Leaders should take care to understand the perspectives of others
Recently, I attended a gathering of 1,500-plus board directors. One was Maggie Wilderotter, who previously served as CEO of Frontier Communications, growing it from $1 billion to $10 billion in revenue. She highlighted a key idea: we stand on the shoulders of our people. Our front line is our bottom line.
Leaders need to see what their people see. How often do we try to see from the point of view of those whom we lead? To experience what our people – our employees and customers – experience? Do we enable their voices, so as to better identify key organizational blind spots?
As I contemplated those questions, two vivid memories came to mind. The first was of a visit to the Uffizi in Florence, where I saw Leonardo da Vinci’s almost life-sized rendering of the Annunciation. It depicts an angel sharing news with a seated Mary. The technical mastery in details like the angel’s wing feathers is remarkable. Yet if you look closely, Mary’s fingers and the angel’s forearm seem out of proportion. For years, scholars attributed these imperfections to Leonardo’s immaturity as a 21-year-old artist. Then, a Leonardo scholar visited where this painting would have hung. It could only have been viewed from the side and up, rather than from the middle and center. From this perspective, the imperfections disappeared: the perspective was perfect.
Here is Leonardo’s genius. He painted from the point of view of the audience. In art, as in leadership and teamship, the point of view of the audience, follower or reader matters as much as your point of view. Leadership is about influence and trust. We accelerate those by taking care to imagine what it would be like to be in their shoes.
The second was at another meeting where I met Jeff Hoffman, the first astronaut to do an unplanned space walk. When I asked him what it was like to be in space five times, his answer was profound. “Language is based on shared experiences,” he said. How do you describe total weightlessness to those who have never experienced it? Our communications are inherently limited. We can’t just step into another’s shoes and experience things we haven’t lived. Language brings us so far – but not far enough.
While you will find cross-perspective communications being taught in our leadership development programs, I believe we need to push further to find ways of experiencing each other’s realities. Wilderotter told us that she visits the nationwide offices of companies she is part of, engaging with employees at different levels. That is a best practice for many leaders. But as we make exponential advances in technology to accomplish previous impossibilities, from gene therapy to AI, we should also ask how technology can help us experience what others experience. Can VR help us experience life in a wheelchair, or what life is like as a farmer in Sub-Saharan Africa?
If we could truly experience what others do, perhaps we would look at each other with a renewed sense of awe and inspiration. We might recognize the courage in their everyday struggles, and take renewed joy in our shared humanity – achieving a collective emotional progress.
Let’s start by being more like astronauts and Leonardo da Vinci in our leadership. Through our limited language, we can try to experience each other’s experiences. By visiting workplaces, and by engaging our employees and customers to openly share their ideas, we can begin to see things from the other point of view.
Sanyin Siang is a Pratt School of Engineering professor and leads the Fuqua/Coach K Center on Leadership & Ethics at Duke University