Perspective Part III: The Last Word
This is a follow-up to a series of blogs on “Perspective”. As part of being a leader for my surgery center and for the larger wellness building, I have to sift through many perspectives and try to attain some “truth” to a problem that is presented to me. First of all, it is my job to understand each different personality with whom I work. Believe me, each person has his/her own personality differences that make that individual unique. I keep a mental scorecard on every staff member and individual in my wellness building of their pluses and minuses. We all have this scorecard, including me. I try not to look at an individual’s negatives but focus on their positives. However, by knowing their negatives, I know how to minimize their biases and to try to maintain a more balanced perspective on a given issue.
Since I have multiple layers of leaders under me, I don’t manage many of the day-to-day affairs of the building but ultimately I do. When one of my leaders comes to report a problem to me, I usually hear the voice of the last person my leader talked to. In fact, in the words used, I can truly hear that person’s voice and I can at times guess, “Oh, I see, you must have just spoken to Susan (made up name to protect the not-so innocent).” Every time we speak to someone, that individual will present himself/herself in the most glowing light since it is never that person’s fault. How ever moral and ethical we are, we have a tendency to inflate ourselves and to blame others for a problem. We are always the angel, and they are always the devil. And, believe me, I can hear the angel and devil scenario presented to me.
If you have ever seen Akira Kurosawa’s classic, Rashomon, you know the inability at getting toward a knowable truth because of the human biases involved in recounting an event. In the black-and-white film, there is a rape and a murder that are recounted from multiple vantage points. Each time the story is retold through a different person’s voice, the bias is clearly evident and the taint of the storyline is apparent.
If you are called to be a leader (in whatever capacity) or even have to deal with another human being (in other words, this blog relates to you unless you are Robinson Crusoe), I would say that we all have to deal with human bias. How, we can intelligently handle that information depends on our emotional intelligence, something that we are born with but that we can also improve upon.
There are always two sides to a story. Whenever you get too much bias from one party, try to see if you can get the other side of the story too. Just remember the truth probably lies somewhere in between two extremes presented. Then reflect on the reliability factor of that person’s commentary. There are some people that tend to be very biased in their comments and then there are some people that tend to be biased more with certain topics that are particularly sensitive to them. Reading another individual can help you break free partially from untruths toward a more enlightened reading of a problem and help to solve problematic human interactions. Don’t be a prisoner to the last person you spoke with. Don’t be subjugated by the “last word.”
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