One of the most underrated and under taught skills in professional life, that is I suggest nevertheless vital for success, is preparing for and seeking to understand the people you will meet or deal with. This means anticipating who you will be seeing and how they are likely to react and behave. Thinking in advance not just about what you may want or need but what the person you are meeting is feeling, thinking or needs.
It sounds incredibly simple and obvious, but tendency to assume that everybody else thinks like we do, coupled with the pressure of other activities in day to day working life, often means that lip service is paid to this critical task. It is easy just to assume that say the other side in a deal will have an immediate understanding and empathy with our point of view. The truth is often the polar opposite. They are only looking at things from their perspective.
I came across this apt quote in Dale Carnegie’s book How to Win Friends and Influence People by the then Dean Donham of Harvard Business School:
I would rather walk the sidewalk in front of a person’s office for two hours before an interview than step into that office without a perfectly clear idea of what I was going to say and what that person – from my knowledge of his or her motives – was likely to answer.
If somebody genuinely has a point of view no matter how stupid or wrong you may consider it, you just cannot discount it because it will affect their behaviour and how they react to what you want. If a person believes the earth is flat, you do not have to agree with them but understanding this may help deal with them. TS Eliot said There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal can be finally separated and labelled.
The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius suggested that Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
Here is an interesting Forbes article Why Understanding Other Perspectives Is A Key Leadership Skill which concludes:
We live in a professional world that goes fast and where people do not always take the time to step back. When going fast, leaders often confuse their perspectives with reality and have difficulty truly understanding the point of view of others.
A perspective is not right or wrong by default. It just is what it is: the point of view of a single person based on their life experiences and values, among other things. We each have one; sometimes we share it with others, and sometimes we do not.
Stephen Covey the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People suggests When you really listen to another person from their point of view, and reflect back to them that understanding, it's like giving them emotional oxygen.
Henry Ford summed this all up well when he said If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from that person's angle as well as from your own.
It sounds incredibly simple and obvious, but tendency to assume that everybody else thinks like we do, coupled with the pressure of other activities in day to day working life, often means that lip service is paid to this critical task. It is easy just to assume that say the other side in a deal will have an immediate understanding and empathy with our point of view. The truth is often the polar opposite. They are only looking at things from their perspective.
I came across this apt quote in Dale Carnegie’s book How to Win Friends and Influence People by the then Dean Donham of Harvard Business School:
I would rather walk the sidewalk in front of a person’s office for two hours before an interview than step into that office without a perfectly clear idea of what I was going to say and what that person – from my knowledge of his or her motives – was likely to answer.
If somebody genuinely has a point of view no matter how stupid or wrong you may consider it, you just cannot discount it because it will affect their behaviour and how they react to what you want. If a person believes the earth is flat, you do not have to agree with them but understanding this may help deal with them. TS Eliot said There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal can be finally separated and labelled.
The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius suggested that Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
Here is an interesting Forbes article Why Understanding Other Perspectives Is A Key Leadership Skill which concludes:
We live in a professional world that goes fast and where people do not always take the time to step back. When going fast, leaders often confuse their perspectives with reality and have difficulty truly understanding the point of view of others.
A perspective is not right or wrong by default. It just is what it is: the point of view of a single person based on their life experiences and values, among other things. We each have one; sometimes we share it with others, and sometimes we do not.
Stephen Covey the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People suggests When you really listen to another person from their point of view, and reflect back to them that understanding, it's like giving them emotional oxygen.
Henry Ford summed this all up well when he said If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from that person's angle as well as from your own.
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