13: Managing clueless leaders

Wednesday, July 21, 2021

Today: What does being resolute have to do with executive presence? Find out how executive presence works and what it means for you.

Your turn: We'd love to hear from you. Use the "Message" button on the Anchor app to share a story, question, or feedback related to this episode. Or email us at joe@connectioncounselor.com

Learn more: Details about the book, online course, YouTube tutorials and more can be found at www.connectioncounselor.com/executive-presence-place

Music: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann is licensed under a CC0 1.0 Universal License

“Remember, it’s not what you say, do, or wear. It’s how you make people feel that generates executive presence. Nothing. Else. Matters.”

Wow. Dealing with clueless leaders. Jeff, why do you give me all the easy questions? Well, one thing that I love about getting these questions is it really forces me to sort of stretch my thinking on the topic of executive presence and leadership. So I'm really appreciative to you, Jeff, for presenting that question, and that's why I recorded this episode specifically to answer that question. So thanks again, Jeff.

So the setup is what do you do when you're in situations where your leaders, for lack of a better term are clueless, and don't really seem to know what they're doing, but obviously there's a challenge because you don't control them. They're the leaders. You can't tell them what to do.

Managing upward is a lot of the way, you know, people talk about it in corporate America. How do you effectively manage upward? And how does executive presence help you do that? It's a fantastic question.

The key is you have little to no control over your leaders, right? Everyone understands that they're the leaders they're going to do what they want to do and you have little or no control over them. So trying to exert control over them or use a control-type technique generally is doomed to failure.

Now, another nuance is we often think of leaders as parents, but in this instance, I find the metaphor of a child works better. Not a child to belittle them or make it seem like we have power over them, but more in the sense that as a parent, have you ever tried to control your child? When they reach a certain age, “no” becomes a very powerful word for them and then as they get older and older, they just amass more and more independence and you really have no real control over your child.

So I find that to be more of an effective metaphor, to think about dealing with someone you have no control over, which is really everyone, but let's limit it to our bosses or management at this point. So I'm going to share three principles or tips that you can use that will maximize your executive presence while also allowing you to manage upward with someone that you have absolutely no control over.

The first tip is to activate their imagination. Sometimes their failure to see or understand is not one of technical ability or strategy, but it's just an act, it's just for them to really understand what's possible. And one of the most powerful ways to influence someone is to, by the way you interact with them and the things that you sort of direct them to see, activate their imagination as to what is possible and to see things in a new way, because one of the reasons why they're not seeing things the way you see them, perhaps more clearly, is their imagination may be limited and they just have not even fathomed that that's possible before.

So in the way that using imagination can really help with children, activating the imagination of your leaders can really help them see additional possibilities.

A second principle, or tip - present them with positive role models that they can learn from. Don't teach them. Cause we all know what happens when you try to teach a child or a boss something - that doesn't end up well. But instead present them, maneuver, shift their gaze, mention, bring them into the orbit of positive role models who really do seem to get some of the things that they don't get and let them learn naturally for them.

It's not to be sneaky. It's not to be manipulative, but again, it's for them to be able to be influenced and learn in a natural way, in a way that they want to, rather than you forcing them or taking the role of teacher, which we know will probably end in disaster. If not now, then later. They'll get you on the tail end.

And finally, the third principle or tip is, and I give credit to Chris Voss, who I sort of recognized this concept of when I was reading his excellent book, "Never Split the Difference." to ask questions. But not just any kind of questions. He calls them calibrated questions. They're questions with the intention of sort of moving things in a certain direction.

So questions like, "how can we do that?" If they're suggesting something that's totally ridiculous, saying, "Hey boss, that's totally ridiculous," again - not going to end well. However, if you ask, "how can we do that?" it prompts them to really think through it more. And even if they say something like we're just going to do it, they will understand and they will realize in the back of their minds that that's not really adequate. And they may come around later and think about, yeah, maybe there are some problems here and then come to you and say, okay, how can we do that? How can we fix that?

Or another option if you're being asked to do something which is totally ridiculous or contradicts something that you were asked to do earlier, a similar calibrated question is "how am I supposed to do that?"

Right? You're asked to do 80 hours of work in 40 hours of time. You can say, look, I have both of these things. You know, each of them takes 40 hours. You know, each of them takes 40 hours of work for 80 total hours of work. I'm only going to be here for 40 hours. That's not going to change. How am I supposed to do that? And then that gets them thinking about, okay, this is a problem - offload some of this reprioritize that, and then together you can get to a solution.

So these three tips: activating their imagination, presenting them with positive role models that they can naturally learn from, and finally asking calibrated questions, can really be powerful ways for you to stretch and flex your executive presence, muscles, which is really hard when you're dealing with management.

But I believe what has the biggest payoff and the biggest acknowledgement because not many people are actually comfortable or effective doing this sort of upwards management. So, thanks again, Jeff, for that excellent question. Hope some or all of this is helpful to you or to your clients. Thanks so much for listening to Executive Presence Morsels. This is Joe Kwon, the Connection Counselor. Remember, it's not what you say, do, or wear, it's how you make people feel that generates executive presence. Nothing else matters.