Perspective-Taking: An Overlooked Skill for New Managers

A few weeks ago, Amy started her first management job, leading a team of five quality assurance inspectors for Madison MedTech, a small company that manufactures parts for medical devices.

When she interviewed for the job, Amy's new boss, Brian, warned her that she'd have to hit the ground running. According to Brian, the team's performance had declined dramatically over the past few months. He was counting on Amy to turn things around.

During her first one-on-one meetings with her employees, Amy got her first clue about what could be causing the recent performance slump. When she asked each of her team members what she could do to help them, three of them suggested getting rid of the electronic defect tracking tool (DTT).

About two months before Amy joined Madison, her predecessor had replaced the old-fashioned paper-based defect tracking form with an electronic version. The DTT was supposed to speed up production by communicating defects to the manufacturing staff more quickly. Instead, it seemed to be having the opposite effect.

Under the old system, inspectors recorded defects on a paper form at their workstations. With the DTT, however, they had to leave their workstations and enter the defects in a shared computer terminal several yards away. While spending time out on the floor with her employees, Amy often found two or three of them standing in line, waiting their turn to enter defects in the terminal. She sometimes overheard her employees privately referring to the terminal as the "work stoppage machine."

Amy decided to review the production and quality metrics for the past year. Just as she suspected, the performance slump coincided perfectly with the implementation of the DTT. Like so many other process improvement initiatives she had experienced in the past, the DTT was an example of a change that looked good on paper but failed to deliver in the real world.

Armed with feedback from her employees, her own observations, and hard data, Amy approached her boss with a plan to discontinue the DTT and reinstate the paper-based system. Brian didn't like the idea of shutting down an initiative so soon after it was implemented, but he reluctantly agreed.

A few weeks after reinstating the paper-based system, Amy reviewed the metrics again. She couldn't believe her eyes. Not only had production levels not rebounded, they had actually dropped below where they were under the DTT. To make matters (much) worse, Amy received an email from Brian with the subject line We Need to Talk! Apparently, customers were beginning to contact Brian with complaints about defective parts from Madison.

After the shock wore off, Amy took a deeper dive into the metrics. She found that almost all of the production and quality problems in the past two weeks could be traced to Erin and Julie, the two most experienced inspectors on her team. Amy couldn't decide if she should scream or cry, but she felt like doing both. What the hell was happening!?

Okay, let's rewind the tape. It's six months before Amy joined Madison. Brian had asked Nick, the then-current quality assurance manager to implement an electronic defect tracking system. Nick, who was already mentally checked-out from Madison and sending his resume to other employers, delegated the responsibility to his two top inspectors: Erin and Julie.

Erin and Julie were excited about the project. They didn't have training in process improvement, but they got together on evenings, weekends, and lunch breaks to read books and articles to teach themselves. After a lot of hard work, they put together a solid plan that included change management, training, and a modest investment in tablets to be mounted at each workstation to ensure production continued to run smoothly.

Nick thanked them for their effort and then stripped out the "inessentials" (i.e., the change management, training, and tablets) and presented the low-cost version of their plan to Brian, who gave it the green light.

When the DTT was rolled out in its bare bones form, Erin and Julie felt blindsided and betrayed. When they confronted Nick about the changes to the plan, he dismissed their concerns and pushed forward. The DTT project was a disaster, and, because everyone on the team knew that Erin and Julie developed the plan, they felt humiliated.

Erin and Julie knew that the DTT wasn't working. But when the new boss, Amy, unceremoniously dumped it and reverted back to the paper forms, it was yet another humiliation for them. Their trust in the company's leadership was trashed and their morale sunk below rock bottom. Unsurprisingly, it showed up in their job performance.

Okay, so what the hell did just happen?

This new manager disaster was brought to you by a lack of perspective-taking. Perspective-taking is just what it sounds like: putting yourself in someone else's shoes and looking at the world through their eyes.

When solving a problem, it helps to take the perspective of your employees, your boss, your peers, and other stakeholders. Pretend to be the other person and ask these questions:

• What do I know about this situation?
• What do I not know about this situation?
• How might I be thinking about this situation?
• How might I be feeling about this situation?

Ideally, you can find the answers to these questions by asking the other people involved directly. If Amy had spent more time time with Erin and Julie, for example, they might have told her the sordid backstory of the DTT.

In the real world, however, it's not always possible to get others' perspectives just by asking for them. For one thing, some employees--like Erin and Julie--have good reason to distrust others and may be unwilling to share their real thoughts and feelings. Even when someone is candid, however, they may not be able to give you a complete story because they don't know what they don't know. (Yes, I know that's a confusing sentence, but think about it.)

Another limitation is that you won't always have the time to talk to everyone involved in a decision before making it. There are going to be times, for example, where you find yourself in a meeting with other leaders discussing a plan and you'll have to advocate for people who aren't in the room on-the-fly. You're not always going to be able to call a time-out and take the time necessary to gather others' perspectives first-hand.

I suspect that perspective-taking is second nature to some people. They do it naturally and easily. For the rest of us, it's a skill we have to work on.

You'll make mistakes along the way. It's unavoidable that you'll make some incorrect assumptions about others' knowledge, thoughts, and feelings. But, if you learn from those mistakes, you'll eventually get better at perspective-taking and become a stronger leader as a result.

At this point, you might be asking how perspective-taking would have helped Amy. She didn't know the backstory, after all, and it isn't likely that Brian was going to clue her in and make himself look bad in the process. The reality is that Amy was hampered by another common new manager mistake: tunnel vision. She was so focused on solving the problem as quickly as possible, it never even occurred to her to wonder why Erin and Julie weren't complaining about the DTT like their coworkers. If she had noticed that anomaly, she might have decided to dig into her employees' perspectives with as much vigor as she dug into the metrics.

This is part of a series of articles for new managers. If you enjoyed this post, check out the other articles in the series: Promotion Shock, The Boring Truth About Wardrobe, The Near Mentor, Listen to Everything, Promise Nothing, Your First Day, Don't Mention It, Ask And You Shall Receive, What Got You Here Blah, Blah Blah, You are Not the Yardstick, The Most Important Meeting, You're on the Air, Your People Come First, Your First One-On-Ones, and Perspective-Taking: An Overlooked Skill for New Managers.