Flip It Over and See Through Their Eyes
“They say I disrespect them… they say I’m insulting or condescending. I don’t understand, I don’t do those things… I would never willfully insult them. I don’t know why they are upset.” Managers can and do find themselves in this situation. Employee anger pointed directly at them, but no clue what they did wrong.
Henry Ford 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.”
Maybe Ford’s too controversial now… how about Harper Lee… “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.”
Or maybe Lincoln… “I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.”
For the manager to grasp what went wrong, the manager has to turn loose. Turn loose of their own perspective and walk around the table. Their intentions don’t matter. What matters is what the employee heard, not what the manager said. Get to know your employee.
Something like 60% of face to face communication in America is nonverbal. That means posture, facial expressions, hand movement, stance, weight shifts, volume and tone… all these things carry more information than the words… and the words STILL MATTER.
Want to improve as a manager? Start learning to flip it over and see the other side. See everything from someone else’s point of view. Hear everything from someone else’s point of view. Physically get up and walk around your desk. Sit in the guest chair and think about what you sounded like to the employee that just left angry.
Sherrie Campbell, psychologist and author has an interesting short article on this idea online at Entrepreneur Magazine: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/275543... It’s worth a look if you’re thinking about perspective and value.
Learning to see conversations and meetings, and more importantly, ideas and challenges from another perspective is critical to communications. Suddenly you begin to anticipate reactions, adjust for objections ahead of time, and actually LISTEN to the other person.
These are good things… but flipping takes effort and practice. Start with some safe practice. Read emails out loud before you send them… and read them thinking about the recipient’s point of view. What will matter to them? What might be insulting to them? Why should they care about this? How much do they care about this? What should I be asking that I’m not?
A little practice with email and the written word gets you started, but quickly move to meeting planning by thinking about the other side of the discussion. Put yourself in their place. How do they want to be addressed? Why does any of this matter to them? What does respect sound like to them? What do they need?
It’s very easy to focus on your own needs, but to get them met you need to meet the needs of others.