“Perception is reality.”
I’m sitting with a friend of mine, a team manager at a large regional bank, and she’s telling me about the difficulty she’s having getting her team to accept some major changes to their goals and team structure. Her bank’s business changed and that made the team changes legitimately necessary. She’s explained the reasoning to her team, but now she’s telling me they don’t seem to be accepting her explanation.
“I’m picking up a lack of trust,” she tells me. “I even think some of them are actively working against the changes and that’s making it really hard for me to trust them.”
“Do you know they’re resisting your plans?” I ask.
“It seems like they are.”
“It seems like they are, but you don’t know they are,“ I point out.
“True. But perception is reality.”
It’s true that we shape our actions in response to what we perceive and our actions are real. But perception and reality are not the same thing. Perception is an interpretation of inputs. Perception is interpretation.
Now, if you know me at all then you know that all of my experiences turn out to be analogies. And I have another story to tell you that illustrates the idea I’m getting at here:
My sons and I have recently developed a mutual interest in fishing. They are 7 and 5 so fishing is new to them. I am much older than that, but I haven’t fished since I was 12. So, fishing is new to me too.
Our evening TV selections now often include one or more fishing shows. Guys on boats catching bass. Or walleyes. Or lake trout. Sometimes old guys, sometimes young guys, but one thing is always the same: the fishing is easy! A sunlit lake, a shiny lure, a couple of casts and fish on!
And so we found ourselves last Sunday morning at our local everything store in the sporting goods section combing through the countless lures, spinners, rubber squid and fake minnows choosing what we needed to match the success of our TV heroes. Most of the baits cost under $3. I bought $75 worth.
Then we were at the lake. Our lures ready, we spun our lines into the water, hearts racing in anticipation of the strike. But cast after cast we got nothing. Well, that’s not entirely true. We pulled in plenty of seaweed. I hooked a lily pad. My youngest son almost landed a pair of ducklings when his line got so tangled he couldn’t reel it in and his lure, its hooks loaded with marshmallows, floated dead in the water. The ducks skated desperately across the still lake water and attacked the bait while we screamed at them terrified they would snag their little beaks on the barbed hooks hidden inside the marshmallows they were devouring.
That was the only real excitement for the day. In three hours on the dock we got no bites.
Finally we gave up. “There are no fish here,” we told each other. “Tomorrow we’ll try somewhere else.”
Leaving the dock we passed another fisherman who had been there when we arrived and had outlasted us. We were packing it in, he was still going. We asked him the standard question fishermen ask each other on the dock. “Any luck?” He said nothing but reached down and pulled a nylon line out of the water on which were strung at least 10 fish.
“Whoa!” my sons said in unison.
“How did you do that?” I asked him.
“Worm,” he said.
“Just a worm?” I asked.
“Worm,” he said.
“Perception is reality.” Is it? Were there no fish in the lake? That was our perception and we were ready to carry that perception home and never return to that spot. But with a simple direct question I tested the perception and found the reality to be very different. There were fish in the lake, lots of them. But our approach to them did not match what they wanted. And because we didn’t match their needs they didn’t respond the way we wanted them to.
I can’t help but see a connection to the experience my friend is having with her team. They are not responding to her the way she wants them to. Maybe because they don’t trust her, as she has concluded. But maybe they’re acting the way they are for a very different reason. Until she tests her perception with a simple, direct question, she’ll never know what the reality is:
“'It’s my perception that you are struggling to get behind these changes. How do you respond to that?'”
And until she knows the reality she won’t know what to give them so they’ll respond the way she wants them to.
I think that as a leader you don’t get to operate according to your perceptions. I think that as a leader you are required to test your perceptions. Especially during the difficult times. Especially when things are not going the way you want them to. I think that as a leader you gain more when you try to understand than when you try to be understood.
What do you think?
Ethan Yarbrough is President and Co-Founder of Allyis, Inc., a technology consulting and staffing firm focused on helping organizations leverage and prosper from the use of enterprise software platforms, social technologies, and open, employee-centric cultures to increase productivity, foster collaboration, innovation and knowledge management, and contribute to employee morale and retention. Ethan is a social computing thought leader and active participant in the Enterprise 2.0 conversation via his blog at http://blog.allyis.com, Tweets, white papers and speaking engagements.
Photo credit: Francesca Lafferty