I had a frustrating experience recently where I was working with the CEO of a large international organization. He had asked me to rewrite the values statement for the entire team. I couldn’t help but feel like what he wanted was a grocery list of excepted terms that, quite frankly, I could have found on Google. The conversation over the next several weeks were no help at all. He continued to wonder why I wasn’t producing the expected outcomes, and I continued to try and articulate that I felt we were short of the mark in how we defined the desired results. No apparentlyI was given a task and should complete the job as instructed. My frustration evolved into me asking myself questions like “Why am I stalling on this project?”, “What is it that bothers me here?”, and “Am I I the right organization because this isn’t fulfilling at ALL!”. I decided that rather than argue (the opposite of persuasion… don’t worry I will explain…) this was an opportunity for me to demonstrate my Page 172 E The Magazine for Today’s Female Executive
leadership within my role through persuasion.I put together a proposal outlining why I felt the current parameters were inadequate- not just from my perspective, but their impact on those within our organization and ultimately those we intended to work with across the globe. I was hoping to persuade him to see things a little differently and to evaluate my task perhaps with the information I provided in mind. This is still a work in progress… Persuasion is not a fast or guaranteed process. It takes patience, diligence and often unlimited reserves of creativity to make a Subscription link www.female-exec.com/s.html