Managing subordinates is an extremely challenging task. To thrive as a boss and make subordinates deliver the desired results, you must invest in persuasive strategies. The following book extract from “The Persuasive Manager: Communication Strategies for 21st Century Managers” by M M Monippally assesses the strengths of a boss that can be used persuasively to make subordinates work in a desirable manner. It is third in the four-part series of extracts from IIM Ahmedabad Business Books.
As a boss, the minimum asset you have is authority over your subordinates. You may possess other assets that include greater knowledge and experience than your subordinates and soft power. Let us look at each of them.
Authority
Whatever rung in the hierarchy you perch on, you hold power delegated to you by your organisation. The range of power you wield depends on the position you occupy.
If you are the CEO, for example, you have power delegated to you by the board, which ultimately derives its power from the shareholders who own the company. Because you are at the apex of the pyramid, you have direct power over your reportees such as vice-presidents and general managers, and indirect power over everyone else in the organisation. The whole organisation recognises this equation.
If you are an assistant manager, you have the same power delegated to you, but it is severely limited and diluted. You may be able to exercise it only on a few support staff. If a subordinate ignores it, there is little you can do other than an appeal to a higher authority.
In all cultures, people defer to authority. Right from childhood we are trained to comply with requests from people who hold authority. Initially, the authority figures are parents and other adults in the family. Later, the set expands to include teachers, doctors, priests, traffic police, and so on. We learn to comply with the wishes of all these adults. They use rewards and punishments to ensure obedience.
The rewards offered by parents may be words of praise, food, gifts, or permissions. Parental punishments include scolding, inflicting physical pain, delaying food, and withholding privileges such as watching TV. Research shows that rewards are generally more powerful than punishments for ensuring compliance.
The colour and shape of rewards and punishments change as we grow older and move into the bigger world, but they always accompany legitimate authority and strengthen its compliance power. Like the Pavlovian dogs that salivate at the ring of a bell even after the food is withdrawn, we continue to submit to authority even when rewards and punishments are not projected prominently along with compliance requests.
One of the dimensions of the power derived from the position you occupy is your access to even more powerful people in the hierarchy compared to your subordinates. At higher levels in the organisation, your position may give you access to powerful people in other organisations including the government. Such connections and the implied influence (ability to put in a word in favour of or against someone) also enhance your ability to get compliance from your subordinates. The simple reason is that this extends your ability to give out rewards and punishments in an indirect way.
This universal respect for authority is an important strength you have when you are a boss. When you ask your subordinates to do something that is legitimate, part of the contract, part of the tradition, and so on, you can generally expect compliance even when you have nothing other than your positional authority to base it upon. Your subordinates will not hold out unless they have an excellent reason why they need not comply.
The respect for authority is such that people listen to you and follow you if you speak authoritatively and decisively even when you have no authority. Assume, for example, that you are a motorist involved in a traffic jam. Everyone waits in their cars hoping that the traffic police will come to their rescue and somehow clear the jam. As the jam gets worse, if you get out of your car and direct the traffic confidently, the other motorists will meekly follow your directions.
Superior competence, experience
If you are a standard boss in a typical organisation, you are likely to be older, more experienced, more management savvy, or more knowledgeable than your subordinates. It is rare that a boss is superior to all his subordinates in all areas. Because of the explosion of knowledge and universal accessibility to it, even bosses who start out with an edge over subordinates in technical knowledge may lose it quickly. This is well understood. You may be a young college dropout, but you may be able to have people more experienced, more managerially competent, and more knowledgeable than you as your willing subordinates if you have a brilliant idea, as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have demonstrated.
Similarly, if you have a few million dollars to invest, you may be able to hire people who are older, more experienced, more competent, and more knowledgeable than you. The idea is that there is at least one aspect in which you are superior to your subordinates. This superiority generates in them some respect for you, which in turn gives you power over them. You may be able to get their compliance because of this power.
Among all these attributes, managerial savviness is the most prized because it is the rarest. An MBA degree from the world’s best business school doesn’t give it to you any more than training in versification makes you a Kalidasa or Kipling.
