In this solo podcast episode, Bradley Hamner recounts a pivotal 2005 experience as a pharmaceutical sales rep at Astellas, where his manager Sharma conducted an intensive ride‑along after he won the Summit Club Rep of the Year award. Sharma relentlessly critiqued Bradley’s calls, pushing him beyond his comfort zone and comparing him not to other reps but to a future, higher‑performing version of himself. Bradley reflects on two key applications of this lesson: (1) managers should treat top performers as having untapped potential and challenge them with higher expectations rather than letting them coast on past success; (2) individuals should regularly compare themselves to their own future potential, using self‑audit tools like sticky notes to ensure they are embodying the habits and discipline needed to become that future self. He ties the story to Blueprint’s current work on the “Develop A‑Players Playbook,” positioning the anecdote as a practical illustration of the playbook’s principles. The episode concludes with a call to leaders to challenge their teams and to individuals to self‑reflect on their untapped capacity, ending with a signature sign‑off, “lead well.”
Chapters
Hey everyone. Well, yesterday I was on a podcast at the time of this recording on someone else's podcast, and they asked me a question and it brought back a story that I had not thought about in a long period of time. And after that, over the last 24 hours or so, I've given this a lot of thought and I thought, you know what, I think that would actually be valuable for our listening audience for me to share. This story, not specifically that the story itself will benefit you, but some of the principles that happen that has really helped to shape how I think about developing team members. Now ironically, within Blueprint, we were just working on the Develop A-Players Playbook, so this is relevant at the time for our Blueprint members. But what it is, I'm going to take you back roughly about 20 years. I think it was 2005, 2005, 2006. And at the time I was in the pharmaceutical industry, I was in my very first— was actually my second job out of college. My first job, as you may have— many of you may have heard me share, I was selling Yellow Page ads. But in 2005, I had my very first job and was working with a pharmaceutical company that is still around called Astellas. Japanese-based company, really well ran, had some really great, uh, products. And so that year I had learned that they had an award that was given to the Rep of the Year, and it was called the Summit Club Award. And so there was the Summit Club, and then there was the Rep of the Year within the Summit Club, and I fortunately won that award. Well, whoop-de-doo. Reason I'm sharing this with you is that my manager at the time, her name is Sharma. Sharma unfortunately a few years later passed away from cancer. Now I'm 6'5", Sharma was maybe 5 foot. So it was really funny when we would go into different offices. I called on Urologist was the drug that I had, and some family practice internal medicine doctors as well. But our primary writers were urologists. And so the week after, we were in Chicago whenever they did the big, um, the annual convention. I won the Rep of the Year award. And while at that convention, Sharma said, I'm gonna come over to Huntsville and I'm gonna have a ride-along with you. Well, that's not uncommon for those of you that have been in that industry. It's not uncommon in sales in general to have your manager to come and ride along with you. And so I'm coming off of a high of winning Rep of the Year, which was a surprise. I did not think that I was gonna achieve that. And the next week, Sharma meets me at 8 AM, maybe even earlier, but it was certainly at 8 AM for breakfast. And we work all day until 5 o'clock. It was a long day. I kept thinking she's going to come in, we're going to work a few 'Few hours together and now I'm gonna kick off for the rest of the day. I'm probably gonna go play golf, who knows what.' Well, no, it was anything but that. She rode my butt all day long. And not only that, but we were coming out of offices and we would come out of the office and she— we'd get in the car and she was ruthless with me. She would say, 'Bradley, that was terrible.' That was a very bad call. You didn't open, you didn't ask for the sale, you didn't close, you didn't share with them the next time that you're going to be coming in. And I'd say, oh my gosh, okay, well, that's just not how that office does. And we go to the next one, we did the next one. I don't know how many offices we call on that day, it was a lot. And at the end of the day, I finally had gotten frustrated with it. And also, I'll share with you, up to that point when we would have team meetings from the reps kind of around the Southeast, which happened maybe 3 or 4 times a year, she would ask me to do presentations and I would gather