Knowing how to fight successfully for your ideas is another important type of knowledge. It helps in fighting your people, because often you can aid a particular man greatly if you can sell the cause or pint of view he is working for, going to bat for him may mean, in effect, going to bat your own projects. The example you set in fighting your ideas may also help your subordinate learn how to work more effectively in their own behalf.

In addition, if you can put your ideas across you should be better able to build a strong organization. Your department and all other departments in the company should be continually developing and applying new ideas, else your firm will lose ground in the industry. But ideas come from people; it is up to you and your associate to produce and sell the concepts for new methods processes and products that will help the company.

Take the time and energy needed to sell people.- Too frequently, because of the pressure of other tasks, managers put off the selling job required to put an idea across. It is not so much that the selling job is tricky or complicated, but that it takes time and effort which are never given.

For instance, you may know that orders are being processed too slowly at a the warehouse, and you may see clearly that certain changes in the system must be made or the delays will continue indefinitely. And you may see clearly that certain changes in the system must be made or the delays will continue indefinitely. And you may start mentioning the problem to a few people. But to really get the change, you must sell your boss and perhaps several others and that means taking time off to get some facts together and then presenting them persuasively in a series of meetings. You keep postponing these steps because of  all the other things you have to do. Your procrastination is human and understandable, but the result is that nothing happens in the way of change.

Again you may have certain standards of what makes a day’s work that you want your people to observe. Most of the employees meet these standards well, but a few don’t- and these few make trouble all around. You keep thinking that you ought to have some meetings and  work things out; the trouble may be a simple misunderstanding or it may have something to do with a supervisory policy . The result, again is that nothing happens.