I DON'T GRADE FOR THE TEST

This was one of my earlier field rides as a sales manager. The representative was relatively new to reporting to me, but he wasn't new to selling.

He had a good reputation—with customers, with the company, and as a salesperson.

The company had recently completed formal sales training, and I believed strongly in what we were trying to accomplish. The training introduced techniques designed to make customer conversations more focused and productive.

But as we moved through the day, I noticed something.

I could hear the training.

Almost every question sounded as though it had come directly from the training room.

The representative wasn't struggling to sell. He was struggling to demonstrate how he'd been taught to sell.

And those are not necessarily the same thing.

At some point during the day, I essentially told him:

Don't stand on ceremony.

I wasn't telling him to disregard the training. Quite the opposite.

I wanted him to incorporate what was useful from the training into what he already did well.

So I started asking him about his own approach. What had worked for him historically? How did he normally engage these customers? What did a good call sound like when he wasn't thinking about demonstrating a particular technique?

Because before you coach someone toward something new, you should understand what already makes them good.

I believed in the training.

I just didn't believe the purpose of training was to make every representative sound trained.

As the day progressed, I began hearing a difference.

The questions became more natural. They were still focused. They still had purpose. But now they sounded like him.

Instead of reaching for a question simply because it demonstrated a technique, he could build naturally from an earlier customer conversation:

I want to hear more about your success as a result of trying Product X in that patient type you described.

Now the technique was serving the conversation rather than controlling it.

The calls began to flow differently.

He wasn't abandoning what he'd learned. He was integrating it.

And that distinction mattered to me.

Training gives you additional tools. Experience helps you decide when and how to use them.

There was another lesson taking place that day, although I probably understood it more clearly afterward.

I was observing how he sold.

He was observing how I managed.

A field ride can very easily become a test.

The representative knows the manager is watching. The manager knows the representative knows. And suddenly behavior can shift from doing the work effectively to demonstrating the behaviors everyone expects to see.

That's when I told him something that would remain part of my management philosophy:

I don't grade for the test. I grade for results.

That didn't mean technique didn't matter. It didn't mean process didn't matter. And it certainly didn't mean training didn't matter.

It meant I wasn't interested in someone performing a technique for me merely to prove that they knew it.

I wanted to know whether they understood it well enough to use it when it could improve the result.

That conversation also strengthened our relationship. He learned something about how I would manage him, and I learned something about how he worked.

The field ride stopped feeling quite so much like an examination.

It became what I believe a good field ride should be:

an opportunity for both people to learn.

Training should add to capability, not disguise it.

That sounds obvious, but in practice it can be surprisingly easy to confuse adoption with integration.

Adoption says: I can demonstrate the technique.

Integration says: I understand the technique well enough to know when it improves what I already do.

That distinction matters because experienced people already have patterns, instincts, and approaches that have helped make them successful.

The goal of development shouldn't be to erase those strengths. It should be to expand them.

The best evidence that someone learned the technique may eventually be that you stop noticing the technique at all.

It has become part of how they work.

Training gives you techniques. Craft begins when those techniques become your own.

That doesn't mean rejecting structure. It means understanding it well enough to use it without allowing it to replace the strengths that were already there.

I learned something else that day, too.

I was observing him. He was observing me.

Every field ride works in both directions. I was learning how he sold. He was learning how I managed.

And perhaps the most useful thing I could communicate was that I wasn't there to grade a performance of the training.

I don't grade for the test. I grade for results.

Training teaches the technique. Experience teaches when to use it. Craft is knowing how to make it your own.

That's the craft.