This is a pity, because inside commercial organisations we could also do with a bit more diplomacy to help us get things done. When it comes to engaging in genuine communication and inspiring willing collaboration, we seem to have forgotten more than we have ever learned. That’s why most businesses experience repeated failures to implement many elements of their carefully crafted strategies.
Diplomacy has been characterised as being the art of letting someone else have your way. An exercise in subtle persuasion that may take time, but ends with the other party becoming aligned to your intention. Both emotionally and intellectually. That is hard to achieve, and we have made it harder for ourselves by using the language of management rather than leadership for many decades. To be fair, we thought we were doing the right thing. In business, processes need to be controlled. Tasks must be managed and responsibilities allocated. But none of these worthy imperatives inspires action. No wonder managers have been taught to follow up diligently. If colleagues aren’t aligned to the task they won’t contribute to it. That's why the word most used in progress or status meetings is ‘ongoing’.
Diplomacy begins with identifying your intention and then looking at it from the other person’s point of view. If you are able to do that, you are demonstrating empathy. The key is how to make your intention relevant to the other party, and that is better done by asking questions than giving orders. For example: ‘if we modernised our call centre, how would that make your job easier?’
Open questions (ones that cannot be answered with a yes, no or other static response) are good for opening up possibilities - like the possibility that an initiative will be worth the effort.
Diplomacy continues by building support, key person by key person until you have the groundswell of opinion necessary to start collaboration. We particularly need these kind of skills when collaboration is required between divisions or across different geographies. Here, a leader’s ability to empathise must stretch to encompass cultural tropes such as ‘HR never talks to Marketing’ or ‘Kenyans don’t respect Tanzanians.’
This takes time and effort but is far less arduous than the task of chasing people for action. As one of my client CEOs memorably put it: ‘Once again, I am the Chief Follow-Up Officer!’
Chris Harrison leads The Brand Inside
www.thebrandinsideafrica.com
