It’s better to be effective, than to be right.

If you’ve read Peter Drucker then you know that being an effective executive is one of the goals of every manager and leader.  My understanding is that effective is defined as the ability to get things done.  You have an idea of the actions you want your direct reports to take, now you need to get them to do those actions.  In a perfect world, you would lay out the logical reasons for why the new course of action is better than the old way and everyone would be convinced and immediately undertake the new way of doing things.  Unfortunately, that’s not how things work.  You’ll have some people who quickly adopt the new way, others who will begrudgingly try it, and some who flat out hate change and will resist you till the bitter end.  What are you as a manager supposed to do?  Focus on the behavior not winning minds.

As the title of this post says, it’s better to be effective than to be right.  It doesn’t matter if people agree with you, so long as they do what you ask.  To use an example from my company, we know that being out on the sales floor improves customer service, however, our sales associates at one location kept staying behind the counter to work on projects (like pricing items, processing merchandise, etc.)  We explained that staying out on the floor leads to more sales, and makes the sales associate more approachable, but we couldn’t get the behavior to change.  So instead of trying to convince them, we simply changed the way they worked.  We moved their work area to be outside of the cash wrap area.  Instead of processing behind the counter, they now had to process on the other side of the counter, partly on the sales floor.  We also put a humorous “keep out” sign behind the counter to remind them.  We also instituted a floor walk every 15 minutes (which we stole from Target, I believe).

The key change in approach is to think of behaviors.  How do I get the behavior I want?  Rather than, “How do I convince them I’m right?”  In a perfect world, you could convince people with just words, but in business it’s more important to get the actions you need rather than win arguments.  Our customers don’t care if I make a persuasive argument, they care that they can find a sales associate when they need them.