Chapter 3. Gaining Credibility
As a rebel, you need to gain as much credibility as possible so that people will listen to you. In fact, you want so much credibility that people look forward to hearing your ideas (at least once, anyway).
For that to happen, you’ll need to work on three things:
- Your relationship with your boss
- Understanding management concerns
- Your relationships with others
- Finding your rebel alliance
- Your own growth
- Increasing your trustworthiness
Understanding Your Boss
It’s almost impossible for rebels to gain credibility and trust if we don’t understand how our bosses and managers think, what motivates them, and what concerns them. What would they like to be able to achieve? What obstacles do they face? What are they afraid of?
What Worries Your Boss?
Some bosses, entrenched in positions of authority, are suspicious of new ideas because those ideas might undermine their authority or, worse, diminish their relevance. For leaders in this situation, any kind of change proposal is immediately suspect. They are not thinking about whether the idea is good or bad. Their frame of reference centers on themselves. How will this idea affect my job, my status? Will I become less important with this change? Might I even become unnecessary?
Most bosses, however, want their colleagues and departments to be respected, grow in responsibility and resources, and thrive harmoniously.
While they may worry about the risks of change on a personal level (“What will happen to my reputation if we take a chance on this new idea and it fails?”), their real concerns tend to relate to risk and uncertainty, concepts that are all too easily confused.
Risk means you have some knowledge of what could go wrong. There are known factors to research and assess. The less complex the issue, the easier it is to understand the risks.
Uncertainty means what might happen is unknowable; you haven’t done this before and don’t know how it might turn out. The more innovative an approach, the more uncertainty there is likely to be.
One way to gain credibility with your boss and allay her fears is to separate risk from uncertainty:
- Be open about risks connected with your idea and describe how you plan to research and manage them.
- Be forthright about what is uncertain and unknowable, and what can be put in place to quickly respond and adapt as your idea is rolled out, thereby mitigating emerging risks.
What other worries might your boss have? Table 3-1 highlights some of the most common with suggestions for how to minimize them.
| Boss’s worry | Rebel strategy |
Worried about not having all the answers; wants to avoid criticism | Stay out of drama. Focus on the desired outcome, not the problem or its origins. Show how your idea supports management’s agenda and objectives and makes your boss look smart. Help your boss present the idea to her boss. |
Wants to avoid risk | Be sure you understand which risks most concern your boss. Talking about her concerns will help you be more effective and gain credibility. Determine whether your boss is confusing risk with uncertainty. |
Wasting time and resources on something that might not work | Find data and research to support your proposal, even if it is anecdotal. Be clear about the challenges, which shows you’ve thought through the realities of making the idea work. Suggest an experiment to learn and test, with finite timeframes and metrics to gauge results. |
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Credible people treat one another with respect. While television shows like “The Office” depict the hilarity and sick pleasure of making fun of bosses, in real life, no good comes from doing so. We offer these suggestions:
- Don’t mock your boss.
- Whatever you do, don’t criticize your boss for being cowardly or too concerned about her own job security, because after all, that’s only human. The fact that you both want job security may even be a good way to develop a common understanding. Neither of you wants to hurt your career. If you can establish that as a given, perhaps your boss can begin evaluating your ideas on their merit.
Warning
It bears repeating: never mock your bosses or talk negatively about them. It will always find its way back.
- Don’t go over your boss’s head.
- This can seem like the only option if your boss is recalcitrant, particularly if she forbids you to discuss your ideas any further. Going over your boss’s head is like trying to draw to an inside straight in poker: the chances that it will turn out well are very slim and, when it doesn’t work, you end up with the worst cards at the table. Once a rebel shows one member of a management team that he can’t be trusted, he has almost certainly tarnished his reputation with every other boss in the organization. If you decide to do this anyway and it turns out badly, apologize sincerely and profusely. It’s your only hope.
- Don’t worry about your boss stealing your idea.
We often hear rebels complain that management took their ideas and didn’t give them enough credit. Our take? When a manager likes a rebel’s idea enough to steal it, that’s a rebel win. As rebels, we often have to swallow our pride and savor the internal satisfaction that comes from knowing that we planted the seed.
