Every business leader has heard this disturbing statement at least a few times when having a “hard 
conversation” with a direct report:
“I feel that you micromanage me because you don’t trust me or believe in my abilities.”
Depending on your leadership style, you can either acquiesce and give in to whatever the employee is saying or asking for, or you put your “hard-ass hat” on and in some fashion, tell the employee “Yes, you are correct, I don’t trust you or your decision making.”
In either scenario, you as the business leader lose in the short term and most likely you have lost as the business leader in the long term by having disengaged employees who are not very productive.
In this blog post, I present a solution to this leadership challenge; FACTS. Business facts. More specifically, valid business facts that are driven by genuine business acumen skills and knowledge.
One of the largest gaps in leadership performance is being unaware of how your leadership style feels to your direct reports. The notion of “holding people accountable” often is confused by micromanaging situations and not trusting people to do their jobs. Developing a culture that includes facts and data can be critical to leadership success. Having the business acumen skills to substantiate and validate the data is even more critical.
Based on our experiences designing, developing, and delivering business leadership skill development engagements utilizing business acumen, here is a recommended technique for closing this leadership gap: Train your team to look at the business data and facts and present them to you in a way that makes business sense and supports business decisions. Doing this creates an environment where facts become your friends.
Business Acumen lessons to teach your team:
“Tell me how this supports our value proposition to your customers”
Train your team to present you with a story of how an investment, decision, or approach supports your company’s value proposition to your customers. In other words, give me the facts on how this is going to help us execute our strategy. Pushing this thinking forces your employees to think about customers and more importantly about how what they are doing aligns with the strategy. It makes managing the team easier and perhaps even removes the need to approve a decision. At the very least, this simple step can remove seeds of doubt about trust.
“Give me the ROI analysis”
Train your team to present you with the Return on Investment (ROI) of their decision. In other words, help them figure out the benefits received divided by the costs expended to get those benefits. Here is a simple example of a common ROI conversation:
Employee: “Our people are overworked, we need to hire more programmers.”
This is the classic set up for conflict as the employees feel overworked and you feel that they may be complaining or their requests are groundless.
Here is another version:
I did an analysis of our utilization, and based on industry standards we are at 118% of our programming capacity. If we hire one more part-time programmer, we can increase our revenues by 2% and reduce our costs by 3 %. What do you think?
“How is this going to create better team alignment?”
Executing strategy to deliver the value proposition and ROI analysis isn’t everything; there is a third benefit and that is helping to support a high performing team. By asking your team to provide facts in terms of team productivity and overall alignment, it can be very beneficial to ask for facts in terms of long-term productivity.
In summary, this is a very simple technique that could have significant benefits. The secret to success is making sure that your organization and your team has the right business acumen skills to present the facts from a business perspective.
