There is a moment every sales leader knows well. You have been promoted because you were excellent at the job. You could close, you could build relationships, you could hit numbers consistently. And then the promotion comes and suddenly the very skills that made you exceptional as an individual contributor are the exact skills that are quietly working against you as a leader.
Sound familiar? You are not alone. And more importantly, you are not broken.
This is actually the most predictable, most common, and most solvable challenge in all of leadership. But here is the problem: most leaders never stop long enough to name what is actually happening. They just keep pushing. Foot on the gas. Same play, different title.
Dr. Garland Vance and Dorothy Vance have spent 25 years researching, training, and working alongside leaders across industries to answer one central question: why do capable, intelligent, well-intentioned leaders get stuck? Their answer — and the entire framework behind their book Unleashed Leadership — starts with a definition most leaders have never actually been handed.
Leadership, as Garland and Dorothy define it, is not about charisma, personality, or even experience. It is about one thing: the future. Here is how they put it, and it is worth reading twice:
A leader is someone who sees a clear, preferred, and desired future — who gathers others around that future — and who mobilizes others to create that future.
Three verbs. See. Gather. Mobilize. The future is not just the destination. The future is what leads the leader. And when you internalize that definition, everything about the framework that follows starts to click. Most leaders who feel stuck are not lacking ability — they are missing clarity on the future, or the capacity to bring others into it, or the skill to get people moving toward it with real intention. The gap is identifiable. And it is fixable.
Why Good Sales People Struggle to Become Great Leaders
There is a tension that shows up constantly in the sales world: the very thing that earns someone a promotion is often the thing that holds them back once they get there.
Think about it. A salesperson gets promoted because they were exceptional at selling — prospecting, connecting with clients, closing. So what do most newly promoted sales leaders do next? They keep selling. They keep doing what they know. It feels productive. It feels like winning. But it is not leadership. It is habit dressed up as momentum.
According to Garland and Dorothy’s research, the most common mistake leaders make in this transition is failing to slow down long enough to ask three critical questions before jumping back into action:
1. What kind of work is most valuable in my role right now? As a salesperson, the most valuable work was selling — prospect, reach out, close. As a sales leader, that shifts entirely. The highest-leverage work might now be coaching, removing obstacles for the team, developing talent, or connecting people to the right resources. These are not the same skill set, and treating them as if they are is where the trouble starts.
2. Based on that most valuable work, what skills does my team need me to develop? If coaching and training become the highest-leverage activities, then the skills required are entirely different — creating training materials that actually change behavior, presenting effectively in front of a group, designing tools and workshops that produce results.
3. Based on those skills, how does time management need to change? Time does not expand because the title changed. If the calendar does not get restructured deliberately, the important work never gets done and the urgent work continues to run the show indefinitely.
Those three questions sound simple. They are not. The phone still rings. The quarter still ends. The pressure does not pause to let a new leader find their footing. Before long, months have passed and a newly promoted sales leader is still functioning like a top individual contributor — quietly wondering why the team is not thriving, not realizing the answer is in the mirror.
Leadership is not an upgraded version of being a great salesperson. It is a fundamentally different craft. And the sooner a leader accepts that, the faster they can grow into the role their team actually needs them to fill.
The Seven Issues Are Not Flaws. They Are Gaps.
One of the most important reframes in Unleashed Leadership is this: the problems leaders face are not character flaws or personal failures. They are gaps — specific, nameable gaps between current abilities and current responsibilities.
Leaders feel this gap constantly. Three steps forward, four steps back. Sometimes eight. That feeling is not failure. It is a signal. And that signal has a name. Actually, it has seven names.
After 25 years of research and hands-on work with leaders across organizations, Garland and Dorothy identified that 95% of leadership challenges trace back to one of seven specific issues. Every. Single. Time. They all begin with the letter C — which makes the framework memorable, and memorable frameworks are good leadership in themselves. Here is what each one means:
1. Character — This goes beyond the baseline ethics of do not lie, cheat, or steal. Garland and Dorothy are intentional about separating moral character from leadership character. Leadership character is the harder work above that line. It means making the difficult decisions others avoid, having the conversations no one wants to initiate, demonstrating real humility, taking ownership of failures rather than deflecting them, and consistently putting others before yourself. A leader with strong character gives credit away and absorbs accountability. A leader with a character gap does the opposite — and the team notices, even when nothing is said out loud.
2. Competence — Are the skills currently in place aligned with what the organization and the team actually need right now? Competence is not static. The skills that earned someone a leadership role may not be the skills that role now requires. This issue is directly connected to the transition challenge above — the leader who keeps doing what got them promoted instead of developing what the job now demands.
3. Capacity — This is about the time, energy, and attention a leader has available to actually lead — not just manage, not just react to the most urgent thing on the list, but lead with intention. Capacity surfaces as the most common struggle for people-facing leaders, and the ripple effects of poor capacity management extend far beyond any individual’s own schedule.
