Prejudice prevents you from seeing the world in its entirety. It forces you within some boundaries and it reinforces your perspective by limiting doubts.
When prejudice is taken a step further it becomes righteousness. That’s when you aim at keeping others within the same boundaries built your own prejudice, and you allow them only one possible version of the truth.
Prejudice and righteousness are human traits. That’s why it’s important to remind ourselves of how limiting they are.
To build relationships in a work environment, particularly when you have leadership responsibilities, consider the following three things.
Where are you struggling the most?
If you want a thing done well, do it yourself.
But it would be more accurate to say: if you do a thing yourself, you’ll probably consider it well done.
Because you are the only judge. You set the standard, you choose what “well” means.
Of course, that’s not practical and it does not scale. And so, at some point, you will have to work with others, who will bring a different perspective on what “well” is.
If you are open, that’s a way to progress and figure out that what you thought of as “well” was actually just “good enough”.
If you are closed, on the other hand, you will probably go on doing “good enough”, until it becomes obsolete.
There’s what you think you are. And that’s where you should invest most of your time. Understanding what you stand for, figuring out what you like, setting your own boundaries, and managing your triggers. You have full control on this.
There’s what others think you are. And that’s something you can’t do much about. Because others will always use their past, their experiences, their fears, their dreams, their thoughts, their values, their versions of the world to process what you are doing. You just can’t change that.
And there’s what you think others think you are. And that’s dangerous. That’s when we give up figuring ourselves out and instead use others to highlight everything we don’t like about us – our body, our mind, our traits, our personality, our behavior. You are giving up control doing that.
It is so tempting to think you have the right solution.
To take things in your hands and ask of others that they do as you tell them.
To schedule just one more meeting and go through what everybody is doing, assign blame, share opinions, drive action.
To comment on everything as it is happening and inspire urgency.
To check, and double-check, and triple-check, and check just one more time.
To put people, projects, tasks into boxes and then complain that things are slow, siloed, not properly communicated.
It is so tempting to take ownership and control.
And it is the exact opposite of what you should do.
You've got this 