How to Resolve Conflict in Organizations

7Life conflicts – individual

The effective MD: the power of personality

I had a client once who ran the company more than the real Managing Director (MD), who was largely ineffectual. It meant that the Pretender didn’t have the powers of authority but still had influence. You might wonder how he could do this and the answer was in his personality. From what I could see, the factors that enabled him to do what he did were: (a) a penchant for new things. This meant pushing and pulling the organization to be more modern (this was a requirement in this company). (b) He was bright and helpful. The real MD was rather gloomy while the effective MD was quite open and inclusive and people responded very well to this. And (c) he did, however, have a fatal ...