4. Clarity — Is there a clear picture of where the team is headed? Does every person on the team understand where they are going, how they are getting there, what their specific role is in the process, and why it matters? Clarity is not a one-time announcement at a quarterly all-hands. It is an ongoing leadership responsibility that requires consistent, deliberate communication.
5. Community — This is the environment of trust and collaboration that a team needs not just to function, but to genuinely thrive. It is built in the small moments, the consistent habits, and the way a leader chooses to show up with their people every day. And it extends beyond the leader’s individual relationships — it includes the quality of the relationships between team members themselves.
6. Culture — Culture is what happens when the values an organization claims to hold are tested by the decisions it actually makes. It is the alignment — or misalignment — between what gets preached and what gets practiced. Culture is visible in where time goes, where resources go, and which behaviors get celebrated or quietly ignored.
7. Consistency — This one almost did not make the framework. Garland and Dorothy originally built the model around six issues. A trusted colleague challenged them: what if a leader implements all six brilliantly, but only once? Consistency is the multiplier. It is about showing up with the same vision, the same emotional steadiness, the same expectations, and the same commitment to the team — not just when things are going well, but every single day, regardless of circumstances.
One principle ties all seven together: a problem well named is a problem half solved. Leaders waste enormous time and energy solving the wrong problem because they never stopped long enough to correctly identify what the actual problem was. A culture problem is often a clarity problem in disguise. A team performance problem is often a capacity problem — belonging to the leader, not the team. Name the right issue, and the path forward becomes measurably less complicated.
What Sales Leaders Get Wrong About Connecting With People
Of the seven issues, two surface most reliably among leaders in people-facing and sales-driven environments. Understanding them is the difference between a team that merely performs and a team that thrives.
For leaders in customer-facing, people-heavy environments: Capacity. The irony is almost painful. The more a leader cares about customers, team members, and results, the more they pack into their calendar — and the less available they become to the very people they are supposed to be developing. Healthy capacity is not a luxury. It is a leadership responsibility.
What does a leader with genuinely healthy capacity look like to the people around them?
- They build margin into the calendar — not for leisure, but because surprises, questions, and real conversations will fill that space every time. A packed calendar with no room for people is not a sign of productivity. It is a sign of misaligned priorities.
- They are not reachable on vacation. This one stings, and it should. The message a leader sends by being reachable when they said they would be off is not dedication. It is an unspoken instruction to the team: you are expected to be available too. What leaders model will always outweigh what they say.
- They have a clear, communicated system for availability — whether that is structured office hours, a consistent open-door window, or even a simple visual signal that tells the team when the leader is interruptible and when they need uninterrupted focus time. The specific method matters far less than the consistency of it and the team’s understanding of it.
For leaders in sales specifically: Community. Results-oriented leaders — which describes the vast majority of the sales world — tend to underinvest in the relational infrastructure that makes those results sustainable over time. They are scoreboard people. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, until the scoreboard becomes the only metric that drives every interaction.
Building community starts with something that sounds almost too simple to mention: remembering people’s names. And yet it cannot be skipped, no matter how large the team. Systems exist precisely for this purpose. The effort to remember communicates value. The failure to remember communicates the opposite.
But genuine community extends well beyond names. A leader who is actively building it:
- Knows who matters to the people on their team — their families, their kids, the things that energize them outside of work.
- Remembers important dates, milestones, and life events — and does something intentional with that information.
- Asks about people’s lives with enough specificity to signal genuine attention, not a scripted opener before the real agenda starts.
- Actively facilitates trust between team members — not just between themselves and each individual.
That last behavior is one most leaders overlook entirely. A leader is not only responsible for the trust between themselves and each team member. They are responsible for the quality of trust between team members with each other. Silos do not form because people are difficult. They form because people do not know each other as human beings. When they do — when they realize that everyone at the table is working in good faith, carrying real challenges, and aiming at the same goal — collaboration replaces competition as the default.
On clarity, Garland and Dorothy offer a framework that is immediately applicable. Every person on a team is subconsciously asking four questions every single day, whether they realize it or not and whether they would ever voice it or not:
- Where are we going? What is the big goal? What is the team ultimately trying to achieve?
- How are we getting there? What is the plan? What strategies and processes are actively in motion?
- What is my specific role in getting there? Not the team’s role in general — my individual role. What do I uniquely contribute, and how does my work connect to the larger goal?
- Why does it matter? How does achieving this goal improve things — for the organization, for the team, for each person’s life and family?
The test is straightforward: ask every person on the team to answer those four questions independently. If the answers align across the board, clarity exists. If they do not — and for most teams, they will not — there is real, solvable work to do. Sales organizations tend to be strong on the first question. Sometimes the second. The third and fourth are where the gap opens, and those are precisely the questions that drive discretionary effort, personal investment, and the kind of engagement no pipeline report can measure.
