Leading At Work: Put Our Team First

When you ride into town, you first look after the horse you rode in on. I don’t recall when I first heard that but the application of that aphorism is one of the best statements of leadership I’ve heard in my professional experience.

In ABM, that “horse” is your team.

Without them, there’s no campaign, no pipeline, no revenue.

Titles don’t pull the wagon — people do. A manager that whips the horses but never helps to pull the wagon, that’s tyrant and not someone you want to work with long term… or even short term for that matter.

I’ve learned this the plain way: revenue teams win when the leader serves, not the other way around.

That means we put my people’s capacity, clarity, and credit ahead of our comfort, our calendar and our workload.

It isn’t noble.

It’s practical.

Service compounds into trust; trust compounds into speed; speed compounds into revenue.

Two real examples, what does this look like?

1. I pause my work to carry theirs across the line. Last quarter a teammate was drowning — two launches, one client escalation, zero daylight. I shelved my own deck and spent the afternoon rewriting a Decision Kit and fielding the tough client call. It wasn’t heroics; it was math. If she slips, the account slips, the quarter slips. We hit the date, she slept, and the client extended. My deck waited. The pipeline didn’t.

2) Give the credit away — by name — and skip my own. We closed a stubborn account after weeks of multithreading. In the readout, I praised the people who did the heavy lifting: ops who fixed the data flow, finance who tuned the ROI model, the AE who kept the room small and decisive. I didn’t list my part. Why? Because credit fuels careers. When good people get seen, they stay, they grow, and they lead. That’s a better return than any applause aimed at me.

What “team first” looks like in an ABM revenue motion

• Capacity before velocity. I check load and blockers before I push for more touches. Overloaded people produce rework; right-sized people produce results.

• Clarity before intensity. Every play has an owner, a date, and a definition of “done.” No mystery work. No “circle back.”

• Fit before volume. We protect the team from bad lists. +1 accounts only. Park the rest.

• Proof before adjectives. We support the crew with assets that actually move decisions: one-pagers, mini cases, 90-sec screen shares, ROI one-pagers, pilot plans, Security/Legal FAQs.

• Scoreboard before stories. We coach the seven numbers each Friday — Template→Meeting, Meeting→Next Step, time-to-first-meeting, time-in-stage (median & p75), roles in meetings, win rate, pipeline velocity. Budget follows what pays.

How I try to lead (on good days, which as it turns out is every single day)

• I ask, then act. “What’s in your way?” If it’s mine to fix, I fix it today.

• I book the next step. Every meeting ends with a date and an owner. No homework disguised as progress.

• I protect focus. I’ll say “no” to noise so the team can say “yes” to revenue.

• I model feedback hunger. I ask for the hard notes in front of the group. If I can take it, others can too.

• I grow leaders, not dependencies. I hand over the whiteboard, the meeting chair, and the credit. Then I get out of the way.

Why this matters (beyond being nice)

ABM is a team sport: sales, marketing, biz dev, finance, ops, sales engineering, customer success, executive sponsors. The buyer sees one journey, not our org chart. When we put the team first, we reduce handoffs, tighten the message, and move faster through the buying group. That’s not sentiment. That’s pipeline velocity.

A simple weekly ritual

• Monday: remove one blocker per person.

• Midweek: praise one teammate in public with specifics.

• Friday: Keep / Cut / Create — fund what moved Template→Meeting and Meeting→Next Step; cut the rest; test one new idea. Repeat.

Leaders aren’t crowned by titles; they’re recognized by behavior. If you put your people first — carry the weight when it counts, hand them the credit when it lands — you’ll create more leaders than you can promote.

And that’s the point.

In the end, the team that has the more effective leadership will prevail and land more revenue: and outcompete their lesser competition.