Intruducing Extreme Ownership to older, experienced staff

[marizaanbruwer]

Good Day.

I am a 25 year old female living in SA. I recently accepted a position as Sales Representative at a Redistributor in the Fruit and Veg market. Upon my arrival and after working here for just a week I realised that the business is in jeopardy and that none of the staff including the senior management is taking ownership of their work. I made a suggestion to the CEO to implement Extreme Ownership and let his Senior Staff read the book. He has given me feedback and wants me to run training on extreme ownership.

My concern is that some of the staff will be reluctant to accept the idea and especially taking advice from a 25 year old female. The OPS manager who has a great influence always makes up excuses for when things go wrong, even when I try to sit with him to find solutions we simply cannot find one, because of too many excuses. He has also told me about incidents in his previous work where a 25 year old tried to tell him how to do his job and he was not impressed. How do I get them to forget about my age and experience and actually take the advice I give to them and using it in their departments.

I do know that every problem we have that is causing us to loose business comes from a lack of leadership and that implementing the principles from extreme ownership will definitely improve performance.

I will greatly appreciate your advice.

Kind Regards

Marizaan Bruwer

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[mynewunit]

This is a tricky one. What you need to do is straight up manipulation. This needs to be appropriate to your position, personality, the other person, their inclinations, their disposition and every other person in the company.

Being a new guy this puts you into a different context. The best way to teach extreme ownership is to demonstrate it. Show them how to take control of something and hopefully they should want to control more.

You could put together a slide show with quotes and pictures and say go team. You might be able to keep them all awake.

You have the blame game. How do you fix the blame game? You can have them try to find the biggest problem in the company. Then they could come up with potential solutions. Then you, yes you, become the solution manager. Maybe you need redundancy. You cross train yourself to do everyone else's job. Then you cross train everyone one else to do atleast their direct supervisor and direct reports jobs. You facilitate. Whatever it takes, cookies, lunches, handouts. Then once it works you have to train someone else to be the cross training solution manager. Whenever someone misses a training, you own it. You notify verbally, in writing, reminder and calender invite. When they miss it you ask why? Whatever they answer gets reported to you and up the food chain so to speak.

If you can show that you are the fix to problems, you must also make other people capable of fixing the problem. I recently got trapped where I was fixing a problem. I then got moved to a different position and the other problem resurfaced. I let them know what the problem was, the solution, and the consequences of each decision. They get to choose if I fix problem A or problem B.

Let the team come to their conclusions. They will follow their plan longer than your plan. Your ideas will be dumb and theirs will be great. Don't force them. Show them the construct and have them apply it to the company.

Remember you are playing the long game. Don't burn bridges. Listen. Ask Good questions. Preserve their egos. Be humble. Good luck.