Lisa wanted to hire another employee to take on additional workload, but her manager wasn’t in favor of it. He agreed that she needed the help, but he didn’t see the need to add to payroll. He asked her to go back and see if someone else could pick up the work. She was disappointed and she brought the situation into our coaching session to discuss.
This is a common situation that happens. What could have been handled differently here? Whenever you want to convince a manager to hire someone else, you have to think about it from their point of view and not your own. Of course you can see all the reasons to do it and it seems so logical. Why can’t they see it?
The outcome that you want is to get someone hired and you need your manager to agree. Think about this situation from their standpoint. They don’t want to spend the extra money unless you can show that it is justified. How can you prepare for this conversation with intention? The first conversation didn’t go as expected, but you can go back to discuss it in a different way.
Here are some things to think about before having a conversation like this:
- Do you have the money in your budget to pay for this person already or is this an unplanned expense? Can you show the return on investment to hire this person?
- What revenue-producing activities would they do each day?
- How does hiring this person help you as the leader of the team be able to do more? (have more time to scale, be more strategic, drive more programs or change in the company)
- Are there activities that your current team members haven’t been able to do (that are important to your manager) that this person could do?
- What gap in experience does the team have? How could a new person with that experience help the company succeed faster?
These types of conversations are always challenging and it isn’t a bad thing to do the due diligence. Each new person that you bring on can be a great thing to get more work done. However, there are costs that you may not have considered in terms of hiring, training, salary, benefits, laptop, monitor, etc. It is the right thing to do to make sure that the person is needed from your manager’s point of view. Plus, it gives you a great opportunity to spend the time to prepare your case of why you need the person.
Lisa spent the time after our coaching call to put the information together and her manager agreed it was the right thing to hire the new person! She told me this she was glad her manager had forced her to go through this exercise to justify the resource. It was a valuable lesson for her to learn and now she knew how to do it. It may seem like a lot of work to put this type of information together, but this is how to be an intentional leader. It allows you to show your strategic side and your ability to influence. These are good things for your manager to see about you.