the present— I would do some stuff for the presentation. And she was really, really hard on me during the time. And I would notice that that wasn't the case with other reps. I would notice that whenever she would go ride with Jason, who was in Tullahoma, or someone else who was in Birmingham, I would think to my— they would— I would say, well, how'd it go? They said, oh, you know, she got here at 9, got here at 10, and then she'd leave. And I thought, you know, she just doesn't like me. And finally, at the end of that day, I, I guess had enough. And I said, Sharma, what is the deal? You have been riding my tail all day. And I was young and arrogant. And I said, look, I won Rep of the Year last year and you're on my butt. We've had it in like, called them 10 offices or whatever the case may be today. You've ripped me apart after every one of these. What's the deal? And she said, Bradley, I know what you have inside of you. I'm comparing you to you. I know what you're capable of. And you have more in you. I like Morgan Wallen. I've been to a Morgan Wallen concert. He has a song that's called Me to Me. In fact, I think that's what I'm going to name this solo podcast. And I'm pretty competitive. I like to win. If we go play golf, we go play pickleball, go play basketball, do something, I'm going to try to win. I play Cooper still in sports. I'm going to try to beat him in mini basketball. I'm going to try to beat him in putt-putt. I'm not going to let him win. I'm pretty competitive. But what that really taught me was that I was needed to compare me to me. She did not care that I had won Rep of the Year and beat other people. See, she saw something in me that she knew I had more in the tank. And you know what? She was right. She was right. And that has stood out to me so much. So there's two applications to this story. Number one, if you have someone in your organization and they're, let's just say, your top producer, and they're smoking everybody, and you compare them to everyone else, you may be doing them a disservice because you may see they have more in the tank. They have another level that they can get to. They may have 2 or 3 or 4 other levels that they can get to. And Sharma saw that in me, and I'm so thankful she pulled that out. And admittedly, no one else prior, and no one since that I had ever worked with— of course, now as an entrepreneur doesn't really exactly work that way— had ever challenged me in the way that she did. And I'm so grateful for what she taught me that day. She was comparing me to the future version of me. She saw what I was possibly capable of. She saw that I wasn't working as hard. She saw I was, I was getting lackadaisical in the way that I was showing up, uh, visiting those physicians, visiting those offices, doing the certain things. And she wasn't going to allow it to happen. So number one, if you have somebody in your organization maybe that you know that they have more in them than what they're giving. Number 2 is, what about yourself? What about yourself? I'm gonna mess this up, but Keith Cunningham has a great line that says, "Hell on earth would be to meet the man I could have become," or meet the woman I could have become. And he says, "I want to meet that person and say, 'I am you. I became you.'" And that resonates with me from time to time. I can't tell you that I think about that all the time. But maybe I actually should put a little, uh, one of those sticky notes on my computer. I have a number of them sitting here from, from my kids and other things I've written to myself, but maybe I should actually add that one to the list. But point is, is that to think about, am I comparing not just myself to other people, my other peers that I'm around, but what about my own potential? What am I actually capable of. Me to Me. By the way, the Morgan Wallen song really has nothing— really has nothing to do with Me to Me in that sense. I just like the title. So I hope that resonated. I hope that story of what Sharma did for me— God bless her soul— what she did for me that day and what she taught me coming off the back of that is something I will never Forget, I'm so grateful for it. So I'm going to make sure that I too, through this story, I'm going to go and within my team, if I see that they have, they have more in them than what they're, than what they're producing, to challenge them. I owe it to them. And they may not like it. I didn't like it when Sharma was doing it for me. But challenge them, expecting more out of them, comparing themselves to what you know they're capable of, and also give myself a look in the mirror. What am I actually capable of? Am I producing everything? Am I showing up the behaviors, the discipline, the habits, the routines in a way that is actually going to be and help produce the person that I really want to become in the future? Hope this episode was helpful. Till next time, lead well.
