Changing Your View
Last time I was hiking in Montana's Glacier National Park, I
stopped to view through binoculars, a mountain goat trekking
atop a rock cliff. My husband, viewing the switch-back trail
we'd just climbed, happened to see a grizzly bear cross behind a
group of hikers a hundred yards below us. With my narrowed
focus, I never saw the bear. Our different views yielded
different impressions.
It's like that at work, too. We survey our landscape using
departmental binoculars, seeing through lenses of a work group,
a site, a division, a subsidiary, or a corporation. We may see
the goat and miss the bear, or vice versa. We make decisions,
offer solutions, create ideas and do our work based on an
understanding of what we've gleaned from a partial view.
So if you're in software development or human resources,
customer service or accounting, sales or creative services,
manufacturing or marketing, legal or public relations, or any
number of departments, professions, industries or businesses,
you'll tend to see your work-world from that role perspective,
making interpretations accordingly.
But if you want to be winning at working, you need to get beyond
a narrow orientation. Doing that requires a different mind-set.
One that understands that actions taken by one individual or
department impact other individuals or departments; actions
taken in one business or industry impact other businesses or
industries; and actions taken in one country, impact other
countries.
Changing your view has nothing to do with larger numbers of
people or the size of a department or business enterprise. It
has nothing to do with where you are in the hierarchy either.
People with myopic self-interests can be found at every level of
an organization. It's not the position that helps us see
differently, it's the "eyes" we develop.
Let's say, you implement a simple change, going from paper to
electronic invoices. That decision impacts the printer of the
paper invoices, the shipper of the forms, the IT department
needed to build new systems, suppliers who must adapt to your
way of doing business, employees who must be trained on the
electronic system and ... you get the point. Knowing the impact
doesn't mean you won't make the change. But it produces better
decision making, enhanced communications and more positive
results.
People who are winning at working think beyond their narrow
roles, stepping back to gain a larger perspective. Mao Tse-tung
puts it this way, "We think too small. Like the frog at the
bottom of the well. He thinks the sky is only as big as the top
of the well. If he surfaced, he would have an entirely different
view."
If you want to be winning at working, you need to surface from
your well and look out at the work-world you share. Changing
your view, changes everything.
(c) 2005 Nan S. Russell. All rights reserved.
About the author:
Sign up to receive Nan's free eColumn, Winning at Working, at
http://www.winningatworking.com. Nan Russell has spent over
twenty years in management, most recently with QVC as a Vice
President. Currently working on her first book, Nan is a writer,
columnist, small business owner, and instructor.
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