Patience is a Leadership Virtue
by Kristin Robertson

Strong leadership requires many virtues: vision, communication skills, project management, empowerment, delegation, and coaching skills to name a few. 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, 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, astute leaders know that patience is often the secret weapon in getting things done.

Patience isn’t one-dimensional. It has several facets including the three Ps: perspective, politics and persistence. Each one deserves exploration.

Perspective

Perspective allows leaders to choose their battles and ultimately win the war, knowing that losing some battles is okay. 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 way of doing things, its favorite metrics, and even its own tools. To begin to consolidate those disparate operations into three seamlessly operating sites,
Proffer and her colleagues 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 Proffer. “Someone always loses.”

It isn’t enough, however, for leaders to cast a vision and expect the team to obediently follow. The next step is to get your team to buy in by involving them in fleshing out the vision. After all, they’ll be responsible for executing the dream. Don Thomas, vice president, Central Division of 7-Eleven, Inc., remembers a young manager who used an autocratic style with his team and didn’t slow down to get their buy-in or their 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 Thomas. “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 started to see the big picture, and the team started to perform.”

Once the perspective is established, everyone can decide 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 Proffer’s direct report. With a future state cast firmly in mind, you can map out the steps, the battle plan, to get to the goal.

At Verizon Wireless’ ITSC, their goal was to increase first call resolution at the initial point of contact. The managers knew that this meant 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. ITSC looked first for low hanging fruit – the repetitive tasks that the other groups hated to do. By starting small and taking small 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 perspective during the daily drama of corporate life is critical. Many young managers get emotionally involved with the “crisis du jour” and can’t see what’s 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. Successful leaders must have a sense of the political environment in which they operate, and use good judgment in timing requests, projects or special communications. Timing can be critical to success. In this context, wise leaders know that the week the company announces an earnings loss is not a good time to ask for additional headcount. Good leaders 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 become a major issue for the technology staff – a common dilemma for many IT organizations. The idea of imposing size restrictions to protect 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, the team’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 became the drivers. Now business leaders and the technology group formed joint teams to address the proposals that had once been deemed technology driven and thus a low priority.

Finding an ally from other parts of the organization can bolster your chances of winning approval for your project or help you implement change. It takes time and patience to develop those relationships with people from other departments.

“I’ll call my colleagues just to ask ‘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 often pays handsomely in the long term. Thomas recommends first getting the resisters on board with your ideas. “Figure out which 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. Quantity also 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 CEOs who are presenting to their Board of Directors as it is for Support Center managers seeking funding for a new CRM tool for a growing department.

Wise leaders know that an initial “no” only means “not now.” If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again! It’s important to vet ideas a while before they must be implemented – again, because we work with people and as a general rule, people don’t like change. Persistence is a subtle but effective weapon in overcoming resistance over time. At 7-Eleven, a big initiative was to consolidate the accounting functions from a regional focus to a centralized, corporate function. There were two positions for the same area of accounting. One handled corporate accounting transactions and the other managed regional accounting transactions. Having just one manager for the area would connect all the work and lead to huge efficiencies. Thomas remembers that it took him 18 months to convince the two managers that their functions would perform better under one leader. “I call it turning on the water and never turning it off,” he says. “At every meeting with the two men, I’d jab them with a reminder that one person managing their functions would work better. Finally, both managers agreed that a change was needed to consolidate the function under one manager.”

In being persistent, leaders 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 and tempered 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 necessary leadership virtue. 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 this valuable attribute.

About the author
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.

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