It isn’t a fight sequence (that would go on too long!), just a great some great dialogue regarding resilience.
‘It ain’t about how hard you can hit, it is about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward.’
We are not resilient Managers / Leaders when we see something wrong (a process / a concept / a new idea), present it to our senior leaders, have the idea knocked back – and then never try again. ‘I tried and they just won’t listen’, ‘What can you do if they don’t support you’, ‘I did all that I could and they didn’t want to know about it’. All of those comments are rubbish – but they have been expressed to me by Managers when complaining that their bosses / superiors don’t listen to them.
Did they try more than once? Did they try a different setting or a different approach to get the point of view across. Did they try and get someone else to suggest the idea (because they were too close or passionate about it? Did they try it again a week later with a different tack?
No, no, no and no. Worse, being told no to one idea prevented many from raising any other new ideas. Perhaps your first suggestion was raised at the wrong time, wrong place, wrong justification, or perhaps your superior was focusing on something else and you didn’t have their full attention. Perhaps you just didn’t find the right way to raise the idea?
Perhaps it is not the idea / suggestion or process that is wrong – perhaps it is the way in which you presented it?
Why would you not try again?
Could it be (and in my case it has occurred more times than I can count) that the idea wasn’t as good as you thought it was? Is this a satisfactory reason for not raising a new idea / suggestion again?
“It’s not that I’m so smart , it’s just that I stay with problems longer .”
Albert Einstein
How many problems have you stayed with? When you have heard ‘no’ from your boss regarding a good idea or process, will you take that as the final answer? When you have been ‘hit’, will you get back up and move forward?
As I heard recently ‘ success is getting up one more time that you have been knocked down’.
Get up again, be successful.