Motivational

Rule 54: Be adaptable in your dealings with different people

October 21, 2016

Nigeria’s Famous Magazine Publisher & Owner of City People, Dr. Oluseye Kehinde

Being
a chameleon is a good thing just so long as you can carry it off. People are all different and if you try to
treat them all the same you run the risk of offending them all or at least
failing to satisfy any of them.

It
is a lot easier if you are a parent to understand this rule. If you have more than one child, you will
know how essential it is not to treat them the same. Each child needs different
motivating forces. For some it is enough
to be mildly disappointed. For others
you have to be a real ogre just to
get them to get dressed in the morning.

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I
have five sons and a daughter and I have to treat each one differently.
Sometimes I forget and treat them all the same and they are quite surprised and
quite hurt. Each needs me to be something different, something unique for them,
something special. As a manager you are a sort of parent to your people and
must treat them as individuals.

“You have to be
adaptable, ready to change quickly depending on what is required of you. The perfect manager is the one with the
ability to spin on a sixpence….Identify who around you is successful and watch
what they do with people”.

I
once staged a completely fake loss of temper to get my own way over a fairly
trivial matter. The person for whose
benefit the tantrum was put on was so shocked that I was given into
immediately. Now there are quite a few
bosses around for whom such behavior would have been intolerable and I would
have been shown the door straightaway.

When
I was a general manager I always felt I could get the best out of my work force
by being fairly pleasant and quite kind. But there were the odd few who didn’t
respond to this type of behavior. They
were so entrenched in their old fashioned approach to work that they expected a
boss to be a complete bastard and to shout at them and tell them what to
do. And here was me asking them how they
were, and what they thought of it all.
They couldn’t cope and I had to be unpleasant to them to get them to
respond—different strokes for different folks..

You
have to be adaptable, ready to change quickly depending on what is required of
you. The perfect manager is the one with
the ability to spin on a sixpence. Study how you are with people. Are you always the same, no matter who they
are or what is going on? Do you adapt
and change readily and easily? Identify
who around you is successful and watch what they do with people.

(Excerpts from THE
RULES OF WORK by Richard Templer Read “Knowing where to hang out and when” from The Rules tomorrow on Asabeafrika)

Rule-to-Work Series