Do you agree?
Human beings are complicated. Each one of us comes with our own personal mini-universe of opinions, feelings and beliefs.?It is that diversity of preferences and thinking styles that helps create amazing new ideas, drives innovation, and makes a team powerful. If we all agree about everything, not much new or interesting is likely to happen.
Most of the time we all muddle?along in that clumsy soup of human diversity of?opinions,?confident with our own private and personal ideas and preferences.?We choose our own limits of what we find comfortable, what challenges us, or is beyond what we are ready to believe?or agree with. Everyone being a bit different?seems to work fine for the most part.
Then, every now and again...we have to vote on something. And despite all that diversity of thinking we suddenly become tribal, black and white, and divided - as we rationalize our binary voting choices.
The remarkable thing is that it seems?to me that we don’t just become obviously divided -?often we become?split exactly?in HALF.?
It seems like whenever we are forced?to make a binary choice we almost spookily divide down the middle into two opposed, and often hostile, camps.
That means that half of us is constantly?unhappy. Half of anything is a lot of people to be living with disappointment, with our opinions and choices rejected. Factions form, divisions?deepen and the potential common ground shrinks.?
Leaders?are not?elected, or appointed, to lead only the people that agree with them. A fundamental skill of leaders?in business is to create alignment among their people and set a north star that everyone?can get behind. Smart business leaders know that innovation and great work arises from diversity of opinion.
Confident?leaders embrace ideas and opinions that differ from?their own. If companies were run with an "us and them" mentality, turnover would be high and companies would fill up with 'yes people', and creativity would stagnate.
The task of?leaders must surely be to seek out that common ground where a vast majority?of us can be happy, productive and comfortable. Is it good leadership just to further convince people that already agree with you, and further alienate and ridicule those that do not?
It is a sad situation when consensus and teamwork is seen as betrayal or weakness. Are you really a leader if only half your people are ready to follow you?
We live in an increasingly divided, binary, world. It is the job of our leaders to align us, to find our common ground and embrace all of our ideas. To bring us together and harness all that incredible?human diversity of thinking.
To create, not destroy. To listen, not to always talk. To unite, not to divide. To look for messy agreement that?fixes problems for the majority, rather than focus on extremes that?only work for some.
Do you agree?
Transformation Coach, Author of "Where's My Free Lunch?"
2 年Thanks for your comments all - after another few days of hearing about elections going 49.9% v.50.1% it feels like we are just as divided as ever. One day perhaps there'll be a person or an idea that 75% of us can get behind.
Good stuff, Eddie Ross. Looking for common ground, compromising, is sometimes done at the expense of a greater good, but most of the time it's the way of making progress that benefits larger groups of people. Unfortunatelly, it's easier to divide with propaganda than to unite explaining the benefits for the involved parties. That's driving our sadly divided political scenarios, at least in many Western countries.
Global Business Leader, Chief Strategy and Operations Officer, Coach and Change Agent
2 年Sometimes the arguments or the story that we are asked to vote on are complicated, so in the end I think it often comes down to trust. Do you believe what the leader is telling you will benefit the community they are serving, or is it for their personal gain? According to the 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer research, nearly 6 in 10 say their default tendency is to distrust something until they see evidence it is trustworthy. This is fueled by the fact that nearly one out of every two respondents view government and media as divisive forces in society. On the other hand, at 61%, business is the most trusted institution which means that the relationship that a business leader creates with their employees is especially important.
Global Corporate Communications at Amadeus IT Group SA; Comms at EONA-X, Mobility, Transport & Tourism data space.
2 年Diverse teams, diverse mindsets, diverse views. All of that enriches their leader and the company they work for. Diversity, plurality converge in One Direction, no pun intended.
Storyteller at Amadeus - and rock god!
2 年I generally agree. Leaders have to unite all of their team and set everyone off on the same path. Areas such as politics, though, have suffered from "footballification" in the last few years. Whatever your team does, you support it even if it's wrong. It's hard to get the fans of opposing teams to go in the same direction. Also, many times, when we ask them something in an election or referendum they vote without having the right level of knowledge to make? an informed decision. Is it ight to go for a consensus decision like this when there are experts who can show the way better?