In my new role I’m starting to take over regular operational meetings from my boss. Many of these involve dealing with very senior managers, and of course they are mostly a lot older than me, which is always a challenge. In addition my boss’s management style is far more authoritarian than mine. I prefer to counsel ideas and then make best decision based on available information, hence getting people to do what I need them t do because they understand that it’s the logical thing to do. However my boss isn’t quite so searching for information and makes decisions quickly and expects people to follow his instructions.
So this meeting in particular, a high level financial review, started well, however I soon found myself working hard to prevent the session descending in to a bun fight. I managed to keep the meeting on course until a point where I had to leave it to the accountant because I had another meeting. Later the accountant recounted that the remainder of the meeting had been quite uncomfortable, and he likened it to when a class used to being managed by a very strict teacher had a substitute because the strict teacher was ill. All that was missing was paper aeroplanes and feet up on the table.
And yet these guys are all very senior and well respected managers, so it seems to me that this change in personnel is allowing them to vent some of the frustration that they didn’t and don’t feel comfortable with venting previously. The temptation for me is to react in future meetings with a harder style, and yet that isn’t the way I believe things should be done, so it’s interesting, it seems that these people are used to behaving in a certain way, and when the previously experienced force isn’t exerting, balance is restored by them acting like schoolchildren, resulting in me needing to behave like my boss, hence returning the status quo and allowing those frustrations to once again bubble under the surface. My challenge is hence one of staying true to the way I want to manage things long enough so that they begin to be more open and accepting of the new style, and eventually we start to see high performing, productive meetings.
And I guess I’ll be able to measure progress by how many paper aeroplanes I find on the floor after each meeting.
