There are so many books out there sharing insight and expertise on leadership that it is easy to get overwhelmed with all the recipes on offer. Add five of this, stir in three of these, leave out eight of that .... Sound familiar? Almost all the recipes have value - but I don't have the time to experiment with them all. Sometimes I have wondered what the one thing might be - the one recipe, the one ingredient - that could be of greatest value to my leadership efforts.
I found a candidate this week in an unlikely place - or should I say - under an unlikely heading. Barry Brownstein added a blog post to the Arbinger Community with the title 'Projecting Charlie Sheen'. The headline was so unexpected that I went in for a read and found a gem. In his post he quotes a recent blog post from former student and now professor Warren Nilsson....
"…In general people are very poor at reading and understanding each other’s inner lives. Most of us might think we are among the exceptions – that our powers of psychological insight are remarkably keen – but I think this is a grand delusion. We are experts not at comprehending each other but at projecting our own perspectives, desires, and insecurities out onto the world. We are gifted and unapologetic fantasists… We .. continue deceiving ourselves that we understand perfectly what other people are experiencing."
What if the one thing of greatest value to me as a leader - as someone looking to have influence on others - is to simply accept that our understanding of what others are experiencing is imperfect at best. One of the greatest deceptions I perpetuate on myself is that 'I know what you are going through'. When I do this I simply project an overlay of myself onto you and congratulate myself for my deep insight. This distorted insight now reinforces my perception of my powers of understanding - and the hole I am digging for myself just gets deeper.
How can I lead or influence people when I won't see them and therefore can't learn from them? How can make the most of the people I work with when I won't allow myself to be influenced by who they really are and what they are actually experiencing?
Maybe the greatest improvement I can make in my leadership is to assume that I know nothing of their experience and that there is much that I can learn from every person I come in contact with. Not long after pondering this topic I found a talk given by Steve Jobs. It was interesting to watch given the assumptions I had built up around the speaker. If you haven't seen this already - it is well worth the investment of 15 minutes:
Much of leadership, and life, is about connecting the dots - making sense out of our experiences and moving forward with purpose - and many of the greatest opportunities that come to us are not in the things we do but, rather, in the people we meet and the lessons we learn from them - if we will just stop looking for our own reflections and simply see them, as they are, without distortion ....
Food for thought ....
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