This marks the fourth in a series of reader response logs for my reading of Leadership and Self-Deception by The Arbinger Institute (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2010 )
How do you interact with and respond to others?
Most people likely think they treat others well, and are acutely aware when they didn’t. In fact, I’m willing o bet that most of us perceive ourselves as being nice, until we elect to be not so nice, at which time we highlight, gloat even, how un-nice we were in a given situation. For example, have you ever been snippy or curt with a retail sales person, and then in their absence turn to your shopping partner and justify the way you treated because in the end it got you what you wanted? I thought so.
I’d argue though, that our being “not so nice” actually goes well beyond those seemingly international moments.
Consider this scenario: You make efforts to get to ask a co-worker about their weekend and their family, you “actively listen” to their remarks and also their concerns about some work matters, and maybe you even go to lunch or a happy hour with them. Yet, all the while what you’re really interested in is fostering in them a better opinion of you. It’s in situations such as this, the ones where we are being nice, that we just might be the least nice. Our relationships will always suffer when our company can sense how we really feel toward them. People know, they simply seem to sense when they are being “coped with, manipulated, or outsmarted,” and they can most assuredly grasp what’s really beneath our “nice” actions – our judgements, resentments, and self-centered objectives.
As I read the text, I am beginning to question my “nice” behaviors. I am turning a corner to some genuine self-reflection as to what is truly behind so many of my nice actions – am I really concerned about my audience, or am I concerned about their perceptions of me? Humbling, really.
Something else that’s hit me is the idea that the actions I am performing, the specific behaviors I am engaging in don’t always reflect the way I am seeing thos on the other end of my actions. Ultimately, I see now, I am often approaching things with a pretty dim view of my audience, a view filtered through a lens of false superiority. In other words, I have spent a lot of my energy delegitimizing the needs of those in my midst.
I see this at home. Way too often. My wife will ask me to do something innocuous such as bringing something to her or picking up something laying around the house, and I will respond as if I’m being put out, as if the request is disrupting my entry routine or progress on something significant. Like watching/not watching a popular sporting event. Naturally, this creates a sense fo discord between us, and I’m clueless as to why. Now, I get it, My wife’s needs are legitimate. And in the scheme of thing probably more legitimate than mine at the time. Yet I am seeing her needs as less significant than mine.
I want to challenge anyone reading this to consider how large a part of your perspective involves blaming others for having their wants and needs because they might infringe upon yours. Furthermore, how small a part of your energy and though is applied to genuinely understanding and normalizing the needs and desires of others, while setting your own aside?
The fundamental question I am asking myself to reflect upon, and I will ask you as well, is this: as you go through your slice of the world, are you conducting yourself as if you are a person among people, or are you approaching matters as if you are the person among a cast of objects?
As I’ve read through to the finish of the first part of this story, I’ve found myself identifying with and coming to engage with the questions and issues facing Tom Callum. When he apologizes to his assistant, saying, “I think I have some things to unlearn, I think I’ve been blind to some things I do to people..[and] I’m beginning to think about how I might sort of minimize others and fail to see them as people,” the words cut to my core and I can’t help but think I must embrace this thinking if I want to be the leader I want to become.
Here’s to true, deep self-reflection and a transformation in how I (we) regard those in my (our) midst.
-Schlegs
schlegsofminne 