Shifting Perspectives
Zooming out, required reading & one insight
For those of you in Europe and the UK, this week hasn’t been a comfortable one. Soaring temperatures have meant adjusting to the excessive heat, quickly.
What felt hot the week before, felt almost incomparable, against this weeks 40°C (104 Fahrenheit). It’s amazing how the experience of the last few days can shift perspectives so quickly.
The interesting thing is that these tiny, sometimes momentary, shifts in perspective happen around you constantly; some noticeable, and others almost unconsciously as experiences shape and change your view of life.
Yet despite all the possibilities to broaden your perspective, it’s easy to remain fixed in your views.
But for leaders who want to be more adaptable, learning to actively change and broaden your perspective is a key skill.
As one client and CEO recently said to me “you don’t know what you don’t know; until you know.”
The question is of course what happens, once you do know. Because one tiny insight can have a powerful impact, if you let it.
For leaders, there’s a balance between staying authentic and true to who you are whilst also being open to different ideas, views and change. And like the heat this week, anything that challenges the status quo is not always comfortable.
But the unknown is a place that’s rich in opportunity, if you explore it.
To help you intentionally broaden your perspective this week, here are five things to experiment with.
Meantime, if you haven’t already, I’d love it if you hit the button below.
Strategise: Think about the composition of your leadership team. Sharing the same ambition and having great collaborative relationships are fantastic, but if you are too similar it’s likely you’ll share the same blind spots.
What perspectives are your Board or leadership team missing?
What or whose perspective drives most of your decisions? The team, your customers, your stakeholders or advisors?
What one perspective would introduce a shift and tilt the balance?
Lead: Everyone has a natural way of thinking and operating, whether it be a focus on logic over emotion, optimism over skepticism, caution over risk, big picture over detail.
What are your top three natural preferences that guide how you work?
What would be the opposite perspective (e.g. low risk = high risk)?
Write down one question for each that you can ask yourself when you face a decision to encourage yourself to think differently.
Expand. Great leadership is all around you, and not always from those with the word ‘leader’ in their title.
If you’ve spent most of your life in one field, industry or country, it can be helpful to look outward and see what you can learn from the wider world.
Think about your interests outside your day job; film, music, sports perhaps.
Who exhibits great leadership in that field?
What qualities about them resonate with you the most? What don’t?
What one thing that they do you could bring into your own leadership and experiment with?
Read: This book by Reni Eddo-Lodge has been the biggest perspective shifter for me this year. It was not a comfortable read, but it has opened my eyes to perspectives that I never knew existed and her writing on structural and institutional design made me reflect deeply on what I thought I knew, professionally as well as personally.
If I had the choice it would be required reading on the leadership curriculum.
Observe: When you’re in the thick of it, engrossed in ‘your' world there can be value in stepping back and trying to see things differently. There are many techniques that help you do that.
Here’s one:
Step 1. Find Google Earth and type in where you live. Zoom in as far as you can go.
What do you see on the map?
Look out the window. What sounds, energy and sensations do you feel?
Step 2. Back on Google Earth, hit the Zoom Out button (bottom left). Keep going until it’s as far as it will go.
What do you feel as you pan out? When you’re at the most distant point, what do you notice?
Remember, in both scenarios you’re in exactly the same place. The only thing that shifts is your perspective.
Last week’s issue: Preparing for Pre-holiday Pressure
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