Protecting Your People

In the standard workplace, one of the basic responsibilities of leaders is to put themselves between their followers and upper managers who are abusive or unreasonable.

This can be a challenge since the upper managers who are most likely to cause problems are also the least likely to be responsive to common courtesy and common sense. The unpleasant nature of those characters, however, does not reduce - indeed it increases - the leader's obligation to shield followers.

Some strategies to consider are:

Increase the information flow. If the interrupter is a micromanager, the disruption may come from a desire for information and an assurance that things are getting done. A short status report in the morning and late afternoon may placate those concerns and reduce the tendency to interfere.

Have a direct talk. Tell the upper manager that you want him or her to deal with you directly if a matter or person needs to be corrected. If you are going to be out of the office for several days, designate your temporary replacement as the contact point. Stress the importance that you place on your being the person to correct matters and how going around you reduces your authority.

Distinguish between the event and the reaction. Train your employees in how to deal with difficult people, be they customers or upper management. Note that while they may not be able to control the event (the unpleasant behavior), they can control their reaction so their behavior is always thoroughly professional.

Post and advertise your values. Make "Respect" one of the key values. Let upper management know that you are stressing that with your employees and that it will help if the upper managers exemplify that value.

Will these approaches be fool/jerk-proof? No way. But they can mitigate the effect of unpleasant people while showing your associates that you are not indifferent to their treatment. If the behavior goes above garden variety obnoxiousness, you should seek redress further up the chain of command. There may be a risk in doing so, but that's why you're a leader.

Leaders take risks to protect their people.

Leadership Essential: Credibility

If I were to pick the one characteristic that is essential to leadership it would be credibility.

Credibility can rest on the actual ability to lead, the perceived ability to lead, and the integrity that causes others to place their trust in the leader. The integrity involves a certain reliability that permits the followers to know that the leader will, within reasonable boundaries, be predictable. A leader who is frequently unpredictable will soon lose followers and resemble the man who jumped on a horse and rode off in all directions.

A major reason why so many executives, managers, and supervisors fail in their leadership responsibilities is they have, in either a dramatic event or a series of damaging actions, lost credibility. How is credibility lost? The ways are too numerous to list but the usual suspects are insensitivity to others, failing to keep commitments, and failing to produce. One trucking executive put it well: "People don't give you their trust; they only lend it to you."