Blog on Leadership – LeadershipJot.com

You cannot convince everyone…

It is proverbially noted that leadership is influence. Many leaders and managers exert a significant amount of time and energy trying to convince every member of their team to support an initiative. Most of the time it is important to have everyone understand what the initiative is all about, but rarely is it critical for every member to fully “buy in” to the plan.

…but you can communicate so that everyone understands.

Communicating with the goal of everyone understanding – that is effective communication. Trying to persuade everyone – that is an act in futility; as William G. McAdoo put it, “It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument.” (Okay, so just because someone doesn’t agree with you, it doesn’t make them ignorant; despite what political pundits purport!) However, to effectively communicate with your team, focus on whether they understand first and foremost. Full understanding is the first step. Getting buy in” to the plan is secondary and is less likely to happen if it is not understood first.

One of the best principles that all leaders follow is that you can learn from anybody. When I was in the military, I worked for a Chief Warrant Officer, who told me that you learn from all types of authority – you either learn what to do or what not to do. You can learn what works and what doesn’t work. You can figure out what you like and you don’t like, but the key point is that you are observing and learning from other leaders and then applying what you learn in your own practice.

This is true on the small scale as well as one an international relations stage. Mikhail Gorbachev observed what Ronald Reagan used to describe the Soviet Union and used those descriptions to help push through reforms of Perestroika and Glasnost in the 1980s.

As much as the Western world may detest and deplore Osama bin Laden, if we want to succeed in the struggle with terrorism (which is more a struggle of the minds than a struggle of battlefields) we have to observe and learn from the terrorists as well. Osama bin Laden described his viewpoint of power by saying, “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.”

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has drafted and proposed a tax on the financial sector to fund future bailouts in the event of a future financial crisis. The proposal is titled, “A Fair and Substantial Contribution by the Financial Sector.” This makes sense. The IMF originated in the Bretton Woods agreements, which were drafted in the final year of World War II and implemented shortly after. The IMF and the predecessor to the World Bank were implemented for two main and substantial goals: 1. to recover from the most destructive war and the Great Depression, 2. to put practices in place that would prevent the causes of World War II and the Great Depression from repeating. Sounds like the kind of initiative that we need now! Let’s not wait until the problems get worse and the consequences are even more treacherous.

Some may cite the failure of the IMF to stave off the financial crisis, but this is short sighted since the failure rests on multiple shoulders in a complex basket of contributing factors. It is quite unfortunate that major multilateral initiatives (such as the proposal of the IMF) only get implemented after a painful and destructive disaster. But alas, such is the hard-headed nature of mankind – wait until a fork in the road to stop and think about the direction that one is heading.

Leadership lesson: don’t be so hard-headed. Leaders need to always think about the direction that they are headed and the direction that they are leading their organizations. You can’t wait until a problem arises, until your market share is diminishing, until your competitor comes out with a revolutionizing product, or until your core business is irrelevant. Leaders need to look around the corners and anticipate the future. This is a main difference between leadership and management: managers seek to continually improve what the business is doing; leaders seek to continually drive what the business is improving.