By Floyd Rembert, Marietta, GA
The dugout is not the boardroom, but the lessons transfer
I have coached youth baseball since 2011. I did not start out thinking it would change how I lead in my career. I started because I like the game and wanted to give kids a good experience. Somewhere along the way, it became one of the clearest teachers I have had about how to work with people.
Sales and coaching have more in common than most people think. Both are about getting a group of individuals, each with different strengths and different confidence levels, moving toward the same result. Neither works if you just tell people what to do and walk away.
You cannot coach everyone the same way
The first thing I learned on a baseball field is that kids do not respond to the same instruction the same way. One player needs you to break a swing down into three small steps. Another player just needs you to get out of his way and let him fail a few times. If you coach every kid with the same script, you lose half the team.
I see the same thing with adults. In my work, I deal with different people, different organizations, different priorities. A pitch that lands well with one person falls flat with another, not because the substance changed, but because the person is different. Good coaching, and good sales leadership, starts with paying attention to who is actually in front of you before you decide how to talk to them.
Confidence is built in small reps, not speeches
I have never seen a pep talk turn a nervous nine-year-old into a confident hitter. What works is repetition. You put the bat in his hands, you let him swing, you tell him what he did right, and you do it again the next practice. Confidence gets built one rep at a time, not delivered in a single motivational moment.
That is exactly how I think about developing any skill worth having. Preparation and consistency built my track and field results years before I ever worked a sales territory, and the principle has not changed since. If you want someone to trust their own ability, whether it is a ten-year-old at the plate or a new hire on a call, you give them enough reps that the skill becomes theirs, not something they borrowed from your encouragement.
Accountability has to go both ways
Part of coaching is holding kids accountable: show up on time, listen during drills, back up your teammates. But I learned early that accountability only works if it goes both ways. If I expect a kid to show up prepared, I need to show up prepared too. If I expect the team to stay positive after a loss, I cannot be the one sulking on the bench.
Leading a team of adults works the same way. You cannot ask for a standard you are not willing to hold yourself to first. I try to bring the same discipline to my own mornings and my own preparation that I ask of anyone I am working with. People notice pretty quickly whether the standard is real or just something you talk about.
Losing is information, not identity
Kids take a loss hard. Part of coaching is helping them separate what happened in one game from who they are as a player. A bad inning is information about what to work on. It is not a verdict.
I try to carry that same separation into my own work. A deal that does not close, or a quarter that comes in under where I wanted it, tells me something useful about what to adjust. It does not tell me anything about whether I am good at what I do. That distinction sounds simple, but it is one of the harder things to actually practice, and coaching kids through their own losses has sharpened it for me as much as anything in my career has.
Why I keep doing it
I could spend that time a dozen other ways. I keep coaching because it keeps me honest about what leadership actually looks like at its most basic level: paying attention, being consistent, holding yourself to the standard first. Those things do not change whether you are working with a group of ten-year-olds or a room full of professionals. The uniform is different. The job is not.