Creating the Innovation Culture: Leveraging Visionaries, Dissenters and Other Useful Troublemakers

Chapter 16. Knowing When Enough is Enough

It is hard to know how much dissent to encourage but it is even harder to know when the dissenter has gone beyond the bounds of what is healthy. This chapter will help managers identify when dissent and dissenters have gone beyond what the organization should tolerate and how to handle it.

The Hard and Soft Side of Management

Some managers think that people are the "soft" side of management. Finances, operations, that's the "hard" stuff. A large part of your job ismotivating and leading but calling this the soft side implies there isn't a "hard" side to people management. There is and should be. All your efforts are for naught if you can't be tough when needed. We've all worked for managers who were really nice guys but who also couldn't or wouldn't fix personnel problems. We suffered and so did the workbecause these managers had the soft but not the hard down pat.

The hard part of people management kicks in when the soft side isno longer sufficient—when you have done all the coaching, mentoring, requiring, and motivating that you can. When every positiveavenue has been exhausted, you need to think about moving to thehard side. And the hardest is to let people go.

How Do You Know When to Let a Dissenter Go?

Let's say Mary has been a thorn in your side for a long time. How doyou know when enough is enough? Obviously she's a troublemaker.

But as we've discussed, the trick is to distinguish between those peoplewho are difficult, frustrating, and ...