It’s All About Perspective
Understanding and having perspective is crucial to success in the workplace, both at the team member level and at the leader level. Failure to maintain your own perspective of the things around can be dangerous. However, failing to understand the perspective of those around can be equally dangerous, if not more so. Here we will focus on the importance of perspective as a leader.
As a leader, your primary responsibility is to provide support for your team and others around you. First and foremost, you must understand the perspective, or “the why”, of your own leadership. Without this, you risk pushing your team in the wrong direction. Team members may sometimes question the direction of leadership and it is essential to understand leadership’s direction so that you can provide the appropriate answers. This is about more than “towing the company line”, though; it is about unity. If everyone moves in different directions, it makes it ever more difficult to achieve large-scale goals.
Perhaps even more important than keeping a team united under a company’s direction is seeing things from your team members’ perspectives. This is for a couple of reasons: 1) it helps you, as a leader, get ahead of questions and 2) it helps you to motivate and push your team. If you are able to get ahead of questions, it can afford you the opportunity to prevent rumors and misinformation from spreading due to speculation This also allows you to better understand how to motivate your team by seeing things through a different lens.
