Deal with dissension
At the first few Warmington Way meetings, everyone came in
totally committed to making the company better. Warmington says
the department heads and vice presidents had no reservations and
were all really excited about taking the best ideas and practices
and consolidating them into a formal companywide philosophy.
But there was one issue that quickly rose to the surface as the discussions progressed. Every person at the meeting thought his or
her ideas were the best.
“Everyone was fighting for their ideas,” Warmington says. “As
soon as we started questioning their ideas and saying, ‘Maybe we’ll
go in another direction,’ you started to get a little bit of pushback.
But we just kept talking about it and going through it. All the VPs
would get together and go through it, and they would talk it
through and come up with the best idea.”
Warmington says you should resist the impulse to be too delicate
in a discussion like this one, because if you just dance around an
issue without confronting it, you may not end up with the best
solution for the company. You have to set the tone early if you
want a fruitful discussion, he says.
“Even though no one is attacking anyone in a mean way, people
take their work very personally, and when someone starts questioning it in a pretty serious way, it can seem like a personal attack
unless you’re used to it,” he says.
Make sure your staff members understand that you are not criticizing their ability to do their job, you are just trying to dig down for
a deeper understanding of the issue being discussed. Once that
understanding is established, you can have a civil discussion about
what’s best for the company — without emotions getting in the way.
During the meetings, Warmington would go around the table and
let each person defend his or her idea. He asked questions like,
“What do you like about your idea?” and “Why is your idea better
than his idea?” He says you have to continue to ask questions until
you can determine the reasoning behind the action the employee
wants to take. Having a group of other executives or department
heads involved in the discussion is a good idea, because it gives you
more viewpoints and can eventually help you reach a consensus on
which ideas would take the company closest to its goals.
Of course, even after all that discussion and after a near consensus
is reached, some people will still think their ideas are better.
“At the end of the day, if we got five out of six of the VPs of construction to agree to a certain way, the sixth guy would basically say,
‘I trust all of you guys; you’re all really good at this, and if five of you
think this is the best way, then I’m going to go along with it and we’ll
try it for six weeks,’” Warmington says. “Because they had gone
through the process, they totally bought in to it. Even if they didn’t
agree 100 percent, they were willing to give it a shot because they
knew it was better than what we’re doing now.
