Your direct reports spend a lot of time thinking how best to influence you. You probably spend time listening to them try to influence you. You can save them and yourself time and effort simply by telling them what it will take to influence you.
Roger Schwarz — Smart Leaders Smarter Teams
I saw a friend of mine the other day,
And he told me that my eyes were gleamin’.
Oh I said I had been away, and he knew,
Oh he knew the depths I was meanin’.
And it felt so good to see his face,
Or the comfort invested in my soul.
Oh to feel the warmth of a smile,
When he said “I’m happy to have you home”.
Ooh, “I’m happy to have you home.”
If you or your team members believe that you must first have trust before you can start moving to mutual learning, then you are confusing cause and effect, and will probably never build or rebuild trust. Trust develops when team members take risks by making themselves vulnerable — for example, by being transparent — and see that others do not use the vulnerability against them.
Roger Schwarz — Smart Leaders Smarter Teams
It’s difficult to be transparent when you’re using a unilateral control mindset; you would have to share information that doesn’t support your solutions, disclose why you really want to know what you’re asking, and reveal that you are, in fact, trying to unilaterally control the situation. Sharing this information would undermine your approach and your ability to win. But being transparent when using a mutual learning mindset actually increases your effectiveness and enhances your strategy because your strategy is to learn jointly rather than control the situation.
One reason is that […] people aren’t fully aware of the mindset they are actually in. In your own organisation, I’m guessing you heard other leaders (perhaps your boss?) use language that espouses openness, cooperation, and the sharing of accountability between peer members of a team, but when you listen to or watch the same leaders in challenging situations, they seem to be guided by an opposite mindset, unilateral control, without recognising the discrepancy.
I found the various little glasses so inspiring that I was wafted into an entirely new and unexpected state of consciousness. There was no longer any inside or outside, no longer an “I” and the “others”, No. 1 and No. 2 were no more; caution and timidity were gone, and the earth and sky, the universe and everything in it that creeps and flies, revolves, rises or falls, had all become one. I was shamefully, gloriously, triumphantly drunk. It was as if I were drowned in a sea of blissful musings, but, because of the violent heaving of the waves, had to cling with eyes, hands, and feet to all solid objects in order to keep my balance on the swaying streets and between the rocking houses and trees. “Marvellous,” I thought, “only unfortunately just a little too much.”
The more I read and the more familiar I became with city life, the stronger grew my impression that what I was now getting to know as reality belonged to an order of things different from the view of the world I had grown up with in the country, among rivers and woods, among men and animals in a small village bathed in sunlight, with the winds and the clouds moving over it, and encompassed by dark night in which uncertain things happened. It was no mere locality on the map, but “God’s world,” so ordered by Him and filled with secret meaning. But apparently men did not know this, and even the animals had somehow lost the senses to perceive it. That was evident, for example, in the sorrowful, lost look of the cows, and in the resigned eyes of horses, in the devotion of dogs, who clung so desperately to human beings, and even in the self-assured step of the cats who had chosen house and barn as their residence and hunting ground. People were like the animals, and seemed as unconscious as they. They looked down upon the ground or up into the trees in order to see what could be put to use, and for what purpose; like animals they herded, paired, and fought, but did not see that they dwelt in a uniformed cosmos, in God’s world, in an eternity where everything is already born and everything has already died.