Seek to understand
What Would Dale Do? is a newsletter about human behavior.
“It takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving1.”
A person with different experiences and a different vantage than you may predictably be solving for different priorities. Like Dale says, “Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them2.” So, we seek to understand.
A noble phrase, eh? Unsurprisingly, I wasn't much of a fan when I first encountered it while working at Big Company. It was my first time coming face-to-face with lots of “process”: approvals, committees, and norms that felt burdensome and often unnecessary to my startup mindset. I faced red tape around hiring constraints - I didn’t understand why open jobs required specific “Headcount ID numbers” to hire against, why Compensation needed its own function, and how it was that people would get grumpy on the suggestion to do new, more, and/or different things.
Whenever I wanted to push back, my boss never told me “no” (spoiler alert for a future topic), but he did encourage me, always - like a steady beat on a drum - to “seek to understand.” Seek to understand: the background, the history, who else cares (what do they care about? And why? What do they have to win? To lose?). Seek to understand. Start there.
Seeking to understand is an active practice of many levels -
The first is for reactions: in a heated situation, seeking to understand gives a moment of reprieve. A reminder to de-escalate, to retreat from quick conclusions. It’s the game-time decision that keeps you from putting your foot in your mouth.
The second is a matter of business: there’s often a natural harmony between behaviors and incentives. Seek to understand the metrics, KPIs, and objectives your business partner is solving for. The more you can present a change as an opportunity to reach a shared outcome, the more you’re building a climate of teamwork, team-orientation, and shared goals.
The third is to offer benefit-of-the-doubt: it's the practice of trust. Seeking to understand (your counterpart, your teammate, perhaps even your arch-nemesis) acknowledges that generally there’s reason, generally there’s history, generally there’s a method to the madness. It means anticipating that there’s a reality other than yours – and you’ll be served by rounding out what you know to be true with other perspectives about why things exist or are done in a particular way.
By suspending your own priorities for just a minute, you allow yourself to approach the situation with curiosity - a world of difference from judgment. Here are some questions to get you started:
Who are the stakeholders? What stakes do they hold? What dependencies exist?
What’s the genesis of the status quo?
What have they already tried?
What have they already learned works / doesn’t?
What’s downstream from this? Who else will be impacted from this change?
Seeking to understand empowers you with context, it builds bridges, and it helps you choose the right hills to fight on. That’s why you’ll see it as a recurring theme throughout WWDD.
What are your favorite questions to ask when trying to understand a person or situation? Please add in the comments below:
HTWFAIP Pg. 13
HTWFAIP Pg. 16