For years, I struggled interacting with people that I believed just “didn’t get it”. The right answer was just so obvious and clear — how could they not see it? Why was I wasting my time trying to explain this to them? In the end, I would often just avoid these people and “lock them out” of involvement in whatever it was that I was doing.
Talking with many others in my industry, this is a common refrain. Interesting, everyone thinks they “get it” and it is the other people that don’t.
Over the course of the last few years, I have learned that I was the one that didn’t get it.
In fact, I was committing one of the dumbest mistakes in history: I was not leading folks to my way for thinking. I was not making what I was doing better by understanding their point of view. I was not helping them achieve their vision/goals in a way that could help mine. I was just being plain stupid.
As I think about a clean summary of the above — I think about a quote that I just read from Martin Luther King, Jr (in Tricycle):
“I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”
As a Buddhist, you would think that this would be obvious to me. It wasn’t, but it is now. For those of you of a less philosophical bend (and if I could be so bold):
I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality definition of leadership.
