It is a challenge to motivate my own team to rise up to resistance in rejection.
“What I am proposing shall do the company good. Why are there such resistance?”
“Why is the approving authority rejecting my ideas when it was clearly spelt out that it will bring us more good?”
“I thought this is what the management think the best solution two months ago. I worked so hard to study the mechanism and its impact and now they have a change of heart?!”
“Why are the Support Functions making it hard for me to push this through? Didn’t they know that more red tapes will only delay the decision making hence more monies will leak from our pocket day by day?!?!”
“The whole Board is having Alzheimer! And they have no balls to make decision despite the high salary!”.
Yup. It is the hardest to motivate them to see that the roads are not always smooth and clear. Most of the time, they tend to take sit back and fold their arms and watch. Then a few months back they will come back and say ,
“See? If we made decision early this year, we won’t be caught in this situation!”.
“I worked for two months straight on the study of the impact but they rejected it right away on my face. I’m not working that hard anymore. I’m done!”
“Don’t ask me to study this again. It was rejected last year. There is no way I’m putting it back on the table. Don’t waste my time!”
I call these people the rebel. Once they are in, it is very difficult to get them out of the zone, hence the importance of motivating the team not to even reach the border of the rebel zone.
As a leader, I believe that all these frustrations come from the fact that human need recognition. Rejection is a total opposite of that, hence the frustration. Every business proposal that is rejected symbolizes the failure to achieve recognition.
Guess I am still learning on how to motivate my team to endure the pain of rejection. However, as a leader, I myself must endure the pain too. Instead of sitting back and folding my arms, I’d like to rework on my presentation of the ideas, injecting or deleting more numbers and figures. Sometimes, keeping them aside and waiting for the right moment seems like the best strategy, but that doesn’t work out that fine for a person who always like to get things done fast and his table cleared.
We must understand that the Board is responsible for all the business decisions especially when it comes to dollars and cents. To get the Board’s buy in, a fanstastic leader that I knew aka NIC is a master. He went to see the most influential and loudest man in the Board, get his ideas presented before the actual Board meeting.
But to get to NIC’s level, a lot more patience need to be fertilized into my brain. And that patience includes the pain of enduring rejection.
