By: Liz Ryan

Everyone wants to know how to get a crusty, inflexible corporate culture to loosen.

Shared: From your friends #*@TechAutoCareers.com®* the online resource for the *Automotive Sales Fraternity™*

They want to know how to get rid of outdated policies and ideas that slow their businesses down. They write to us and ask for our help shaking their higher-ups out of their stupor and their Industrial Revolution thinking.

I don’t blame them. I have been in the same spot myself. It’s frustrating trying to get leaders to shift their thinking!

Most of us grew up on the idea that managers tell other people what to do. We grew up with the idea that the manager’s word is final. Why is the manager’s word the last word? Because he or she is the boss – that’s why!

We are evolving out of the mechanical workplace and into the Human Workplace. It doesn’t cost anything to take that step. It takes a shift in thinking.

You can push and prod and inspire and harangue your leaders to move into the 21st century. Some of them are still adjusting to the twentieth! The problem is that your efforts will be wasted unless your leaders see a good reason to change.

They may like their old-world thinking and the order they feel it brings. They may like your three-inch-thick policy manual and the fact that in your company, every keystroke is measured. They may feel comfortable and cozy with the notion that the leaders make all the important decisions and everybody else falls in line.

These are processes and standards we’ve had in place for over a hundred years.

Most medium-sized and large organizations have Change Management departments that help people get comfortable with changes. The irony is that leaders need to accept change more than anybody else does!

Where is the Change Management department when the CEO says “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it!” or “It’s not supposed to be fun – that’s why they call it work!”?

The only way to shift your leaders’ point of view is to show them how their old-school thinking is hurting them.

Your leaders have problems. The same way I teach job-seekers to dig in to understand a hiring manager’s pain, you need to dig in to understand your managers’ pain in order to influence them. You won’t say “We need to change our culture, because all the cool companies are doing it!” Your leaders won’t care about that argument — and why should they?

I don’t listen when my kids say “All my friends get to stay up until midnight on weekends!”

I don’t give a dang what the other parents do, if the kid is telling the truth which is doubtful in itself. Your boss has no reason to care what you found in a survey or how other companies run things. We can’t blame your boss for wanting to do things his or her way.

Your job, if you want to walk the Human Workplace path, is to find the intersecting point between your leaders’ pain and the human-voiced solution you propose. That intersection won’t be found in a survey or a book about best practices.

About I.C. Collins

I.C. Collins is grateful that he can pursue something that is both interesting and has value on several levels. For over three decades in the Automotive Sales Industry a bottom-line guy Collins doesn't shy away from telling the truth in ways that cut through the noise to deliver streetwise and corporate knowledge from someone who's been there and done that, many times over.

He aims to create “a long-lasting major brand that for generations is a company that is business-critical to the leading brands in the world. We are focused every day on creating something that’s valuable and has permanence.”

P. S. Urgent if you’re looking to optimize your interpersonal skills for success get your copy of " How to Succeed in the Automotive Sales Industry " today @TechAutoCareers.com. Then settle in for a satisfying read that will surely enhance your interpersonal skills for success this year, it is not just a book we are a service.

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