On culture, stated values must show up in actual decisions. Garland and Dorothy guide leaders through a clarifying exercise: separate aspirational values from actual values. Write down what the organization claims to believe. Then examine the behaviors — what happens in meetings, what gets celebrated, what gets ignored, where the budget flows, what topics dominate leadership discussions. Do those behaviors confirm the stated values or quietly contradict them?
An organization that says it values people over profit — but opens every meeting with numbers and never mentions people — is not living its stated value. The aspiration is genuine. The practice is not. Culture is shaped by what gets rewarded and what gets quietly ignored. If the goal is a team that connects authentically rather than just transacts, then the behaviors that reflect connection need to be the ones that get recognized and celebrated. That means acknowledging when a team member goes the extra mile for a customer beyond the deal. It means asking people to describe the person they are serving, not just the contract they are trying to close.
The Ritz-Carlton model illustrates this principle precisely. They did not earn the right to charge premium rates and then build a culture of excellence. They built the culture first, trained every person to live it out in every interaction, and the premium position followed. The Chick-fil-A version of the same truth applies equally — consistent, culture-driven behaviors become the brand, and the brand drives the results.
Getting Unleashed Is Not Just a Decision. It’s a Process.
Identifying the right issue is only half of the equation. The other half is knowing what to do next. Unleashed Leadership does not stop at diagnosis — it provides a clear, structured path for moving from stuck to unleashed. Garland and Dorothy call it the three D’s:
1. Decide — Before taking any action, one honest question must be answered: is this actually worth the commitment required? Getting unleashed demands real sacrifice — putting other things aside long enough to do the foundational work. This stage is not about action. It is about clarity of intent. Leaders who skip decide tend to produce a lot of enthusiastic announcements and very little lasting change. They mistake activity for progress and reaction for leadership.
2. Discern — This is where the real work of the mind happens, and it is still not time to move. In this stage, a leader digs beneath the presenting problem to locate the actual issue — because the problem that appears on the surface and the problem that is actually causing it are rarely the same. Discern is also where the strategy takes shape: the specific, intentional plan for addressing the real issue, the critical actions required, and the path from current state to where leadership needs to go. Only when the thinking is complete does action become worth taking.
3. Deliver — Now comes movement — with clarity, strategy, and commitment behind it. But deliver is not a one-time event. It is a repeated, ongoing practice. Leadership is not a project with a finish line. It is a daily discipline, and the deliver stage reflects that reality.
What ties all three stages together — and what ties all seven C’s together — is the final issue: consistency. Garland and Dorothy nearly excluded it from the original framework. A trusted colleague pushed back, and that pushback was right. Because a leader can develop strong character, build real competence, manage their capacity thoughtfully, communicate with genuine clarity, build a community of trust, and align culture with values — and still undo all of it by showing up differently on Tuesday than on Monday.
Consistency is what transforms effort into identity. It is what makes a team believe — not just in the direction being set, but in the leader setting it.
This Framework Is a Leadership Mirror
At least one of the seven C’s described in this article is going to land differently than the others. That is not a coincidence. That is the framework doing exactly what it is designed to do.
Unleashed Leadership is not a checklist. It is a tool for honest, productive self-assessment — one that meets leaders where they actually are and gives them a practical, specific path forward. The distinction between moral character and leadership character removes the defensiveness that shuts most leadership development down before it starts. The separation of aspirational values from actual values makes the gap visible without making it feel irreparable. The decide and discern stages exist precisely to prevent the costly mistake of investing energy into solving the wrong problem.
What Garland and Dorothy have built over 25 years of research and work with real leaders is not theoretical. It is the distilled pattern of what actually holds leaders back — and what actually moves them forward. The seven issues are not random. They are the seven places where the gap between ability and responsibility consistently opens up, and where closing that gap changes everything for the team on the other side of it.
Name the C that applies. Be specific and honest about it. Then take the next step — because that is where the real work begins.
Take the Next Step
The framework covered in this article is drawn from Unleashed Leadership by Dr. Garland Vance and Dorothy Vance — a book written short by design, because the authors understand that leaders do not have time for theory. They need tools they can use today.
Two resources are available right now for leaders who are ready to go deeper:
- Head to Amazon to access a free audiobook copy of Unleashed Leadership, read by Garland and Dorothy themselves. The audiobook includes over an hour of bonus material that goes beyond the written text — practical, unscripted insights from two people who have spent decades working inside the most common leadership challenges. It is an ideal resource for time spent commuting, traveling, or in any situation where reading is not an option.
- The Unleashed Community brings together leaders across North America who are committed to growing in their leadership — not just consuming content, but applying it alongside others who are on the same path. Members gather twice a month for 90-minute sessions: half dedicated to focused training, half to peer connection, shared wins, and mutual accountability. For leaders who want to accelerate their growth, the quality of the community around them matters enormously.
The leaders who get unleashed are not the ones with the most natural talent. They are the ones who name the right problem, build the right strategy, and show up with consistency until it becomes who they are.