How the skills you'll practise on this course will enable you to develop a more successful management style
Here's an example of someone who needed to change his management style. His approach to people was getting him into difficulties because it was having an effect on them that he didn't want it to have. He'd been labelled as having an autocratic management style, but he found the label perplexing, upsetting and unhelpful.
He was reacting defensively to complaints
He was a distribution manager in a manufacturing company. Like many people in his position, as a distribution manager was under fire from all sides. It wasn’t his fault – it went with the job. Anyone else in that job would have experienced similar pressure. He took the brunt of complaints from customers about late deliveries. Sales people blamed him when customers were unhappy. Production people blamed him when he told them they would have to alter their production schedules because of last minute changes demanded by customers.
Unfortunately some of these conversations became heated and there were a few complaints that he himself was difficult, defensive and annoying to deal with. That's why his management style was assessed and he was labelled as an autocrat. He was upset and confused by this because although he had to put up with a lot of abuse from all sorts of people he always did his best to respond to complaints in a calm, reasonable, practical and helpful manner.
A habit he needed to become aware of and change
His method of handling a complaint was to try to get straight down to the facts so that he could sort out the problem with a minimum of delay. He would urge the person complaining to calm down and stick to the facts. He tried to take no notice of the complainer's feelings because he believed they were a waste of time and would only make matters worse. Unfortunately the effect of this approach was often the opposite of the one he intended. His intention was to resolve the difficulty and give quick satisfaction by being practical, helpful and efficient, but his effect was often the opposite. His effect was to wind them up and make them feel even worse. He didn't understand what was happening.
His underlying mental habit - an assumption he'd held all his life
He grew up in a family that never talked about feelings. Their underlying belief was that feelings were uncomfortable, dangerous, better suppressed or ignored, and that expressing or talking about feelings only made them worse. This fear of allowing people to express feelings would be a challenging obstacle for him to overcome. It's not easy to turn and face something you've always run away from, particularly when you're not even aware that you're afraid of it.
How a new set of skills and a new approach helped him change the way he was perceived
First he needed to be helped to be aware of his fear of communicating about feelings. The underlying assumption that it's dangerous to allow people to express feelings needed to be challenged and replaced with the opposite idea - that the safest and fastest way to calm people down is to encourage them to let off steam.
His initial reaction to this idea was of amazement and disbelief. But in the safety and privacy of one-to-one coaching sessions he was encouraged to slow down and respond with empathy instead of trying to ignore people's feelings. Difficult though this was for him initially, he began to try it and the effect was dramatic. Instead of winding people up, his empathy seemed to calm them down, and to do it very quickly.
Admittedly, in the process of letting off team people were sometime initially aggressive, but the aggression soon blew over. By using empathy to calm people down he was able to have much calmer conversations with people and therefore be quicker to give them satisfaction by sorting out the problems they were complaining about. There were no more complaints at work that he was a difficult or autocratic kind of manager.
Sometime later he said that learning to show empathy and not be afraid to let people express feelings had helped him a great deal not only at work but as home as well. He said he wished he had learned it much earlier in life.
