dangletech

Before you bought your last new business suit, you probably stepped in front of a three-way mirror to see how you looked in it. You may have caught a glimpse of yourself at an angle you’ve never seen before, a view you hardly recognized. If we can live for years without seeing a complete picture of our physical selves, imagine what we fail to recognize about our less visible qualities: our behavior, talents, attitudes, potential. I recently met the head of an established medical products organization, he has spent twenty years in this company, the last fifteen as CEO. His direct reports have been with him for about the same time and found it hard to be honest with the ‘pater’. The board directors had been mainly insiders and have never entertained the thought of providing feedback. The company has now lost important contracts and the stock is in trouble. Independent directors have been brought in and the first thing they did was ask me to conduct multi-rater feedback interviews to provide him with that rare, overdue glimpse that only others see. The feedback was powerful:  Challenge the assumptions and habits that built your success in the first place, it’s your job to forget what you knew yesterday and to start afresh today.  That goes against the grain in a business world that values the “experience curve”. But the non-routine executives win by playing a different game, appreciate the power of the “inexperience curve”-the idea that the more you do something, the more important it is to challenge the assumptions and habits that built your success in the first place.The most open-minded and creatively-charged leaders I know seem to share one quality: they’re insatiably curious-about a whole rangeof things, including themselves. They make it a personal discipline to get out of their element, to mix it up with people who are not like them, to invite subversive elements into their sphere as often as possible, and to generally try anything that switches them off autopilot and awakens them to all the signals out in the world.