Anton H. Germishuizen knows he isn’t going to make the right decision every time. So to balance that fact, he relies on his leadership style at Burt Hill, where he serves as a principal in the Philadelphia office.
“My leadership style really emphasizes being decisive, moving quickly and, if things do not go as planned, that you are willing to readjust,” says Germishuizen, who is in charge of 80 people at the architecture firm’s Philadelphia office, which posted about $10 million in 2007 revenue.
Smart Business spoke with Germishuizen about how to get buy-in for your decisions and how creating a vision will help you in your decision-making.
Q. How do you get buy-in for your decisions?
You need to communicate your ideas to the T. You can’t just come from above and say, ‘Look, this is the decision that has been made.’ You’ve got to sit with your team and say, ‘This is the decision, this is how I arrived at the decision, these are the factors that I have weighed’… and develop the rationale.
I think where leaders get derailed is when they do not communicate or have an open dialogue with their fellow leadership teams in the organization and when there is not transparency.
When leaders feel they don’t have buy-in, they can derail any process. It’s when there is transparency and there is a dialogue and a rational approach on why the decisions are being made that leaders have a stronger chance of implementing.
Q. How do you handle a person on your management team who disagrees with your decisions?
When you pick up resentment from people around you, that’s actually much more valuable than when people around you are agreeing with your position. I constantly try to really come to grips with the resistance around me because the resistance is telling me where my implementation on a specific decision is going to cause it to fail.
You ultimately need people’s buy-in around you no matter what you do. It’s the resistance that gives you that immediate indicator.
How do deal with resistance? You have to listen to it, and if you feel strongly enough that the resistance position is not that valid, you have to spend some additional time to conference and generate buy-in from the areas of the company or the individuals that are resisting. That comes through dialogue; that’s communicating and listening to each other’s point of view.
At the end of the day, though, you have to proceed. As long as you are working with people that understand your point of view and you understand theirs, you kind of make the decision and then you move on.
