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The ability to understand people is one of the greatest assets anyone can ever have. It has the potential to positively impact every area of your life, not just the business arena. For example, look at how understanding people helped this mother of a preschooler.
Leaving my four-year-old son in the house, I ran out to throw something in the trash. When I tried to open the door to get back inside, it was locked. I knew that insisting my son open the door would have resulted in an hour-long battle of the wills. So in a sad voice, I said, “Oh, too bad. You just locked yourself in the house.” The door opened at once.
Understanding people certainly impacts your ability to communicate with others. David Burns, a medical doctor and professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, observed, “The biggest mistake you can make in trying to talk convincingly is to put your highest priority on expressing your ideas and feelings. What most people really want is to be listened to, respected, and understood. The moment people see that they are being understood, they become more motivated to understand your point of view.” If you can learn to understand people – how they think, what they feel, what inspires them, how they’re likely to act and react in a given situation – then you can motivate and influence them in a positive way.
- By John C Maxwell
from The Maxwell Daily Reader
Hi Rebecca,
ReplyDeleteThis was a great article and the example that Maxwell included was priceless. I think that the key to this as a management tactic is to understand people over time. I know that there are times when you have to make snap-decisions and judgment calls, but in terms of developing successful professional relationships with your teams, you may get an unclear or dishonest picture of who they are. You may have better insight on this than I do, but I think that if a person believes that they are in an "interview setting," they try to be on their best behavior and say all of the right things. In my role as a Team Leader, I find that I have several mini-conversations with people across departments and floors, where I actually get a chance to "know" them. We may or may not talk shop, but I am soaking up the conversations as much as possible. This practice helps me find content for Between ColleAGUes and recruits for some of my proposals. I try to get a sense of their likes, dislikes, backgrounds and talents. I've found that people become enthusiastic at the prospect of applying those skills and talents that may not necessarily be used in the execution of their daily duties.