Deal with discord
By giving people the autonomy to come up with their own decision-making processes and solutions, you also give them the opportunity to disagree with each other.
Differing opinions can pave the way for active dialogue and ultimately better solutions to the challenges your company faces, but sometimes disagreements can become disruptive or even destructive, so you have to have a method for dealing with it.
Consensus is always the best outcome, and after that, compromise. But when team members dig in their heels and won’t budge from a position, you might need to get involved on a deeper level.
“You’re always going to have people who don’t buy in to what you are saying, and you have to manage through it,” Carbone says. “That’s only going to make you a better manager to have gone through that. I recently had a conversation with one of my market presidents who was having trouble getting her message through to maybe one or two people on her team. We sat and talked about what we could do, and sometimes you find out that maybe you need to change a team member. We don’t want to have a person who isn’t buying in to what we’re trying to accomplish.”
Generally, your managers’ attitudes will be an indicator of whether they’re willing to work as part of a team or whether they’re fixated on their own ideas.
“You’re going to have problems if you have someone who always wants to dig in, doesn’t want to find different ways to work through something and you always find yourself at a point where that person is butting heads,” Carbone says. “If you run into problems like that, one, it stays in-house, and two, you get everyone into a room and work it out. You set the ground rules right away. It’s OK to have a difference of opinion, but it’s not OK if your opinion has to be the right opinion.
“We haven’t had a lot of scenarios like that because our people recognize that it’s good to have differences of opinion. If you don’t, that means no one is thinking independently. But when you do have those situations, you get everyone into a room, talk about all sides of the issue and come up with the best possible solution for the goals and objectives of the company. If you can do that, most of the time you’re going to be able to solve the problem.”
How to reach: TD Bank, (888) 751-9000 or www.tdbank.com
