Last week I posted about a great book called The Outward Mindset and described what it was about. This past week I started using this idea in my daily life. First thing I noticed however was how difficult it can be to have an Outward Mindset in a world where people are looking inwards. This week I want to share some of my current thoughts around this.
This image pretty well describes the feeling. Imagine walking upstairs against the flow of the crowd all walking down. You might find yourself having to go against the crowd in some situations. Trying to walk against the crowd is not comfortable for everyone else either. Imagine walking with the crowd going down while someone is trying to move in the opposite direction - that can also be quite frustrating. I find this so relevant in my experiences this week and have reflected some on other experiences I've had in the recent past.
When you change your mindset to one where you truly are trying to understand others' challenges and goals, you find quickly that there may be some inherent push-back and general distrust of this mindset as it goes against a lot of what people experience in their observable world. For instance, imagine trying to ask someone what their challenges are when they live in a paradigm where it is not common to be asked this question. The inherent response is something similar to "why are you asking me this?" and some resistance to providing an answer. The frustration having the outward mindset in the inward mindset world is that you are coming from a place where you truly wish to help others, while the inward mindset world sees it as a trick or naive.
"You cannot climb up these stairs - these are one way stairs."
There are no such thing as "one-way" stairs. The rules we set in place might try to force flow in one direction, but the stairs themselves don't really care which direction you intend to walk. In work, there's no real reason why we can't adopt a different mindset, but what we will find is that the rules, policies, and standard procedures might conflict with having an outward mindset. For instance, we might say things such as "you need to manage your people" to get them to fulfill your goals as a manager. The policies in place might require you to do things toward this mindset as well. Imagine an employee that is struggling to meet the expectations given to them, the expectations driven by the manager. To the manager, the employee is an object for the manager to use, a vehicle to get to the particular goal. If the employee cannot meet those expectations, the organization has decided to set up a standard process to provide discipline to that employee. Not only is the process in place, the organization as a whole decides that this policy is the best way forward and will require managers to provide discipline as a way of motivation.
So what does one with an outward mindset do in this environment? According to the Arbinger Institute, this is where those that decide to practice the outward mindset will face their biggest challenge - to stick to the mindset. The idea behind it is that shifting the mindset will be followed by changed behaviors. Behavior changes lag however, and it probably depends on the organization on how much that behavior lags. Having the outward mindset requires a constant and consistent use, with great patience to allow the behaviors to change. This has been my experience I think for quite some time. As my mindset has shifted, I have found it difficult to keep going at times, knowing that it would just be easier for me to conform to the pressures of going back inward.
There are pressures to improve, to push a metric, to use people as your own personal vehicles - but we must stick to it. We must keep the outward mindset, see people as human, with individual goals and individual challenges. If we can help them through their own challenges, and teach others this mindset shift, we can start to see true change in how we behave as an organization. I have seen instances where this mindset shift has occurred. The big successes weren't that the metrics improved, but that the teams engaged with each other to discuss the problems they faced and collaborated to help each other do better. Metrics do not move on their own, and processes do not occur on their own, each rely on people. While it is frustrating during the process of this mindset shift, it is proving to be well worth it. It takes a spark to get it started and I'm happy to be a part of sparking others' mindset shifts.