Irrespective of the level of your education and experience, you will be able to climb the corporate ladder quickly only if you are known to manage people in a way that you get the best out of them. Or, you can create and develop an organisation of your own as Dhirubhai Ambani did with the Reliance empire. It is well known that he started out with very little formal education and even less money. But he had a rare talent for spotting opportunities and taking bold risks.
He also knew how to get the best out of a wide array of people: Employees, customers, shareholders, journalists, government officials, and regulatory bodies. It is not surprising that he was widely admired as an entrepreneur and feared as a competitor although he had his share of detractors.
Moral superiority
In a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887, British historian Lord Acton stated, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” History confirms this insight. Few people ever get absolute power. Even with limited power people can become corrupt. They become overly self-centred and promote their own interests at the expense of others.
In other words, they become blatantly unfair to others as they focus their efforts narrowly on serving themselves and abuse the power delegated to them. Besides being competent, if you are scrupulously fair, credible, and trustworthy — a person of moral character, in Aristotle’s words — and if you lead by example, you will enjoy enviable soft power over your subordinates. They will look up to you, and will be positively disposed towards complying with your requests.
Here, we are referring really to referent power. This moral authority is something you have to build up on your own; no one can delegate it to you. As you try to build it, you will discover that credibility and trustworthiness are extremely difficult to develop and time-consuming. You may face some opposition from your own bosses who may not like your uprightness. They may find your firm commitment to certain values uncomfortable, but they are bound to respect it.
The fact that your bosses respect you helps your subordinates appreciate and accept your moral authority. If, however, your moral superiority is not accompanied by managerial competence, you may be treated as a well-meaning fool and your requests may not carry any persuasive power.
THE PERSUASIVE MANAGER: COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES FOR 21ST CENTURY MANAGERS
INDIAN INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT AHMEDABAD BUSINESS BOOKS
Author: MM Monippally
Publisher: Random House India
Price: Rs 299
Reprinted with permission
Next week: Business and Intellectual Property: Protect your Ideas by Anurag K Agarwal
| A GENTLE RAP In 1996, I was Assistant Administrative Officer at the LIC (Life Insurance Corporation of India) branch at Bareilly. I used to get to work every day by 9:45 am. One day I started earlier than usual from home because I needed to go to a cooking gas agency’s office on my way to work. For some reason that office was closed. So I went straight to my branch and reached by 9:30 am. |
As I entered my floor, I saw a stranger cleaning and dusting. I asked him why he was doing it. He said that Ashok Johri asked him to do it. On being questioned further, he said that Ashok paid him '25 a month for cleaning and dusting, and that Ashok had promised to give him more floors to clean for additional cash. I was surprised because Ashok was the employee who was supposed to do this job as well as provide all the officers with drinking water. I didn’t say anything to the stranger.
About ten minutes later Ashok came in. By then the stranger had disappeared. Ashok saw me sitting in my office. He was a little surprised but he went on with his work, and brought me water. I asked him to meet me at 5 pm, that is, immediately after the office closed. He was puzzled. He asked me if there was anything the matter. I said no.
By 5 pm everyone had left the office apart from Ashok and me. I said I needed his advice. He thought I was joking. He asked, nervously, “Who am I to give you advice?” “You are the right person,” I said, and continued: “I don’t want to come to work from tomorrow. I would like to hire someone who will do my job for me. I will show him how to sign my cheques and do the other work I generally do. I’ll pay him '500 or 600 per month. Meanwhile I can save my salary and do some other business that brings me additional cash. What do you think of this plan?”
“That’s not possible, Sir,” said Ashok. “No one else can come in and work in your place, Sir.”
“But I saw a stranger doing your job here this morning.”
First he said he didn’t know anyone coming in to do his job. But later he admitted that he had sub-contracted the job to a man so that he could do a lucrative job elsewhere. He apologised, and promised never to give me any cause for criticism. I said to him that I would forget about all this. I also added that if he did a good job, the Corporation would promote him in due course to the position of a clerk.
To my surprise and relief Ashok started doing his work conscientiously. Fortunately, the Corporation promoted him the following year. He was delighted. A few years later, when he retired, he narrated this incident in his farewell speech. He also thanked me for showing him the right path.
Source: As narrated by T R Misra, Faculty Member, LIC of India
