If you are anyone who manages others, works with others, talks to others, or just happens to run into other people, you’ve noticed that they have different beliefs that guide them. The great difficulty most people have is understanding what this means and how it guides their thoughts and actions. Even more importantly, it leads to many having a complete inability to understand these others and figure out how to effectively communicate with them and work together for mutual benefit. Witness our recent American election.
I, like many of you, have often wondered about the seeming intransigence of those others when faced with, what seemed to me, to be rational arguments based on factual information. Then I started reading articles by Jonathan Haidt and eventually his great book “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.” I highly recommend you read this book for the insight it gives and the ways it offers to cross the divide of differing core beliefs.
To be successful an organization must bring all its people together into an aligned, unified, and accountable whole with each and every person going in the same direction towards the same goal…and working together in spite of differing core beliefs. Each needs to be reached and spoken to in the language and way that connects with them and enables all to see how this future benefits each and every one.
It is not easy.
Speaking to all means being willing to accept that differing beliefs have value and being willing to modify how you communicate to engage with them in mutually understandable language aimed at overcoming common problems in ways that all can accept.
It is not easy.
Recently Haidt wrote an article for The New York Times called “We Need a Little Fear.” As I read it I realized that while he is talking about issues requiring united political solutions…and offers a way for liberals and conservatives to unite on the issue of births to unmarried mothers…what he describes can be generalized to many organizational issues.
As the Bedouin proverb he quotes says, “me against my brother, my brother and me against my cousins, my cousins and me against strangers.” To paraphrase a bit, when the fleet of asteroids is heading for us, we are all cousins.
It still is not easy, but now it is possible.