Speaking of Leadership
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May
8
Authority brings push back
Filed Under Uncategorized
Friends,
A great book has triggered a memory rich in meaning. This RFL is for authority figures – parents, teachers, principals, bosses, and those heading organizations. It’s about what the book calls “crucial conversations:” “where the stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions run strong.”*
My client was a top-level manager who loved to experiment, had high standards, good business instincts, and a market he was growing in. He wanted to reorganize his offices, because the outside business had changed, and he wanted me to help him sell the reorg. He said, “I want the employees to see this is best for them, and I think you can get them to see it as their idea.” I countered by suggesting that we instead convene the employees, share his picture of the reasons for change, invite them to enrich that picture, and then get them to design a reorganization plan to meet the company’s needs. I would structure the meeting so that he and his management team had plenty of opportunities to add missing data, or point out problems with proposed reorganization plans that might not address the full set of business needs that he saw. I suggested that this approach would both get him great ideas (perhaps exactly what he was thinking) and truly have people committed to the solution they had created. He was nervous that the meeting might somehow go astray, but he agreed to do it.
The first part went tremendously. People were super-engaged, saw the same kinds of mismatches between their structure and the needs of their clients that the top manager had talked to me about, and they came up with plans very similar to the one he had envisioned. We were in the middle of the exciting but difficult last conversations about competing plans. And then the train left the tracks. Someone asserted that one of the plans assumed that the employees were not dependable and needed more close supervision than was necessary. With a bit of an accusatory tone he asked for more autonomy. It hit a nerve. The top manager began by saying the comment was unfair because people were not over-supervised, and then he got really wound up, talking about how much trust he gave them, how much freedom – maybe too much! – and veering into how well paid people were, and how they should be grateful, and maybe he shouldn’t have even given them this opportunity to weigh in. Maybe he should have just told them how it was to be. The effect? It felt like someone sucked the oxygen and the joy right out of that room. Employees who had been unbelievably fired up 5 minutes ago, and were on the verge of giving him 95% of what he wanted (and arguably 15% more that he hadn’t seen from his vantage point), now felt chastised, demoralized, and unsure. I tried to work with it, but the tape could be rewound, but not erased; some of the damage was done. The reorganization went forward successfully but without the powerful buy-in that was there for the taking.
This memory was triggered because I have been reading an awesome book, Crucial Conversations: Tools for talking when stakes are high. The authors provide a very compelling description of the ways in which we get threatened in important conversations, and we turn to “violence or silence.” Their preferred alternative is dialogue, through which two parties “enrich the pool of shared knowledge,” so the participants can make the best decisions possible. They offer many ways to monitor our thoughts, feels and speech in such precarious conversations, so that we don’t verbally attack our kids, workers, spouses or students, or just avoid tough but essential issues. In the story above, that manager – in one of the eternal struggles between those organizing the work and those doing the work – got his buttons pushed. He felt attacked, and with his ancient human wiring he did what animals do when they feel attacked: he fought back. And in doing so, he turned essential allies into enemies. I can’t summarize the wisdom from this exceptional book in an RFL, but I want to merely offer this thought: great leaders listen to the tough stuff. They work to hear what their people are saying – even when it feels like an attack on them. They learn. And they keep their teams learning. In turn and in time, they share their perspectives. But they don’t turn messengers into enemies.
If you have patterns of attack or escape from important conversations at home or at work, i.e., if you’re human, I highly recommend a look at www.crucialconversations.com (or take a shortcut to http://www.vitalsmarts.com/CrucialSkills/FreeStuff/ to see some of their free information and tools and see if their book interests you. You have to manage your powerful emotions in order to:
Lead with your best self.
Dan
* Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, Switzler, Crucial Conversations: Tools for talking when stakes are high, (McGraw Hill, 2002), p. 2
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