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How To Transform Your Leadership With More Authentic Relationships

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Leaders are most effective when they see others as the individuals they are, rather than through lenses of self-interest or bias. But leaders’ self-perceptions can get in the way, distorting their ideas about others and causing behaviors that undermine trust and collaboration, says Mitch Warner, managing partner at the Arbinger Institute and contributing author of Leadership and Self-Deception: The Secret to Transforming Relationships and Unleashing Results.

However, when leaders shift their focus to acknowledge others’ humanity and act out of genuine concern for their needs, Warner says in a recent conversation, they can build more meaningful relationships that drive better results.

Trust Your Initial Sense Of Others

People have a natural, instinctive response to each other’s needs, which is a core part of being in community. “I know that I have needs, objectives and challenges,” Warner says. “I have this inner life that is real, and because of that, I know you have an inner life that’s real, that you have needs and hopes and objectives that are as real as my own.” But too often leaders ignore their sense of others in a desire to achieve particular outcomes—and that’s where they go astray.

For example, you can sense that it will benefit a colleague if you share information with them. But if you go against your own helpful impulse for some reason—which Warner calls “self-betrayal”—then you must create a self-justification for not following your initial sense of what might help that person. So you instinctively craft an internal story to justify the fact that you didn’t share the information and you begin to view them negatively, perceiving them as either undeserving of help or not really needing anything from you.

This self-betrayal reduces your ability to engage in an unself-conscious, fully authentic way. “If I see you as a person, then yes, I’m going to engage in more effective behaviors than I probably would otherwise,” Warner explains. But when you don’t see people as individuals, it’s easy to fall into patterns of manipulation and self-deception in order to get the results you want. “If I’m telling myself a lie about who you are,” he says, “and then I devolve into manipulation to get you to act in a certain way, that’s what you’ll respond to.”

Looking Outward Works Better Than Looking Inward

In general, by focusing more on the other person than on yourself, you’ll find better solutions to disagreements, Warner says. “When we’re frustrated with other people, we assume that it’s the other person, right? They’re the sole source of my frustration. And the emotions that I’m experiencing clearly must be an outgrowth of this other person’s frustrating behavior.” Most people don’t recognize that it’s a choice to see the other person in a specific, negative way, with no recognition of the impact of their own behavior toward that person. Because it’s difficult to get far enough outside yourself to notice your harmful contributions to a situation, people are prone to developing a false portrayal of themselves and their behavior.

“If I see myself as superior, more capable, smarter, harder working—whatever the case may be—I will carry that view into other situations,” Warner says. Given this artificial self-view, we’re more likely to overreact if we’re challenged in a meeting even if there was “nothing about the situation that was in and of itself a commentary on me as a person, but it was an absolute, immediate threat to the image of myself that I’m trying to protect, trying to portray about myself, that I’m smart, that I’m capable. Now I feel defensive.”

That defensiveness exists to preserve “a false, distorted view of myself that I need to maintain in order to be justified,” he explains. “And the same on the other side, right? If I see myself as inferior, I’m constantly trying to portray myself as not inferior. No one can find out this about me, that I don’t actually belong here, that I’m not fully capable of doing this right. So my life is a performance, and any time something happens that threatens to expose me, I feel defensive and fearful.”

The Heart Of The Matter: Treat Others As Yourself

For Warner, what really gets in leaders’ way is that “they’re constantly trying to maintain and are threatened by managed images,” rather than dealing directly with the people and the work in front of them. “The feeling of defensiveness is the red flag that I am carrying around an image, and if I just let that go, if I didn’t have an image to protect, then I wouldn’t feel defensive,” he says.

But you can’t just erase your inaccurate self-image through sheer will. “You get rid of it because you go, ‘Oh, these people are people,’ right? ‘I’m just with people. They’re trying to succeed. We’re all trying to succeed,’” he says. “That’s how you get rid of it. You become interested and curious about the people.”

Even leaders who wish to be more effective often avoid confronting their inward views and beliefs, he notes, because “we typically don’t want to see anything that is painful about ourselves. We’re often looking for a quick fix.” But when leaders are encouraged to “start seeing the other person as a person that they hadn’t been seeing fully as a person, and getting curious about that person in a way that they never have before,” then they can have new conversations to understand the other’s needs and concerns.

How To Change Your Perspective

You can get started by looking outward, says Warner, and using what you already know about employees to wonder about their needs, challenges and objectives. Also, consider how you as a leader have made things harder for your employees and whether there is anything for which you need to take responsibility, apologize or do differently.

Next, ask yourself some questions: “Hey, what is it like to live and work with me? What’s it like to be my coworker? What’s it like to be an employee of mine?” Effective engagement, says Warner, comes from acknowledging any challenges in your relationship with your colleague or employee, while also recognizing, “You’re a person. You matter like I matter. So here’s what I could do differently, seeing you truthfully, or at least more truthfully than I’ve been seeing.”

The Relationship Rules

Simply providing typical leadership development is insufficient to shift from an inward to an outward perspective. Standard approaches tend to focus on changing leaders’ behaviors and communication, but not necessarily on how they perceive others.

“You can have people across a spectrum of styles and behaviors that are effective and other people might have that same spectrum of styles and be ineffective,” Warner notes. “When we talk about how you see, what we’re talking about is always two-sided. It’s always how I see myself and others, and those are two halves of the same coin, right? If I see you as superior to me, then I see myself as inferior and vice versa. How I see you and how I see myself are always interconnected.”

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