Raising Expectations through Mutual Respect

Last week we reviewed the value of experience, and how enduring adverse and diverse experiences become the bedrock for our leadership skills. Our scars are the price of entry into senior roles. After all, who wants to enter a war under the command of a general that is not battle tested?

How can we raise the expectations of our buyers? This is the question we must pose to ourselves as we serve our clients. It’s simple and striking. This is a path for us to become irreplaceable, to become the company others cannot duplicate. Quoting last week’s message “It REQUIRES interaction of people with a mutual respect of those with a DIFFERENT focus and point of view. We MUST seek out DIVERSE perspectives when solving important situations.”

This is our opportunity to break the comfortable habit of asking people with the same perspective for their ideas. Its time to grow our perspective by asking those with a different point of view for their thoughts. We just had a vendor message sent out by finance that had lots of collaboration between the team. On paper, our process was followed:

1. Make main points;
2. Collaborate;
3. Activate.

The problem was that each of these people came at the message from a similar vantage point. The end result of the communication was it fell flat and is going to make it more difficult to lower our costs through early payment discounts. We should still achieve our goal, its just going to take more effort than it should have. This collaboration was less effective because different points of view were not represented. Lets use this example to provoke us to seek out the different opinions to make our decisions better.

I look forward to seeing you all demonstrate respect for others by asking people for their thoughts on something where they may have a different perspective. Seeking this out will help raise expectations of all.