Patience is a Leadership Virtue
Patience is a Leadership Virtue
Kristin Robertson
June, 2004
Strong leadership in any organization requires many virtues: vision, communication skills, project management, empowerment, delegation, coaching skills. One characteristic of effective leaders that you don’t often hear about is patience. Leaders require patience because they deal with people, not machines. Unlike machines, people have many quirks. People are reluctant to change. People develop political alliances and affinities. People have their pet projects, favorite friends and preferred ways of doing things. It takes patience to effectively work with people and accomplish the organization’s goals and objectives. Although there are appropriate times to be impatient and push an agenda, the astute leader knows that patience is very often his or her secret weapon in getting things done.
In thinking about patience, it is apparent that there are many layers to this virtue. Patience is not one-dimensional, but has several facets. Patience can be categorized into three competencies, or sub-virtues. Those sub-virtues are three P’s: perspective, politics and persistence. Each one deserves exploration.
Perspective
The first sub-virtue of patience is perspective. Perspective allows the leader to choose his or her battles and ultimately win the war, knowing that losing some battles is OK. When you maintain your perspective, you can see the big picture and not get caught up in the small stuff.
Lisa Proffer, Director of the Information Technology Support Center (ITSC) at Verizon Wireless, found that gaining perspective starts with casting the vision for her group. When Verizon Wireless was formed out of the merger of three regional cellular telephone providers, Lisa was tasked with consolidating nine regional, formerly independent, Help Desks into three interdependent sites. Each existing Help Desk had its own way of doing things, its own favorite metrics, even its own tools. To begin to consolidate those disparate operations into three seamlessly operating sites, Lisa and her colleagues in IT had to cast the vision of what IT services was going to look like. “Mergers fail when vision isn’t cast, because it hurts to consolidate systems and processes,” says Lisa. “Someone always loses.”
It is not enough, however, for leaders to simply cast a vision and expect the entire team to obediently follow. The next step is to gain buy-in from your team, who will be responsible for executing the dream, by involving them in fleshing out the vision. Don Thomas, Vice President, Central Division of 7-Eleven, Inc., remembers a young manager who used a fairly autocratic style with his team and didn’t slow down to get their buy-in or their good ideas. Everything was an A priority in this manager’s mind. “This person’s team began to revolt as tasks started to stack up and his unrealistic deadlines went unmet, “ says Don. “When I got him to sit down with his team and define what they wanted to be – what their team’s vision was– and prioritize tasks, the team could see the big picture. The manager finally realized that it couldn’t all be accomplished in one month, and the team started to perform.”
Once the vision of a future state (perspective) is created, then you can see what tactics to pursue. “Patience is easier if you trust that something good is coming. The vision gives you confidence that you’re going in the right direction,” says Eva Hayward, Associate Director of the ITSC at Verizon Wireless, and Lisa Proffer’s direct report. With a future state cast firmly in mind, you can map out the tiny steps, the battle plan, as it were, to get to your goal. At Verizon Wireless’ ITSC, their goal was to increase first call resolution at the initial point of contact. The managers knew that this involved getting access to more systems and gaining approval to perform many tasks that, at the time of the merger, were closely held by other IT groups such as Email Support. The ITSC looked first for low hanging fruit – the repetitive tasks that the other groups hated to do. By starting small and taking baby steps towards their goal, they were able to eventually gain full rights to reset passwords and perform other tasks that increased their first call resolution. It took time, but patience paid off.
Maintaining your perspective while you’re involved in the daily drama of corporate life is critical. Many young managers get emotionally involved with the “crisis du jour” and can’t see what is really important in the long run. Glenn Barlow, President of GlenOak Associates, advises young leaders, “Don't take on every project or challenge that presents itself. Prioritize those which are truly worth the effort and patience it takes to achieve results, understand your ability to influence the outcome, and focus on those with the best net contribution to the big picture. Set the others aside."
Politics
Being attuned to the politics of your organization is the second essential facet of patience. The successful leader must have a sense of the political environment in which he or she operates, and use good judgment in timing requests, projects or special communications. Timing is often critical to success. In this context, the wise leader knows that the week the company announces an earnings loss is not a good time to ask for additional headcount. A good leader will wait for the right time to make a proposal and use that timing to their advantage.
