When I was in high school I spent summers with my dad in the bay area and school year in Arizona. Many of those summers I failed to bring a jacket. When you are short on life experience, and you’ve spent the past several months with temperatures nearing 100 degrees, a jacket just sounds like an absurd concept. Of course, I eventually got better at discounting my experiencing self and learning to pack with my rational brain (seriously – never come to San Francisco without a jacket, we make a fortune selling sweatshirts to tourists).
My packing has improved with life experience and an iphone, but perspective taking still requires effort. It’s hard to discount lived experience and imagine a different context and even when we try, we often miss subtle things.
Many parts of a lived experience go unmentioned or un-noticed. Some from embarrassment, some from banality. Then,on occasion, we get a glimpse of a new perspective and we are able to step out of that blind spot. A great example of this is when toddlers come up with new words. You can’t help but be impressed by the clarity of thinking and then be struck at how you could never come up with anything as inspired. You just know way too much to be anywhere near as smart as a toddler.
Not being familiar with the lived experiences of others is not a failing, it’s part of being human. Not investing to learn and understand the lived experiences of others however, will increasingly become career limiting as we move into a more global and connected world.
We should not think of our blind spots as bad but we should see them as limiting and we should acknowledge that we all have them. As “good-ish” people who are lifelong learners, we should always ask ourselves what am I missing, where am I wrong?
In 2014 I wrote that empathy was a critical 21st century leadership skill. As I reflect on that thinking a decade later, I see that it’s often the small things that make us feel seen. With the extra demands of leading global or remote teams we all have a lot to learn.
Expanding your curiosity to deeply understand the context for team members you work with will pay off not just in improving inclusion and belonging, it will also reduce burnout, improve psychological safety and ultimately accelerate productivity.
As we all look to boost our skills many of us could ask ourselves what social skills investments should we be making to help unlock our own potential and how do we build opportunities to [deliberately] practice these more.
Meg Bear 