Your Castle, Your Rules

Who’s in charge here?

A client reached out to me the other day. He’s the COO of a busy firm.

His text read: “I’m stuck. We need to talk urgently.”  I called right away. He was at the end of his rope and could hardly get the words out fast enough.

“I can’t do this anymore. My employees are manipulative. When I ask them to deliver in a timely manner, they ask for a salary increase. When I discipline them about being late, they threaten to leave permanently. I don’t have replacement workers. The work is piling up. My clients are considering leaving me to go to the competition.  I feel like I am being held hostage by my employees.  What do I do?”

I took a deep breath before replying: “Charlie, remind me again, who is the employer?

He didn’t miss a beat. “Of course, I am. But my employees don’t seem to care.”

“Tell me, Charlie, when was the last time you asserted yourself as a real leader in a meeting with your staff?”

I am not talking about disciplinary meetings one-on-one with glasses perched on your nose. Here’s what I mean:

• Group meetings where you really engage with your staff, a motivational meeting where you give positive feedback on individual and group performance.
• Meetings where you include the staff in the company mission and share the firm’s achievements and help them understand how they align with the long-term goals.
• Informal interactions where you notice, comment and reward outstanding achievements.

If you’d been leading and demonstrating managerial and executive power all along, the lines wouldn’t have blurred in the first place.

Charlie admitted that he couldn’t recall doing any of these.

As a leadership consultant and executive coach, I see these role reversals happen when the boss doesn’t set the parameters of the workplace. If the manager does not assert power, the employees will step into the power vacuum.  That’s what happened in Charlies’s case.

Your business is YOUR castle and you make the rules.  But if you don’t communicate and assert your executive power, you risk ending up like Charlie, being held hostage by uncooperative employees.

Goldy Blum

Activize Consulting