One of the most powerful tools you have as a leader is perspective taking. It builds the relationships needed to lead with agility, drive achievement, develop others, and create sustainable value.
Perspective taking reveals other’s viewpoints, and their reasoning, while expanding your own understanding. It is the equivalent of observing events as if through a camera lens, and being able to open the aperture fully to create a more expansive view. Multiple perspectives are crucial to gain a full understanding of a concept, experience, or environment – to lead with agility.
These 3 steps will strengthen your perspective taking competency:
- Appreciate your own perspective. Thoroughly understanding your viewpoint, and how it was shaped, helps you respect and appreciate how others developed theirs.
- Practice perspective gathering. Learning to approach an idea or opportunity through someone else’s mindset takes practice. Actively gather different perspectives by asking for others’ thoughts before revealing yours; this allows them to share without feeling the pressure to affirm your thinking. Make it routine to collect team members’ takeaways after significant events; you’ll gain deeper insight into how they think.
- Connect diverse perspectives. Once all team members, including you, have shared their views on a given topic, connect the diverse viewpoints. Help team members see relationships between the different perspectives, including yours, and link these to business goals and culture. This challenges the team to sharpen their thinking and broaden their perspectives to create a valuable shared understanding. After that new shared perspective emerges, ask the team to describe how this benefits the situation under discussion, and improves them as a team.
Perspective taking strengthens your relationship with your team, enabling more agile leadership.
How could perspective taking strengthen your team’s agility?