Meet At The Right Place

James Martin is an interesting fellow. He grew up in Plymouth Meeting Pennsylvania, a short drive from Birchrunville where I live. Another connection to me is that he started out with a business degree from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania (I hold a Wharton MBA) and then went off to work in finance for General Electric for 6 or 7 years.  Then we went our separate ways as he became a Jesuit priest…and I didn’t.

Martin is a prolific writer, a wildly entertaining and humorous speaker, and quite the thinker on a variety of issues that have great bearing on improving your management skills. Recently I had the good fortune to hear him interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR.

Much of what he talked about had major implications for better management and improved business results. I was particularly struck by a story he shared about Ignatius of Loyola who founded the Jesuits. The story was all about the power of meeting people where they are. Where they are not meaning physically where they are but mentally where they are.

Most powerfully, it was about you meeting them where they are, not you expecting them to meet you where you are. Martin spoke eloquently and humorously about the power of being willing to listen to others, understand their situation and thinking, and modify your words and actions to connect with them…where they are.

Communication only happens when all the parties are willing to meet the others where they are. All the parties need to be willing to walk in the other person’s shoes, to understand how they got where they are, how it shaped their current beliefs and actions, and what this means for connecting with them and communicating effectively.

We all are where we are, a situation build from a confluence of all that went before, all we experienced. What comes next is built on this base. Great care needs to be taken to respect this history and use it as the basis for what is to come. Great care needs to be taken to start where they are and create a path forward the builds on rather than dismisses or ignores this history. Their history not yours.

All too often those in charge forget that it is their responsibility to meet their people where they are and guide them forward. It takes lots of listening, lots of understanding, lots of being willing to accept that others have different backgrounds, different experiences, different education, different abilities and skills. Different, not better or worse.

It’s up to you to meet them where they are and use the mutual understanding this generates to draw the path forward in ways that build on their history and lead them forward in ways that they can see and understand. In ways that connect with them fully, draw them in, excite them, and lead them to be fully engaged in the journey rather than dragged kicking and screaming down a path they don’t understand, that makes no sense to them, that ignores their history.

Listen to Ignatius of Loyola, and James Martin, meet them where they are.