Follow the Contradictions
It’s Friday afternoon, and an unsettling meeting that you had this
morning with a major customer still echoes in your mind. Even as you start
wrapping up this week and planning for the next, you can’t seem to let it go,
nor can you put your finger on exactly what’s bothering you. Despite the hour,
the phone keeps ringing and messages still need to be returned, so you focus
your attention on the urgencies of the moment, feeling too busy to have any
other choice. It isn’t until the following Monday that you get the difficult
news that your customer is taking its business to a competitor.
The signal was there, telling you that something wasn’t quite
right, but you rushed past it and dove into other tasks. If you had stopped to
reflect on Friday afternoon’s hunch about that uncomfortable meeting, would you
have realized what went wrong, reached out to the team, and at least given
yourself a chance to address its concern?
Your ability to handle
these situations depends on your sensitivity to the nagging thoughts and gut
feelings that are all too easy to ignore. I call them Contradictions because
they run contrary to the ingrained thinking that carries most people through
the day. To “follow the contradictions” means paying attention to the people
and circumstances around you, pausing to consider any faint indicators that
something may be wrong. This can reveal cracks that may exist in the logic of
your everyday beliefs, which are all too easy to overlook when you’re constantly
putting out fires.
Why is it so difficult to
notice and consider the inner echoes of a contradiction? Part of the answer
lies in my last strategy+business post, in which I described a common dynamic, the
manager’s dilemma: As someone in a leadership position, you simply do not have
the resources, either within the organization or yourself, to handle the
demands on your attention and time. By trying to accommodate every
request, you only fall further behind. This leads to counterproductive behavior
patterns that further deplete your already compromised capacity. One of the
first capabilities compromised is the ability to remain present and follow the
contradictions. And that’s too bad, because each of those little indicators
represents an opportunity to refocus your attention on the high-value
priorities that can give you better alignment and traction in your
relationships and on your priorities.
Contradictions are always
emerging. An employee sees something alarming, but doesn’t talk about it. A
board member starts to tell you something informally, but suddenly stops.
Moments like this provide opportunities to guide you through potentially
troubled situations if you take the time to learn from them. Unfortunately,
many leaders feel they don’t have the resources to address yet another task in
their brain’s inbox. The busier you get, the faster you move and the less you
notice. The less you notice, the fewer opportunities you have to pick up on the
subtle signals that something is amiss.
Here are some ways you can apply mindfulness to learn to follow
the contradictions:
• Give yourself
permission to take a step back. As demands pile up, it is easy to get
caught in a reflexive cycle of jumping from one pressing issue to the next.
Allow yourself the time to reflect on whether you feel uneasy about something.
• Ask what and why. When
you feel the hint of a contradiction, ask yourself: “What is really
going on here?” and “Why could this matter?” Search for the answers
without falling back on presumptions, and don’t rush to label thingsgood or bad.
These inquiries can expose the source of the contradiction.
• Look for the
underlying dynamic.There is always more going on below the surface
than you can see. You cannot assume that the people you deal with — customers,
employees, or other stakeholders — will explicitly voice what they are feeling.
Nor can you assume that what you have always done in the past will continue to
please. Thus, you need to validate your perceptions by tuning into the factors
that have led someone in your professional sphere to signal you this way. These
factors might include a shift in, for example, a customer or other
stakeholder’s goals (which now suddenly conflict with yours); an expectation
that an employee had of you that you unknowingly failed to meet; or a trust
issue that you haven’t seen. Explore these issues as openly as you can — if you
can talk about them, it not only gives the relationship room to grow, but it
avoids the secondary effects of these gaps, including the loss of your
credibility.
• Be prepared to
feel uncomfortable at first. Following through with contradictions can lead
you to face things that you might prefer to avoid. But would you rather be the
last to know that something you’re doing is not meeting expectations? You avoid
this by learning how to notice those contradictions and use them as
opportunities for conversation.
While you may not be able to change or influence certain external
circumstances, following the contradictions is a concrete action that will
restore some of your personal resources and eventually enable you to move
beyond your dilemma of shrinking capacity and increased demands. When you make
it a habit to think this way, you see contradictions sooner and respond more
effectively.
Let’s return to our earlier example. It’s Friday afternoon, and
you just can’t get that unsettling customer meeting out of your head. All
around you the office is abuzz with colleagues wrapping up the week’s tasks.
Your first instinct is to push the unsettling thoughts down and plow through
your inbox, but instead you give yourself permission to take time to follow the
contradiction. As you ponder the root of the problem, you feel you’re wasting
precious time, but you persevere. You recall that your customer’s team members
shot each other odd looks during the meeting and weren’t smiling and chatting
as they left the conference room. What was potentially below the surface of
these signals? There could be other explanations, but the risk that they may be
unhappy about something and unwilling to tell you openly is too great, so you
make a phone call to check in.
Maybe you save the day with that phone call, and keep the
customer; maybe you don’t. In either case, you’ve strengthened the relationship
and made it impossible for the customer to act without your influence.
Moreover, you’ve distilled the nagging voices in your head into a concise
problem with an obvious solution. In short, by following the contradictions and
communicating with others about them, you test your hunches in a proactive,
trust-oriented way that sets you apart. And your ability to follow the
contradictions will make you an even more present, engaged leader.
Jesse Sostrin is a director
at PwC’s U.S. Leadership Coaching Center of Excellence. He is the author ofThe
Manager’s Dilemma(Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). He writes and speaks at the
intersection of individual and organizational success.
http://www.strategy-business.com/blog/Follow-the-Contradictions?gko=b6cf9&utm_source=itw&utm_medium=20160614&utm_campaign=fixed
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