Gratitude: Honesty
What I’m Grateful For: Honesty
I have been reading about honesty in teams and business culture, and looking at my own team and thinking about our dynamics as a group. One of the things that occurred to me was an interesting idea about the difference ways that trying to be honest, trying to be kind and helpful, and trying to wrestle with difficult conversations or issues, may all be experienced differently by different people. I personally do not like conflict – I would much rather find “positive and constructive” ways to talk about things. Conversations that don’t include anything like, “This didn’t work and I don’t want to see it happen again.”
In fact, while this may strike you as a good thing, according to research on highly effective teams of people, it’s definitely NOT. A team that is able to have lively arguments and disagreements, one that is able to address issues and discrepancies with candor, honesty and openness, outperform teams that “seem” to be always supportive and complimentary and outwardly kind. I don’t have all the data on this, but I suspect that this phenomenon extends to other walks of life too.
What are your experiences? What do you think?
What I’m Reading: Here’s an interesting article that you might find useful: How Your Brain Decides Without You: In a world full of ambiguity, we see what we want to see. It make shake you up a bit too.
Attention can be thought of as “what you allow your eyes to look at.”
How then can we possibly have what we love to call “open minds”? How can we possibly REALLY think outside the box, when our mind cannot look outside the box as long as our attention has already ruled out most of what is really there and chosen for us what we are able to even see?
This article doesn’t really offer any ideas, but it sharply curtails any notion that we are free of this phenomenon known as “cognitive dissonance.” How does that thought strike you?
How Your Brain Decides Without YouIn a world full of ambiguity, we see what we want to see.
What I’m Pondering: The easiest thing in the world is self-deceit; for every man believes what he wishes, though the reality is often different. – Demosthenes, 384 – 322 BC
