This is the second in a series of posts about leading/managing during the economic crisis.

The content of these posts will include unedited transcriptions from a recent webinar addressing “How to Optimize Teams’ Effectiveness in Difficult Economic Times”.   The webinar contained questions from the attendees.  The questions are answered by  the following five management and leadership experts:

Jerry Houston, Carol Bergmann, A.J. Hiltenbrand, Ed Oakley and See Luan Foo.

The rest of this post contains an unedited transcription of one of the questions asked and answered during the webinar:
Ed: We are going to start out with reading the very first question that we received.

Okay, here’s the first question and this is from Shazad in Pakistan.  I going to read through the whole thing before one of our panelists take the lead.  “My concern will be how to convince your non-qualified, conservative, rigid but senior bosses on many things that need reform or change.  In Pakistan, there is opacity of informed and qualified leaders in almost all the business in public sector arenas.  We as junior managers find it very difficult to convince our pessimistic and non-professional bosses and how to take a lot of heartburn in dealing with the organizational development which is much needed in our scenario.”

Now, it’s from Shazad, who would like to take a stab or a lead on that?

A.J.: This is A. J.  I’ll take a shot at that.  Ed, can you tell me if he or she is on?

Ed: It’s a valid question.  Let’s see if I can answer it.  I’m not seeing it right away, so I guess no.

A.J.: Well, then I’d like to leave something on the recording for him.  I appreciate his question.  Basically, this is the same kind of question that we got when we had International Managers in some specifically from Pakistan and the far east in the leadership seminars that we had and after we had worked together for seven or eight days, so this question kind of came out around the fire place.  I commend this person for bringing it up publicly and so quickly.

Basically, we had some tools to use in the session and we said look, “You have to pick an easy issue.  You have to pick an issue that has no threat to them.  He is talking about his rigid senior managers.

Pick something that has very, very low threat and something where the two of you have an easy win together and then come in with the ideas that you’re going to try this as a test, non-threat and let me try something of low level here, risk to them and high potential win for you as a younger manager and then go from there.

You have to recognize that the boss has the power.  They want to believe it that they have the power and in that situation they definitely do.

So show a plan, stay close to the plan, and review the results with the boss and see if you can go from there.  Appreciate the question, those are my thoughts.

Ed: Alright, I’m going to throw and just toss in a little thought too.  I just noticed that Miriam is on the call and she actually works in the Dr. Shazad’s office, so welcome and good.  In fact we have a question from Miriam later too.

But anyway, the word that jumped out at me was the word “convince” that we as junior managers find it very difficult to convince our pessimistic and non-professional bosses.

That’s the issue, you’ll never convince them.  You’re going to have to work with them in a way and A.J.’s ideas were right on but you want to work with them in a way that you’re able to draw out of them what really needs to get done or have them feel really engaged and being part of the process and making them look good at the same time.

So going over, sitting down and going over the things, one on one, they’re going well and the organization and looking at their objectives what they’re really trying to accomplish in the organization having them realize that to the extent.

And if they’re not really clear, maybe they’re not very visionary then you may very well had to say “Well, you know, is it what you really trying to accomplish this?  Have I got that wrong or am I right about that?  Is this the vision you have?  This is what I’ve understood from you.

And you might see there the lights come on and say “Yeah, that’s what I want to do”.  And then say “Well, boy I’ve got an idea and what do you think would be the benefit of accomplishing them?  What he is going to do for our whole organization, for our team?  What he is going to do for you and me?  And you get them talking about that and then perhaps you got an idea that will help move.

Now, you’ve got to buy in for the results and now come up with an idea, an action plan for moving toward that.

So that’s all I add.  Okay, anybody else what to add to that before we move on to next question.

See Luan: I’m See Luan Foo from Singapore and I can resonate with Shazad’s question.  First of all he refers to [0:10:26] that is true in the Asia pacific region too.  Secondly, it is quite common to focus on the differences between the subordinates and the boss, that’s very common but I think if we have to convince our bosses, we need to look at what other areas of commonalities first.

In other words, we have to build bridges between us and our bosses instead of erecting walls which separate us.  So once we can find areas of commonalities then I think our chances of convincing our bosses are much better.  We increase the odds of success in that way, thank you.

Ed: Alright, thank you.

That was the end of one of the questions and answers in the webinar.  My next post will contain another question and the answers.  I plan to publish this series of posts every two days.

You can find more leadership ideas at my web site:

www.makingmanagersintoleaders.com

Best Regards,

Ed Oakley