Leadership through Eyes of a Coach...Alan Booth

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

ARE YOU AWARE OF YOUR BLIND SPOT?


"I know this might be a bit sensitive: Your team has observed a blind spot that is impacting the effectiveness of your leadership and causing lack of trust with your team.

I need to say this to many of my executive clients; people who are very confident but typically ignore feedback or do not seek it out.

 
Case in Point

Carol and Melissa are co-owners of a very successful and growing business. Melissa wants more money out the partnership being scared about her retirement savings.

Melissa is relentless and angry in finding ways to make more money at the firm.  No one wants to work for her. She angrily pushes to either fire their sales executive or reduce his compensation. With anger she is weak in negotiating!

As the friction increased I was brought in to cause "sanity" in this partnership by working with Melissa. We had a series of partner meetings so I could observe the dynamic.

But the solution was Carol's blind spot: never reacting or negotiating with Melissa enabled greater friction, volume and angry tones.  When she realized she was enabling Melissa's behavior this way, she found her voice and caused a much better relationship to occur and was successful in convincing Melissa of her only two options: either [1] be more collaborative or [2] have her partnership bought out.

Lesson: in dealing with conflict, first look at yourself as an enabler!

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