I’ve been in Shanghai, working in a hotel which was, apparently, the home of Shanghai’s Gangster No 2 early last century. Given the photos of him around the walls, holding court with the statesmen, politicians, actors and business people of his day, he was clearly a very popular guy. Or maybe he was very persuasive.
Monday morning: a workshop that starts by asking this marketing leadership team: what’s the thing you most need to develop that will create a step-change in the work of this team? Their answer: influencing. Creating more effective relationships with their internal and external business partners so that they get the buy-in, engagement, permission, resources – and all those other variants of Yes – which allow their ideas to come into reality.
I’m taken aback by how strongly the team feels about those it has to influence, and mostly those feelings are not positive ones. The default stance seems to be that others are wrong or bad to behave as they do, and that is what makes them difficult to influence. Which sort of explains, I guess, why people think they are going to have to have difficult, fierce and risky conversations to move things forward…
So the first intervention is to change how they look at these ‘problem people’ (Wayne Dyer: change how you look at something, and what you look at changes). To stop making them wrong, to stop making them intractable. To see that the behaviour of these people is perfectly right, natural and justified – from their perspective.
Sometimes we hear exactly what we need to hear precisely when we need to hear it most…or in this case read.
Just this morning I found myself frustrated by yet another conversation gone horribly wrong when I asked a certain someone if he would reconsider looking at a possible solution to his problem (situation). It’s and old conversation. I know I’m opening up that can of worms again and hoping it hasn’t changed to snakes.
What I find myself feeling after reading this posting is that I do forget that this person feels perfectly right, natural and justified. It doesn’t matter what I would do in his situation. I’m not him. I view him as a “problem person” and thus I dehumanize his experience. Thanks for the reminder that not everyone sees the world the way I do…really? Yes.
Great comments!
I was just thinking the other day that what I want to do is recognize and accept completely the uniqueness of every person. By not accepting someone’s uniqueness, I imply that they should be like me or someone else, thereby discounting my own uniqueness as well because if they’re like me, then I’m like them. I believe that I can love everyone, and not necessarily want all of them near me. My goal is to accept them where they are and act responsibly following my own intuition and guidance