Ross and I were going to the dentist. He was driving.
I got into the passenger side, or rather fell into the passenger side.
“Whoa! Who’s been sitting in this seat?” I asked.
The seat had been lowered to the floor, pushed all the way back and the back of the seat had been lowered to almost lying down.
“Hmmm. I remember someone moving it”, replied Ross as I attempted to get it back to our normal position.
“I know”, he said. “It was the guy at the car service place. He got in to show me how to fix some of the buttons and gadgets that had moved since we had the last service. I don’t know why he had to move everything. He was a nice guy and a tall guy but he was a guest in the car and as a guest, you shouldn’t move things without asking.”
This comment about whether he should or shouldn’t have moved things, “as a guest” got me thinking about values and how we all have different values and ways of doing things.
The same topic came up later in the day when I was with a coaching client. We’ll call him Mark.
Mark mentioned since completing one of our leadership experiences, that he was much more tolerant of others’ values and ways of doing things.
I think this is something that most of us deal with on a daily basis. Many of us want things done our way and we get frustrated and angry when people don’t follow the rules (our rules).
In fact, in her book, “You Can Heal Your Life”, Louise Hay cites research by Virginia Satir that showed that “there are more than 250 different ways to wash dishes, depending upon who is washing and the ingredients used.”
Louise Hay goes on to say,“If we are stuck in believing there is only ‘one way,’ or ‘one viewpoint,’ then we are shutting out most of life.”
This poses a couple of tricky questions:
- Is it okay for your team to do the work how they want to do it or must they follow the process?
- If they must follow the process and they don’t, do you just fix it or do you point it out to them and make them feel inferior or guilty or do you look to the system to see if it’s a system problem that could be fixed or is it a people problem?
- If it’s a people problem, is it because they are unable or unwilling and if unable, give them more training.
If you fix it, you are robbing them of the opportunity to learn or worse, you could be teaching what we call “Learned Helplessness”, where people learn to become helpless. For example, say your kids pack the dishwasher and it’s not the way you do it, if you repack it and they see that you have done that, you are encouraging them not to do it again and could be affecting their confidence and feelings of self worth.
What we value and how this differs to others can be a touchy subject. When it comes down to it, the most important question to ask is “how important is this in the scheme of things?”. If it’s not a high priority or very important. Let it go.
Value their values.
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