Are you a sales manager trying to become a better resource for the people under your supervision? This article begins with a common idea. If you work on changing yourself, you will evolve; if you can get other people to change themselves, then they will evolve. If you get a team of people to change together, then you have become a revolutionary. This article is about fostering change in your sales team for the overall improvement of the organization.

In his bestseller, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” Stephen Covey assures readers that if you can implement the seven habits, “your growth will be evolutionary, but the net effect will be revolutionary.”

Covey’s bestseller is largely about how people can make changes in their own lives to become more successful. Read this book to find out how you can improve personally. Read on to find out what you can do in leading your department or organization through positive changes.

You want to be a revolutionary sales manager, the type who will get promoted because you get things done. Depending on your business, you may supervise 3 or 100 employees. Regardless, senior management holds you accountable for achieving the company objectives, and the bottom lines are usually performance and growth. But short of going back to get an MBA, what can you do?

According to the Accenture Institute for High Performance Business’s report–“The Ambidextrous Senior-Leadership Team,” there are benefits and weaknesses to managing an organization as a team and as a hierarchy. An ambidextrous manager can lead using the team or the hierarchy approach, but it takes practice.

“Ambidextrous senior managers contribute to high performance by adjusting to circumstance: they become hierarchies when circumstances demand rapid action or discipline in execution, and they become teams when they confront complexity or turbulence that demands a creative response.”

This concept of managing using a team or a hierarchy is more difficult than it sounds. Before you can do either or both, you need to educate yourself about both approaches. It is time to do some Internet research or academic research about the characteristics of teams and hierarchies.

Once you have grounded yourself in the literature, you are ready to take a critical look at your own management style. How have you been leading your department? Do you run things as a team or with a top-down hierarchy? How are your employees responding to your leadership? Do your employees respect you and complete assignments regularly, or do you receive a lot of complaints and have to pull teeth to get work done?

If you can be objective, you might be able to answer these questions. Another option is to ask one of your employees that you trust about what he/she thinks regarding your management style. In the process of improving your leadership ability, you are changing yourself. If you improve and your employees notice the positive things you are doing, then your actions will inspire confidence and they will begin to perform better. However, if you have improved as much as you can and still aren’t getting results, it might be time to join a different organization.

As a sales manager who wants to become a revolutionary, it is all about you working hard on the long road to success. Many resources exist to guide you in understanding teams and hierarchies. You can acquire those tools and become a better manager with practice.

To be a true revolutionary, you will do all these things without the guarantee of a reward. If you put in the time and effort, some type of reward will come your way, even if it is increased job satisfaction. A reward might come when you least expect it—an advancement opportunity in your company or a rival organization. Don’t waste time waiting around for things to happen. Through incremental positive changes in your own leadership, you can become a revolutionary and see how good things start to happen around you.