Sometimes, a good idea just has to wait for the right business circumstances to make it a politically correct idea. At one company, email storage capacity had became a major issue for the technology staff – a common dilemma for many IT organizations. The idea of imposing size restrictions to protect the users from losing email was politically inappropriate, so the technology group did the obvious – it asked for approval to purchase increased server capacity. Because the proposal was initially based only on technological justifications and the users didn’t feel much impact in the current environment, IT’s proposal was rejected as a low priority initiative due to cost and other factors. Then, the world changed. Sarbanes-Oxley, the Patriot Act and new SEC rulings, which were created in response to corporate scandals and worldwide terrorism, made email and record retention a business mandate, not a technology proposal. Risk management and regulatory requirements were the drivers. Now business leaders and the technology group formed joint teams to address the proposals that had once been deemed technology driven. In this case, patience paid off by waiting for the moment when the firm’s business needs could justify the expenditure.
Finding an ally from other parts of the organization can bolster your chances for winning approval for your project or help you implement organizational change. It takes time and patience to develop those relationships with people from other departments. Proffer keeps in close touch with her colleagues at Verizon Wireless to build good will with them. “I’ll call my colleagues just to ask them what do you think about this?” says Proffer. “I share my challenges with them. I’ll ask for their help.” By seeking the help of other departments, Proffer has been able to achieve her goals more quickly and easily. Having patience in the short term pays handsomely in the long term.
7-Eleven’s Thomas recommends getting resisters on board first with your ideas. “Figure out which other people in your organization could pull either a purse string or a credibility string on behalf of your idea, and get their buy-in,“ says Thomas. “And quantity helps!” The more advocates you can round up to support your idea prior to presenting the proposal, the better.
Persistence
Persistence is the last, but perhaps most important, characteristic of patience. No matter how well you’ve prepared your presentation and financial justifications or crafted your pitch, you may not get immediate approval for a project or purchase. This is as true for CEO’s who are presenting to their Board of Directors as it is for the Support Center manager who is seeking funding for a new Customer Relationship Management tool for his/her growing department. The wise leader knows that initial “no” only means “not now”. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again!
It is important to vet ideas a long time before they must be implemented – again, because we work with people and as a general rule, people hate to change. Persistence is a subtle but strong and effective weapon in overcoming resistance over time – the image of water wearing down rock comes to mind. At 7-Eleven, a big initiative in years past was to consolidate the accounting functions from a regional focus to a centralized, corporate function. There were many duplicate positions in the department, and one by one, the overlaps needed to be eliminated. Don Thomas remembers that it took him 18 months to convince two of his direct reports that their functions would perform better under one manager. “I call it turning on the water and never turning it off,” says Thomas. “At every meeting with these two men, I’d jab them with a reminder that one person managing their functions would work better. Finally, the regional manager agreed to consolidate the function under one manager.”
In being persistent, the leader must marry patience with passion. It’s the passion you feel for your cause that allows you to reformat your presentation, address all executive concerns, and come back to the table to present your project again – and again, if needed. Refined by your big picture perspective and political astuteness, it’s your passion that will ultimately convince others of the importance of your cause.
Barlow recalls a time in which it took over a year to gain approval for a project to upgrade and expand a critical software tool. He was convinced that the project was in the best interest of the customers and the company. The passion of his conviction allowed him to persist in his efforts. “It would have been easier to let it drop, but I was just not going to give up,” remembers Barlow. “I responded to each request for more information and overcame barriers as they were presented.”
Patience is a needed chapter in the book of leadership virtues. Intuitively possessed by many strong leaders, patience can be developed in even the most impatient of us. By gaining and maintaining a big picture perspective of the job and the organization, by understanding the political climate, and by persisting with passion, you too can practice and perfect your patience. Seeing your patience succeed in the long run will be the best reward for your efforts.
Kristin Robertson, President of KR Consulting, Inc., is a consultant to the Help Desk and Technical Support profession. She helps companies increase the efficiency of their support center, save money, and increase their customer loyalty. As both a consultant and trainer, she has worked with companies such as 7-Eleven, Southwest Airlines, Hewlett Packard, Prodigy Communications and CompUSA. Kristin can be reached at 817-577-7030, or krisrob@krconsulting.com. Her website, www.krconsulting.com, contains many free resources and articles for support professionals.