Courtesy Brian Rollo (2020)
Brian Rollo
Leadership is influence.
And a leader can exert that influence through brute force or through common understanding.
So says Brian Rollo, CEO of Brian Rollo Consulting of Queensbury.
He prefers common understanding, and he outlines the ideas in a book he published last month: The 10 Habits of Influential Leaders.
Although the book is fundamentally a business book--good leaders help the bottom line by increasing productivity--he admits that it is also a way he can show leadership and influence others.
“This is a well-thought, strategic move on my part,” Rollo says. “There’s a business sense to it.”
No one hires a coach or leadership consultant who they do not trust or understand, he says. The book becomes a method to cull prospects and to help managers know if they can work with him. “You don’t have to guess what I’m about.”
To the bosses who wish to exert brute force--he often uses “tyrants” in an interview--he says, “I wish them the best of luck, but they are not my people.”
Even with the people who become clients, there is the common misconception that workers need to learn to deal with the boss and his or her quirks and problems, Rollo says.
Often a manager comes to him and says, “‘This is how I do it, and they just don’t get it,'” Rollo says. It’s good intentions, but it’s a lack of skills that bring them in.
“The big revelation that people need to get to: it’s up to them [the leaders] to adjust,” he says. A manager can have in mind what he or she needs from the workers without being a tyrant. "You can be you," he says, but you can adjust your approach, your methods.
That is what he tries to teach in the book.
In the book, he cites a similar example of his own. He was a supervisor to one person in particular, and they got along very well. When she made a mistake, upper management asked him to take care of it. He writes that he came down too hard on her and ultimately lost a great colleague who left the company shortly after.
“I didn’t have the skills to handle that situation,” he says, adding, he needed the skills to go in and move the discussion from opposition to collaboration. His 10 habits outline how that is done.
Rollo spent about 30 years at Arrow Financial, the parent company to Glens Falls National and Saratoga National banks. The final six or seven years, he spent as their leadership trainer, he said, running about 100 managers through programs that he designed and revised. It became his passion.
Although he loves the company, he left in 2018 to form his own firm.
Links to the book can be found at www.BrianRollo.com.