First Step Marketing

“Cognitive divergence” describes the situation of a person whose thinking has become so different from the rest of the group that he or she doesn’t really fit in. This person is now considered ^-out of it,” an eccentric, a maverick. Some changes that can make you seem like this in your own organization:

• Your company may have changed since you joined it as a bright young newcomer. New people with a different management philosophy may have taken over, or the company may have expanded or changed direction as time passed.
• Times may have changed. New ideas, new technology may cause a company to change its outlook. Where once it valued those managers who ran production centers or developed new products, now it may save its smiles for its financial or marketing managers. Or, vice versa.
• Your place in the company may have changed. Everything that until now has made you outstanding suddenly stops working. The very characteristics which made you stand out for the old executive team may now make you stumble.
• You may have changed. As with a married couple, both you and your company may have developed—but in different directions.In such circumstances, it is easy for the manager’s job to go sour, for the good times to stop. Praise comes in increasingly sparser doses; experiences of success grow fewer; prospects for promotion dwindle. Managers previously at the center of things find it hard to get a hearing for their ideas. It’s a new ball game now.Too many managers in this situation think they have no alternative—they must get out. But this is not necessarily so. Here’s what you can do:
• Play by the rules. Some companies reward freewheeling managers, others those who go by the book. Study closely what wins favor in the eyes of new executives and what elicits a big groan. A planning manager who had been riding to work on a motorcycle, wearing a leather jacket, switched to a business suit and took to driving a grey sedan when a new executive team took over. “This is my protective coloration,” he said. “It’s hard enough getting your ideas accepted when you’re an insider, much less when you’re standing on the outside.”
• Take a close look at yourself. To keep up with the company’s new outlook, you may need new skills. Or you may find that your own values have blinded you to legitimate points in the regime’s approach. If you make no attempt to see the point of view of executives, you may have yourself to blame for being in limbo.
• Be so valuable the company can’t get along without you. As Joe McCarthy, once the manager of temperamental Ted Williams, said: “Any manager who can’t get along with a .400 hitter has to be crazy.” If you produce a greater profit than anyone else, executives will not only put up with your eccentricities, they’ll learn to love them.
• Build on your “eccentricities” as the source of your strength. A healthy organization needs managers who complement each other, not ones who are each other’s clones. If you see things differently, you have value to your company as a divergent thinker—the one who sees angles that are invisible to others, possibilities other people haven’t thought of. The trick is to present these differing insights as enhancing the position of company executives, not in a way that seems to undermine them.
• Find a part of the company you match. In a large enough organization, there’s at least one section that most values past experiences; one that prefers innovation; one that needs fast reaction to immediate events; one that requires patient consideration of all the facts. Find your match.
• Wait them out. Let your bosses get better acquainted with how you operate and what results you get. If your views have been right all along, the message should get through. If despite your opinions the company has flourished, that should give you something to think about too.

Observation: In the end, you’ve got to be you. You will do best as a manager in an organization whose ways you accept and where you act in ways that are natural to you and not put on. But going to another organization is not a move that any manager makes lightly—certainly not before he or she has explored the options his or her own company has to offer.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
Being an Outsider in Your Own Company

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 10:32 pm and is filed under Business Management, Career Management, Jobs, Promotion, financial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.