Never let your preference be mistaken as the truth.
From a Soldier: This is why we are invading Afghanistan or Iraq. I’m a soldier, and this is what I believe in. This is why we’re doing what we’re doing. I believe in this, and this is the core of what is true in the world.
From a mother of a deceased soldier: My son, who served for multiple years as an officer and an aviator in the army, died. After two decades in Afghanistan and multiple rotating tours in Iraq – what was it all for? Nothing.
From a C-Level Officer of a company: This is what we should be doing for a business strategy. These are the objectives for the company: We should march forward with these KPIs… Increase margins by 11%, increase the Net Promoter Score by four points, and increase shareholder satisfaction by 24% by the end of the year. This is what I believe in.
From a C-Level Officer in the same company, with a converse opinion: It’s more about the people doing the hard work. How do we compensate them? How do we care for them here? How do we nurture them? How do we put profits and encouragement back into the people, the workers?
When I say these platitudes out loud, none of them seem wrong. But we get into a boardroom, or a conference room, or a team meeting, and conflict arises. The bottom line here is that we take our perspective as the truth. But it’s a perspective. It’s a preference.
I’m not making an argument that there are no hard-core principal truths in the world as far as right or wrong. But so often, we mistake preferences as truth. That is wrong. That is single-minded. That is seeking to win an argument over diversity; and, probably even more so, over relationships. That is snuffing out that the team with the most ideas has the best ideas.
I lived most of my adult life as preferences equals truth. I never would’ve said that back then. In fact, I would’ve said my preference is the truth. And I would sabotage, over and over again, so many relationships, so many business meetings, and so many ministry conversations as I argued my preferences as the truth.
We hold hard to our opinions, but the team with the most ideas is usually the team with the best ideas. The best teams are continually looking for diversity and to respect different opinions. Perspective and preferences are not hard-core truths.
There could be truth interspersed through our preferences. But when we get so enamored in our preferences and take them as gospel truth, we are missing an opportunity to bring different voices and opinions – and perspectives – into a conversation that could be a buoy that raises the tide.
You can read back in many articles we have written at RethinkWork and see how we tripped over ourselves over this one principle. Where we, as we did an audit of our own leadership in years past, had “messed up the team” because we have held a preference as the truth.
Again, I don’t want to say there are no hard-core truth principles regarding right and wrong. That’s another whole conversation.
The bottom line here is that we should seek to understand the different perspectives and preferences of everybody in the room.
We should hear their voices and, listen to their opinions… and weigh them with curiosity. I actually think that curiosity is one of the best things that can help a team. Being curious is one of the best things you can be as a leader. When we are not curious, and we get fortified in our own perspective – and we take that as hard-core truth – we miss out on an opportunity to see something different, something good, something better than where we are entrenched.
Preferences are not necessarily truth. Preferences are preferences.
So here are some questions for you as a leader:
How open-minded are you?
How curious are you about what you did this year that didn’t materialize into the expected outcome?
Is it because your perspective is wrong?
Is it because your preference was wrong?
Is it because you were held fast to a preference you held as a truth, and it did not pan out for you to get the outcome you wanted?
Maybe, just maybe, the goal wasn’t achieved because there was something wrong with your preference.
Maybe there was something wrong in your opinion that you had as a truth that wasn’t true – instead, it was a preference you were too entrenched in.
This is hard to embrace, but we must remain vigilant about promoting other perspectives, preferences, voices, and opinions. We need to be curious about other facts, information, and estimations that help influence the truth we have not yet obtained.
Great leaders understand that to establish a culture of creativity and acceptance within their teams, there needs to be a broader range of perspectives and opinions. The room with the most ideas will usually have the best ideas.