Seven habits of highly effective people - Stephen R. Covey [118]
In business, you can set up one-on-one time with your employees. Listen to them, understand them. Set up human resource accounting or Stakeholder Information Systems in your business to get honest, accurate feedback at every level: from customers, suppliers, and employees. Make the human element as important as the financial or the technical element. You save tremendous amounts of time, energy, and money when you tap into the human resources of a business at every level. When you listen, you learn. And you also give the people who work for you and with you psychological air. You inspire loyalty that goes well beyond the eight-to-five physical demands of the job. Seek first to understand. Before the problems come up, before you try to evaluate and prescribe, before you try to present your own ideas --seek to understand. It's a powerful habit of effective interdependence.
When we really, deeply understand each other, we open the door to creative solutions and Third Alternatives. Our differences are no longer stumbling blocks to communication and progress. Instead, they become the stepping stones to synergy.
Application Suggestions
1. Select a relationship in which you sense the Emotional Bank Account is in the red. Try to understand and write down the situation from the other person's point of view. In your next interaction, listen for understanding, comparing what you are hearing with what you wrote down. How valid were your assumptions? Did you really understand that individual's perspective. 2. Share the concept of empathy with someone close to you. Tell him or her you want to work on really listening to others and ask for feedback in a week. How did you do? How did it make that person feel.
3. The next time you have an opportunity to watch people communicate, cover your ears for a few minutes and just watch. What emotions are being communicated that may not come across in words alone.
4. Next time you catch yourself inappropriately using one of the autobiographical responses -probing, evaluating, advising, or interpreting --try to turn the situation into a deposit by acknowledgment and apology. ("I'm sorry, I just realized I'm not really trying to understand. Could we start again?")
5. Base your next presentation on empathy. Describe the other point of view as well as or better than its proponents; then seek to have your point understood from their frame of reference. Habit 6: Synergize TM
Principles of Creative Cooperation
I take as my guide the hope of a saint
in crucial things, unity -in important things, diversity - in all things, generosity
--Inaugural Address of President George Bus
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When Sir Winston Churchill was called to head up the war effort for Great Britain, he remarked that all his life had prepared him for this hour. In a similar sense, the exercise of all of the other habits prepares us for the habit of synergy.
When properly understood, synergy is the highest activity in all life --the true test and manifestation of all the other habits put together.
The highest forms of synergy focus the four unique human endowments, the motive of win-win, and the skills of empathic communication on the toughest challenges we face in life. What results is almost miraculous. We create new alternatives --something that wasn't there before. Synergy is the essence of Principle-Centered Leadership. It is the essence of principle-centered parenting. It catalyzes, unifies, and unleashes the greatest powers within people. All the habits we have covered prepare us to create the miracle of synergy.
What is synergy? Simply defined, it means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It means that the relationship which the parts have to each other is a part in and of itself. It is not only a part, but the most catalytic, the most empowering, the most unifying, and the most exciting part. The creative process is also the most terrifying part because you don't know exactly what's going to happen or where it is going to lead.