Love! A few years ago I was having deep seated trouble with a colleague at work. The situation had gone on for a while and I had tried everything within my capacity to smooth over the relationship. At least everything I knew at the time that was essential to working well with others. As some of you can relate to, I even tried adjusting my own personality when dealing with the person in the hope that things would get better. But the relationship remained volatile. Great sometimes and out of the blue the opposite would happen. I found this really challenging. Remember how I said I love to engage in the last post? So you can imagine how tough I found this, not being who I feel naturally. On a training course I recounted what I saw as my predicament to another participant. What a listening ear he lent that day! Sometimes it is useful to get an independent perspective. But we have to be willing to take their feedback. He said two things to me. 1. You have tried everything, have you tried doing nothing? 2. I want you to read a book called ‘leadership and self-deception’ by the Arbinger Institute. When I got back to the office I did exactly that – nothing. To this day I am blown away by the impact of doing nothing. You see, it turns out that my need to do something to fix a relationship was not the approach needed here. What was needed was quiet. Slowly but surely I saw our relationship improve. Over time we became great allies and to this day we are in touch with each other. The natural flow of working life, not forced, helped us heal the relationship. In the end I learnt a lot of new skills from this colleague that I am thankful for to this day. And what about the book? Well, I bought it and put it away for quite a while. It had to join the queue because I already had a reading list. Recently I finally got round to reading it, which is why I recall this story to share. I would recommend it to every aspiring leader. I summarise the book and the experience I just described in one word – LOVE! To lead effectively we need to have the capacity to love. Loving the people we lead means being willing to see things from their perspective. To empathise and most importantly to go out of our way to help them succeed. To love is to constantly see our common humanity in those around us and extend ourselves for them. #onlywecan make a difference!
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 06:00:45 +0000
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