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Additional Resources:

How to exercise genuine power like a Leader

Big Brother Cat’s Style of Management

5 Boss Personality Types every Professional needs to manage for peace of Mind

How to Manage a Micro-Manager with Grace and Ease

Conflict Resolution requires you know how to handle strong emotions

Having Tough Conversations Tips Report

Level Up Your Leadership

Influential Leader Crash Course for Professionals

The Complete Leadership Toolkit

Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript

Last month we focused on 3 major leadership challenges for 2024 and beyond. That doesn’t mean there aren’t other challenges at a micro level that need to be addressed.

While I wouldn’t call them evergreen challenges, there are some that you as a leader will face in your career from time to time.

Successful outcomes and resolution of these challenges require the application of emotional intelligence and strong social intelligence.

Your ability to handle the situation with tact and take your team along with you will mark the difference between being a good boss and a great leader.

Hi, I’m Vatsala Shukla from Karmic Ally Coaching sharing a powerful leadership skill you need to develop to reduce dissent and disobedience.

Unless you’re a low-key despot, chances are that you don’t enjoy telling others what to do or reprimanding them. You probably don’t like being called out yourself and you might even question your right to tell anyone else what they’re doing wrong.

Kudos to you if you feel that way! You have what it takes to be a good leader!

I’m willing to bet you’ve already mastered the leadership skill we’re discussing today.

What raises a concern however are the power-mad despots that make for terrible leaders and who eventually tend to come unglued.

The manager in my post on big brother cat certainly flexed his muscles using his position as his power base. He created a working atmosphere that wasn’t good for creativity or productivity.

While it’s not a good thing to take pleasure in enforcing your will, it’s also not useful to bury your head and pretend that everyone can just get along nicely.

That’s not how the world works, unfortunately.

I once worked for this kind of cushion boss who would have done his team a greater service if he had used his position to create dialogue between team members with differences.

Instead, he made each party feel they were right and the situation would simmer to a boil at a later point of time.

The truth of the matter is that power invites challenge.

When you are placed in a position of authority, others will be naturally encouraged to challenge that authority.

Years ago, on my first day as a manager in a new job, the Partner told me during the initial briefing that I’d need to establish authority and boundaries from the word go.

Even though I was in a management position, the team had been there longer and would test my limits and reactions. Establishing rapport and being seen as a leader worth following were non-negotiable.

During my first few interactions with the team, I got a grip of what he had meant but I was fortunate that they gave me a fair chance.

It helped that I was sent on a training course with them, and we got a chance to get to know each other in a setting removed from the office and developed mutual respect.

Of course, there were times when there was dissent and a spot of disobedience which was overcome using a specific leadership skill that works well in the political arena and even in the workplace.

As a leader you need to be clear about how you will lead the team during challenging situations.

And that means that:

• Sometimes, you’re going to have to make difficult decisions.
• Sometimes, you’ll have to have difficult conversations.
• Sometimes, you’ll need to discipline your team.

Key leadership skills in this case include but are not limited to your ability to

• control your emotions,
• have difficult conversations without either party turning defensive and
• diffuse conflict before things turn ugly.

These are valuable skills.

One skill you’ll need to learn and use is how to discipline your team.

How NOT to Handle Discipline

The worst thing you can do when it comes to disciplining your team members is to shout or to lose control or your cool.

This is a bad move for several reasons:

• It makes you look like you’ve lost control.
• It invites further challenge.
• It makes you seem easily manipulated by others.

The other key to remember is that being a boss, or a leader does not mean that you have a right to shout or to reprimand.

The more effective way to think about your relationship with your team is as a partnership. You are a part of that team and you have entered into an agreement.

They’ve agreed to follow your instruction as far as is reasonable and you’ve agreed to pay them.

You aren’t in charge of them, you don’t own them, and it’s not your place to try and punish them or make them feel small.

You simply express that they are violating the terms of your agreement and that they should expect the due results.

Your job, then, is to remove emotion and any bias.

Instead, create a simple procedure for dealing with failure or purposeful disruption.

Express this at the start of your deal with your team members and then simply follow through as you have outlined.

The biggest reason not to shout at or embarrass your team is also the reason you can’t simply ignore the disruptive issues and hope they go away. Both these actions can cause the situation to fester and become worse.

In other words, if someone is unhappy with your leadership, they may make their dissatisfaction known to others. This can cause more of your team become vocally unhappy.

Over time, this unhappiness can end up spreading through your whole team and being incredibly destructive.

Isolating the individual, meanwhile, only causes them to become more set in their opinions and more disruptive when they return.

So, what do you do with someone who is vocally critical and undermining your leadership?

One option is to use a technique, known as Trasformismo.

Trasformismo was the method of making a flexible centrist coalition of government which isolated the extremes of the political left and the political right in Italian politics after the Italian unification and before the rise of Benito Mussolini and Italian Fascism.

The Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci described trasformismo as a strategy to prevent the formation of an organized working-class movement by co-opting and neutralizing its ideas and leaders within a ruling coalition.

Trasformismo is a method for turning a political opponent into an ally. And it works in work and parenting settings too.

In plain English, it involves taking the dissenter or critic and then placing them in a position of power.

You’d have seen this technique being used in your workplace. It could have been in the form of creating a think tank from different departments.

Maybe a staff member was asked to come up with ideas for processes and systems when they raised dissenting voices about a procedure.

Essentially sharing responsibility for an outcome.

By doing this you help to demonstrate the complexity of the situation and thereby silence a lot of their criticisms.

At the same time, this will mean working together closely. You know, keep your enemies close!

This often helps them to gain a new respect for what you do and a greater propensity for working together and being a team player.

Try it and see how it works for your team!

I’ve included some more resources in the description. Have a look at them. Apply them. This is Vatsala Shukla from Karmic Ally Coaching signing off. Bye for now.