THEY FELT LIKE THEY WERE MY ONLY REP

For me, those words appeared in an annual leadership evaluation.

“I feel like I'm his only rep.”

I remember stopping when I read that statement.

In the pharmaceutical industry, managers are routinely evaluated on more than business results. Depending on the organization, the process may carry a different name or use a different format, but the underlying objective is familiar: understand how effectively a manager is leading, developing, motivating, and inspiring the people entrusted to them.

These evaluations offer something that performance dashboards cannot always capture.

They provide a glimpse into what it actually feels like to be managed by you.

And this particular comment surprised me.

I had an entire team to support. Multiple personalities. Different levels of experience. Distinct professional strengths. Individual developmental needs. And the everyday demands that come with managing a pharmaceutical sales organization.

Yet someone felt as though they were my only representative.

At the time, I hadn't set out to create that particular impression.

In fact, the comment made me reflect on how much my own approach to leadership had evolved.

Early in my management career, I discovered something about myself that required a measure of professional honesty.

I naturally gravitated toward coaching opportunities that aligned with my strongest capabilities.

Data interpretation was one of them.

I was comfortable examining performance information, identifying trends, understanding account dynamics, and helping representatives translate numbers into practical business decisions.

When those opportunities presented themselves during field visits, I could engage confidently. I understood the material, knew which questions to ask, and could often identify meaningful opportunities for improvement.

That competence helped establish credibility with certain representatives.

But not every representative needed the same kind of coaching.

Some were exceptionally skilled at interpreting clinical information. Others had developed sophisticated approaches to identifying influential healthcare professionals and understanding the relationships that shaped prescribing environments.

Still others possessed an extraordinary command of local market dynamics, often developed through years of experience in territories I was only beginning to understand.

And that's where I noticed a difference in my own effectiveness.

When the conversation moved beyond my strongest areas, particularly into unfamiliar markets and complex influence networks, my coaching could become more generic.

I was still participating. Still asking questions. Still fulfilling my responsibilities.

But I knew the difference between a conversation that genuinely advanced someone's thinking and one that merely sounded like coaching.

That realization wasn't especially comfortable.

It was, however, necessary.

I began asking myself a different set of questions.

What if I spent more time understanding how my strongest representatives had developed their expertise?

What if, instead of approaching every field visit primarily as an opportunity to teach, I also approached it as an opportunity to learn?

And what if I made that learning visible to the rest of the team?

I started leaning more deliberately into curiosity.

When a representative demonstrated an exceptional understanding of market dynamics, I wanted to understand how that knowledge had been developed.

What were they noticing that others might overlook?

Which relationships had they learned to recognize?

How were they connecting information that wasn't immediately apparent in a performance report?

I also became more comfortable acknowledging that there were areas where I wanted to learn from them.

That didn't mean abandoning my responsibility to lead.

It meant recognizing that leadership expertise and subject-matter expertise are not always concentrated in the same person.

A manager may be accountable for the performance of an entire team without possessing every specialized skill represented within it.

The opportunity is to recognize those capabilities, learn from them, and help make them available to others.

When appropriate, I highlighted representatives' expertise during team calls and shared what I had learned from their approaches.

Their knowledge deserved recognition.

And the team deserved the opportunity to benefit from it.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether that openness helped eliminate some of the speed bumps that can slow the development of trust between a new manager and an established team.

Perhaps there was less need for representatives to determine whether I knew everything, because I wasn't pretending that I did.

Perhaps we could get to the important work sooner.

I can't measure that precisely.

But I believe the willingness to learn from the people I managed changed the quality of our interactions.

One field visit remains especially vivid.

I was accompanying a representative during a customer lunch.

The representative had supported that customer for years and had established a strong professional relationship. The customer valued the representative, and the representative possessed an exceptional understanding of the local market.

During the conversation, I made a point of acknowledging that expertise.

I shared with the customer how much our team relied on this representative's knowledge of local market dynamics and the perspective that came from years of experience.

It wasn't an elaborate speech.

I simply wanted the customer to understand something I genuinely believed about the person sitting with us.

There was also a practical reason for doing it.

I wanted to reinforce the representative's value to that customer and help support continued access to a relationship that mattered.

And I wanted the representative to recognize something about my role.

I wasn't there exclusively to observe, evaluate, or identify opportunities for improvement.

I could also be an ally.

Later, the representative thanked me for what I had said.

I hadn't expected that.

From my perspective, I had simply acknowledged expertise that deserved to be acknowledged.

But the appreciation stayed with me.

It reminded me that a manager's presence can mean different things depending on how that presence is used.

You can accompany someone into a customer interaction primarily to assess their performance.

Or you can also use your position to reinforce their credibility, recognize their contributions, and support the relationships they've worked hard to establish.

Those responsibilities don't have to compete.

In the best circumstances, they complement one another.

Throughout much of my management experience, I routinely spent approximately four days each week in the field.

Field rides, customer interactions, exhibits, and other activities kept me closely connected to the representatives I supported.

That amount of time created opportunities to understand people beyond what appeared in a report or emerged during a scheduled team meeting.

I could see how they approached customers.

I could observe their individual strengths.

I could recognize where additional support might be valuable.

And increasingly, I could appreciate how differently capable people arrived at successful outcomes.

Some needed help interpreting information.

Others benefited from discussing strategy.

Some had developed approaches that deserved to be shared with the rest of us.

The objective wasn't to make everyone operate exactly as I would.

It was to understand what each person brought to the organization and how I could help that individual become even more effective.

That required attention.

But it also required restraint—the willingness not to turn every interaction into an opportunity to demonstrate what I knew.

Sometimes the most valuable contribution I could make was a question.

Sometimes it was an observation.

Sometimes it was recognizing someone else's expertise in front of people whose opinions mattered.

And sometimes it was simply listening long enough to understand what that particular representative needed.

Years of management experience can teach you to think about a team as a collective responsibility.

You have shared goals, common performance expectations, organizational priorities, and business outcomes.

Those things matter.

But the people who make up that team don't experience your leadership as a collective.

They experience it through their individual encounters with you.

Through the questions you ask.

The expertise you recognize.

The challenges you help them navigate.

The opportunities you create for their contributions to be seen.

And the respect you demonstrate when their knowledge exceeds your own.

That is what the survey comment eventually helped me appreciate.

“I feel like I'm his only rep.”

I didn't interpret those words as proof that I had become a perfect manager.

I certainly hadn't.

Nor could one comment tell me that every representative experienced my leadership in exactly the same way.

But it suggested that something important had reached at least one person.

What began as an effort to confront my own developmental needs had contributed to an experience of individualized attention.

And perhaps that was the most unexpected lesson of all.

I had been working to become a better manager.

Someone else experienced that work as feeling personally valued.

For a newly promoted manager, I would offer this thought: don't confuse leadership credibility with the obligation to know everything.

Be open about what you know.

Be equally open about what you still need to learn.

Invite the expertise already present within your team to help close those gaps.

And recognize that your responsibility isn't simply to improve the performance of a group.

It's to help the individuals within that group recognize that their contributions matter.

Because sometimes the strongest evidence of leadership isn't found in what a manager says about the team.

It's found in what one person says about the experience of being led.

Training teaches you the business. Experience teaches you the craft.