By Tom Glason, CEO of ScaleWise, the go-to-market and talent partner for fast-scaling B2B tech firms.
Most growing businesses don’t stall because leaders hold too little control. They stall because leaders hold on to the wrong kind of control for too long.
In research conducted by ScaleWise, we found that 50% of startups still rely on the CEO to lead go-to-market. That approach can work early on. But as complexity increases and scale demands new capability, founder-led GTM quickly becomes a bottleneck.
In response, many leaders try to step back by adding layers of targets, dashboards and training, while still doing the heavy lifting themselves. Control remains centralised, just disguised as numbers. Targets become a mechanism of control rather than a tool for performance. Without realising it, leaders end up capping growth instead of enabling it.
When targets replace trust
Leaders who don’t trust teams to think often rely on targets and training instead of coaching. The result is compliance, not commitment.
Targets are not a strategy. They tell you what you want, but not how to achieve it. When numbers become the strategy, teams optimise for hitting the target rather than solving customer problems or improving how they sell.
Targets also provide convenient cover for weak leadership. I’ve seen high-performing individual contributors promoted into management without being taught how to lead. Under pressure, they default to directing rather than developing, managing numbers instead of people.
A deliberately risky experiment
A quote from L. David Marquet’s Turn the Ship Around challenged my own assumptions about leadership:
“Leadership should mean giving control rather than taking control, and creating leaders rather than forging followers.”
When one of my previous companies needed to change its trajectory, we ran a deliberately risky experiment. We removed sales quotas entirely and replaced them with a data-informed, coaching-led system that gave ownership back to the sales team.
What followed was not chaos. It was sustained improvement. Win rates increased, sales cycles shortened, and productivity per rep improved materially. Performance became more consistent, not less.
From directing to coaching
Removing quotas exposed the real constraint in the system: management capability.
Managers had been rewarded for their own output rather than for growing others. Without targets to lean on, their role had to change. We separated three activities that are often conflated:
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Training: transferring knowledge about product, process and methodology
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Feedback: observing performance and correcting what happened
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Coaching: unlocking thinking, ownership and commitment
Training teaches. Feedback corrects. Coaching creates accountable practitioners.
If managers only train and give feedback, reps remain dependent. Coaching shifts accountability from compliance to ownership.
Building a coaching culture
We treated coaching as a skill to build, not a switch to flip.
Managers participated in a weekly book club based on John Whitmore’s Coaching for Performance, focusing on application rather than theory. We practised real one-to-ones through role play using the GROW model and gave each other peer feedback.
We raised hiring standards so coachability became non-negotiable, and we defined minimum activity levels based on unit economics, ensuring accountability remained intact.
Some managers thrived. Others recognised their strengths lay as individual contributors and stepped back into those roles. That was a success, not a failure. Culture only moves as fast as management.
The personal success blueprint
Removing quotas did not mean removing direction.
Instead, we introduced a personal success blueprint: a co-created, data-grounded plan that became the foundation of weekly one-to-ones.
We started by analysing top performers: discovery calls, conversion rates, deal sizes and sales cycles. That created a clear map of effective execution.
We then aligned performance plans to intrinsic motivation. Reps explored what success meant to them, from progression and earnings to confidence and competition. Together, we defined realistic win rates and agreed how support would show up when performance dipped.
Reps chose whether they wanted a Slack nudge, a problem-solving huddle or a one-to-one conversation. Accountability became a partnership rather than a threat.
Lessons learned
The first quarter was uncomfortable as we built new coaching muscle. Then performance shifted. Win rates climbed. Sales cycles shortened. Record months followed, then record quarters.
Targets have their place. But they are not a substitute for leadership.
If your business is struggling to hit its numbers and wants sustained performance, stop using metrics as a crutch for weak leadership. Invest in coaching. Co-create the path to success and contract for accountability.
Sometimes, the best way to hit a target is to stop aiming at it – and start building the people who will create the result instead.