wrong call. With the division already behind, any sense of good karma right now is misleading, and any problems should be addressed immediately. If she ran the sales meetings, she would never let overly positive proposals or "full of crap" prospect meetings go unchallenged. She'll talk to Chad later in the week with her concerns. He'll probably agree with her.

Unfortunately that means that she'll have to circle back with several members of the team in a few days to get the right info and remind them to commit only to what's a strong prospect. She knows it will be a waste of time as well as a couple of lost days of the week. Under stronger leadership, this waste of effort could be eliminated.

It isn't until the end of the meeting that Louis turns to the tabulation of the headlines and reports into a numbers format. Louis always closes by delivering a few headlines of his own. "It was a good week," Louis says. "We can always do better, and that's what I expect. So go after it this week, and remember, my door is open and my cell phone is on every minute of every day."

Then Louis turns to Mike, who frequently asks some block-and-tackle questions just to get a better feel for each prospect and customer. Other times his questions are probing in an attempt to make sure his team is delivering the information to measure real success.

This week, his calm and straightforward digging also uncovers something about Dave's activity that Louis should have caught.

"Dave, who did you meet with at Freed-Johnson?" Mike asks, following up on Dave's proclamation of a "win" as the meeting started.

"Um, it was with the purchasing manager and the head of the production department," Dave says.

"Do you think they have sign-off approval? I mean, if we get to the proposal stage, will we have to start all over again, up the food chain with the real decision makers?" Mike asks. He thinks he knows the answer, but he isn't sure.

"Well, they told us they'd probably have to get the division VP or, even better, the CFO in another meeting to even get to the proposal stage, but they were optimistic they could make that happen," Dave answers. Mike's gut was right. This isn't a "win," according to Mike's litmus test. It's just the type of consistent activity needed to get to a win.

"This was a really good start, though," Dave coughs up another overstatement, still trying to rescue the situation. He takes another breath and decides to go with a new tactic: full disclosure, knowing that Mike will get there anyway.

"But I don't know when we'll get to the CFO," Dave fesses up. "I've already called her and dropped her an e-mail. She's pretty busy, though, and it's not easy to get on her calendar."

"Okay, thanks Dave," Mike says evenly. He offers no criticism or negative response to Dave's explanation.

But that doesn't stop everyone in the room from looking down for a painful few beats because this is a lousy moment for both Dave and Louis. Dave, like everyone on the sales team, knew better than to call something that was just normal activity a "win." Mike lectured over and over again that these kinds of meetings—the type that may or may not pan out—are not "wins." "It's a pretty chord," Mike would say, "but that's not the same as a pretty song." If Dave had a meeting with the CFO at Freed-Johnson, it would have counted as a win. That's a very hard meeting to get and reason for celebration.

Most of the division managers, like Chad, take for granted that their salespeople's actions will follow the money. Why would a boss waste so much time or energy pushing people who get a bigger check when they succeed, they'd wonder. If salespeople were true professionals, the school of thought goes, it should be obvious they need closes, not just meetings.

Mike, however, doesn't agree. He sees the "they will always follow the money" argument as a misguided and lazy management style for a boss. He creates extra steps of verbal infrastructure in all of his sales meetings with his staff. The boss—Louis, in this instance—needed to question and closely monitor salespeople and keep them on the right course. For Mike, constant coaching and guidance are always more helpful to success than just incentive pay. This is one of the reasons that Mike's division met and then exceeded sales goals every one of the last four quarters.

Dave probably had a lousy week, though, and didn't have a "win" to report; so he tried to make something sound better than it was. Mike knows salespeople do this all the time. Dave would have been better off admitting he had no wins this week.

Louis is in worse shape than Dave. As sales manager, he should have caught Dave's public overselling of the Freed-Johnson meeting. Mike only pushes with these questions in front of the entire group when his internal sales radar screams that something doesn't smell right. Sometimes, his radar is off and a "win" is really a "win." That's fine with Mike because it teaches his sales people to be clearer with the reality behind the headlines.

The closes from last week are all real, which is cause for minor celebration, but Mike can see the upcoming proposal pipeline is weak. This is bad news, and everyone in the room knows it from Mike's piercing question.

Chad's a little nervous about Phil's lack of a response. He knows Phil gets up early, because of the time difference. He thinks of firing off another e-mail, tougher than the first, but he stops, thinking it might make him look weak. Too late, though.

After the meeting breaks up, Mike spends his usual five minutes of postmortem with Louis. It's a weekly, scheduled coaching session, meant to help Louis, who is a good sales boss, to become even better. Today, Louis knows he screwed up.

"Sorry I didn't catch the Dave thing before you did. I'm really excited about the Freed-Johnson prospects, and I got too caught up in it," Louis explains.

"I know. . .I am too. The reason we have such tight rules for the win/loss exercise is to make sure we keep moving forward. It's lousy discipline to pat ourselves on the back for stuff that's not significant yet," Mike says. "I'd have been more happy hearing Dave's Freed-Johnson during his five-minute report of normal activity."

"I should have caught it," Louis says.

"Yeah, you should have. I loved busting chops in sales meetings, listening to the crap and catching it early before we wondered why we weren't hitting our goals. But unfortunately for me that's your job here, not mine," Mike says. "We both look bad when I have to back you up like that. But I will, every time."

"You're right," Louis says.

"Okay, now a more subtle point I want you to work on. You were correct in complimenting them at the end of the meeting; it was a good week, and your directness worked well. But that 'we can always do better' and 'that's what I expect' stuff sounds like something you saw on an inspirational poster kiosk at the mall. You have to be more specific with what you want other than 'better.' It's too vague to show leadership."

"Well, I don't know exactly what I want, but I know I want better performance," says Louis. "Doesn't everybody?"

"Yeah, of course," Mike explains, "but if you can't put some thought and effort into 'better'—like pinpointing a specific client you've been coveting, a record number of wins in a week, or whatever—then you just sound hollow and weak. It's not that 'I expect you to do better' is bad; is just that it's average boss blah-blah-blah. You are not average, Louis. Work harder next week at developing an above average closing to the meeting."

"Okay," says Louis.

"One more thing," Mike says. "Please don't use the 'my door is always open' line ever again. Sounds too much like something Mike Brady would say to Bobby after a real father-to-son chat in the study."

Mike smiles, and Louis does, too. They split off into their separate directions, with Louis wondering if he'll ever be able to see things as clearly and word them as succinctly as Mike can. Mike knows he dropped the hammer down pretty hard on Louis; at the same time, he knows it was the right thing to do. Louis is bright and coachable. Mike is always coaching, even with his best employees. He's confident Louis will incorporate some of his tips next week.