Note
Rebel win. When a manager likes a rebel’s idea enough to steal it.
If it’s any consolation, know that as a rebel you are likely to have new ideas, spot emerging trends, or figure out problems unimaginable today. Our creativity and vision form the pattern of our lives. They are a renewable resource we can depend on. Our creativity is our safety net.
Listen Closely to Pick Up Important Signals
Sometimes we lose credibility by continuing to push ideas our bosses don’t care about. We keep talking, thinking we’re educating our bosses while they just wish we would shut up. They can’t believe that we’re not astute enough to realize that they don’t like what we’re proposing.
By listening intently for clues about what bosses think about our ideas, we can ask questions, uncover their objections, and respond to them. Listening is the only way to get below the surface and find out what is really going on.
To gauge your boss’s interest, listen to her language choices. Over the years, we’ve decoded some signals that tell us what executives really think (see Table 3-2; Table 3-3 gives free rein to our rebel fantasies).
| What the manager says | What the manager really means |
Does Jack know about this? | I want to be the one to present the idea to him because it’s so damn good. Alternatively: this scares the hell out of me and I want to make sure Jack never hears about this. |
I’ll take this under advisement. | You’re dismissed. If I approved this, I’d look like an ass. |
Help me understand what you’re suggesting. | This doesn’t make any sense to me. |
We need to get better aligned. | I want to see more compliance. |
Have you talked with anyone in Legal? | This is risky on so many levels. |
We have to keep the big picture in mind. | I don’t see how this supports our goals. |
Do you have industry best practices around this? What are our competitors doing? | This makes me nervous. (But if a competitor is on it, I may pay attention.) |
I’m not sure your colleagues will like this. | I don’t want to have to deal with dissent or disagreement in the organization. |
Let’s bring some people from other organizations into this. | Let’s spread the risk. No way am I supporting this on my own. |
I need to see more details on exactly how this would work. | I’m not convinced. |
Let me be honest with you… | This scares the crap out of me. |
I appreciate all the work and thought you’ve put into this. | Forget about it. |
| What the manager says | What the manager really means |
How fast could we get this done? | I love it. It’s a slam dunk. |
What else do you have on your plate? | I want you to be able to work on this and nothing else. |
I’m going to review the department budgets this afternoon. | I’m going to move things around to make sure this gets funded. |
Caroline, a product manager at an insurance company, was getting on her boss’s nerves. Caroline knew that if a customer service rep got a potential customer to start an application for insurance, the customer was much more likely to buy a policy. Her idea: enter customer service reps in a sweepstakes every time they started a new customer application. She knew that the more applications that were started, the more revenues would increase. Caroline explained the financial expectations to her boss and her boss’s boss, yet the idea stalled. When she stopped trying to sell her idea and dug into why it met with resistance, she found the problem.
Company policy said that customer service reps could not receive financial incentives for selling insurance. The company wanted to make sure that customer service reps were looking after the customer’s needs, not selling policies for their own gain. With this knowledge, Caroline recast her idea. The sweepstakes rewarded reps only for opening and starting an application, not for selling policies. With that clarification, management approved the program, with great results.
Ask direct questions to find out what’s going on. Saying, “I sense that this idea isn’t a priority for you. What could I do to make it one?” can start a productive conversation.
Build a Rebel Alliance
You can’t bring change alone. Nor do you want to.
The more we collaborate and learn from other people, the stronger our ideas will become. Chances are slim that any one person can identify the solution for a problem bedeviling a complex organization. Sharing ideas and inviting new ideas from others adds strength to your proposal. Listen carefully to what others say. If your ideas aren’t convincing your colleagues, chances are slim that management will find them persuasive.
Further, the benefits of moral support are huge. We often underestimate how psychologically, emotionally, and physically taxing it can be to challenge the status quo. Our friends and colleagues not only increase our credibility; they give us strength, perspective, and sanity when we need it most.
