These 4 Steps Will Help You Win in Difficult Situations at Work

I have climbed the corporate ladder and been through many management roles. Management is difficult, not everyone can survive in management as it deals primarily with people who are complicated, messy, and sensitive.

People are illogical, emotional, political beings who can feel hurt, jealous, and even hold grudges. Management is highly problematic if you’re not able to deal with human relationships with your boss, clients and colleagues.

The most important skill in management is not just the ability to motivate people but the ability to not offend people and make the best out of the worst situation.

If you are a manager working in an organisation, you may often find yourself in a conflict of interests situation and if you are not able to resolve these conflicts amicably, you won’t survive the onslaught of management and will end up with a lot of enemies, potentially limit your possible future progression.

Being the manager, many people would come to you for advice and sometimes even request for you to champion certain causes for them. These requests may be from fellow colleagues, or they could originate from external clients as well.

If you have many people coming to you for help, it is a good thing. It means you are of value to them, and you should not turn them down especially if these people are those you might need help from in future.

An example

An employee may approach you for help to talk to the boss about not meeting quotas this month, you know this employee is someone you have to depend on in the future, you need to gain his trust and can’t afford to say no. On the other hand, you know for sure you will be reprimanded for raising such a topic with the boss and jeopardise his trust in you.

What do you do? Many of your so-call career advisors will simply advise you to do what is right and follow your heart. But what is right in this situation? and how do we follow our heart when our heart is at a loss.? If you raise this, you stand losing your boss’ trust, if you don’t do it, you will lose your employee’s trust.

This is what many people would classify as a lose-lose situation, either way, you lose. Many of you innocent youngsters will fail this test and be forced to choose the option with the least damage, which is to risk souring the relationship with the employee.

What if I tell you high EQ people has the ability to turn such a lose-lose situation into a win-win? Don’t believe me? I didn’t believe it either until I witnessed with my own eyes how it was done.

I am not born with high EQ, but I know this is an important skillset to acquire. Yes, it can be acquired if you pay attention to the details. Once you know the techniques, you can adapt accordingly and apply them in a broad range of situations.

How a person with high EQ might handle such a difficult situation

You only need to do the following 4 important steps to turn the lose-lose situation into a situation that is in your favour.

1. Make clear it will not be accepted

When in such a dilemma, the thing you should do is to convey to the requesting party (it can be an employee or someone external) that his request will not be accepted because the boss is determined to stand by his policy and he will not change his mind.

2. But you will try nonetheless

The above statement is important to tell the requesting party, upfront, that this is unacceptable and give no false hope that you can help him. Only after this statement is clearly acknowledged by the requesting party can you supplement with the next equally important statement, which is to say you will give it a try nonetheless.

3. Find a good time

Next is to find a good opportunity to convey this to the boss and the way you put it across is also important. You have to be frank to say that Mr So and So, has put in a request to review his monthly quota, you have told him it was not acceptable, but noting that he was a valued employee, you would like to surface it to see if there are grounds to review it?. It is normal for the boss to ask for your views, and what you say next will determine if your boss should continue to trust you to defend his interest.

4. Tell the truth, but offer an alternate route.

What you can say is, to tell the truth, that he came requesting help, but you told him this is not acceptable and you have rejected him. Your boss will naturally say if you have rejected him why then did you raise this. What you need to say is — it is your duty to report such matters to him and if he has other considerations that you might not have considered, it would only be right for the boss to swing it the other way round.

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A clear conscience and help rendered

By doing so you would be able to avert the messy situation and come out with a clear conscience that you have helped the employee to convey the request and you have helped the boss defend his interest. You will have a clear conscience because you only promise to convey the message despite knowing it would be rejected. and your boss will feel assured that you have safeguarded his interest without making him appear as the bad guy.

From a lose-lose to a win-win

What is a bonus though, is when the boss decides to give the party a chance because he is indeed a valued employee (or contractor), and override your earlier judgement.

If so, you will come out as the benefactor to the employee for championing his cause and at the same time, you appear to be the one who has made your boss a hero to bring justice for the victim by overriding your poor judgement. Either way, you turn out to be the trustworthy party, a win-win situation.

The above tactic can be adapted and applied in a range of similar situations. It is widely used in leadership management but seldom talked about, only those like me, who had tripped and fallen on the wrong side, was forced to learn the lesson the hard way.

Despite that, I am sharing this golden advice with you guys for free, so you don’t have to learn this important lesson the hard way.