An added bonus is that management takes us more seriously when we are plural, not singular. This seems obvious, yet sometimes organizing a group of like-minded people, from different areas of the organization, seems like too much work, and we try to go it alone.
So just how do you build a rebel alliance? There are many possibilities, from the informal to the more organized. Some ideas to consider:
- Invite interesting people, from inside and outside the organization, to have lunch on a regular basis to talk about your ideas and get their views.
- Set a regular time for a group of like-minded coworkers to discuss the topic. Maybe it’s lunch together every Wednesday, a 30-minute conference call or Google Hangout on Friday afternoons, a weekly tweet chat, or Thursday night pizza and beer.
- Set up a community on your intranet or a private Facebook page where people can share ideas.
- Tweet and blog about your ideas, and follow people with similar interests to learn from them.
- Find and join an existing alliance, such as a LinkedIn group, a local chamber of commerce, or a professional association.
Be open-minded when recruiting people for your rebel alliance. I wouldn’t have thought of “Grace” as an ally initially. Grace was strongly aligned with the organization, what many people would call a bureaucrat. Such folks aren’t normally part of the rebel alliance. But Grace had mastered a particular set of skills—declassification and document handling—and had no other professional ambitions. Too interested in my ideas about moving to the digital age, I didn’t pay attention to Grace’s advice at first. In fact, I assumed that Grace wouldn’t understand my vision and would insist that things be done as they always had been.
I was wrong about Grace. She saw a great opportunity in the transition to the digital age. It gave her a chance to apply her knowledge and skills to an entirely new set of puzzles and she relished the idea. Grace became a great ally and not only came up with new ideas, but also warned me when an idea was problematic. This is an example of the benefits rebels can gain by casting their search for allies more broadly. In the case of Grace, she helped by alerting me to legitimate lines that could not be crossed.
Increasing Our Trustworthiness
Trustworthiness speaks to our character, but it is built through specific behaviors. Acting in a way that engenders trust is essential to being taken seriously at work, especially for rebels, whom some bosses don’t see as team players.
Being trustworthy is not just important in the context of rebel ideas; it should motivate everything we do. We must be productive colleagues who can be counted on to honor our responsibilities. Too often we have observed rebels who forget they are at work and have a job to do. Nothing undercuts a rebel more quickly than letting her colleagues down.
Warning
We’ve encountered rebels who think that being a productive employee betrays their principles. They believe the organization is broken and any work on its behalf is wrong. We can’t judge whether their view of the organization is correct, but it is counterproductive. If your dissatisfaction with your employer is so profound that you don’t want to do any real work at all, then leave.
At its very core, building trust comes down to:
- Doing what you say you’re going to do, whether that’s achieving the sales forecast or completing projects on time.
- Being genuinely committed to helping your organization succeed.
- Helping others without expecting anything in return.
- Admitting mistakes and providing early warnings when you see that things are unlikely to go as planned.
- Not gossiping or saying hurtful things.
- Being respectful of others: getting to meetings on time, meeting deadlines, not exceeding the time allotted for you on the agenda, answering time-sensitive email promptly.
Dr. Linda Stroh has conducted extensive research on trust. She identifies 20 behaviors and characteristics that predict trustworthiness. Complete the self-questionnaire based on her work in Figure 3-1. What did you learn about yourself? Are there areas you could improve? In her book Trust Rules: How to Tell the Good Guys from the Bad Guys at Work, Dr. Stroh explains that the more people trust us, the more they let us experiment, take on projects that they might not entrust others with, and support us with senior management.
Questions to Ponder
- What’s most important to your boss? What is she afraid of? What does she need to make decisions? What annoys her?
- What phrases signal that your boss doesn’t care about an idea? How can reading these signals help you decide on the next step?
- Do you ask questions to clarify issues and have productive conversations? Is there someone at work you should be more direct with?
- Who are your greatest allies? Whom would you like to have as an ally? What is the next step in developing that relationship?
- What is the best way to create a rebel alliance around your interest areas?
- How trustworthy are you? Do you see areas for growth in trustworthiness?
