Shifting Perspective

No matter how aligned people are around some overarching goal—increasing profitability, reducing costs, accelerating product development—they’ll often disagree over how best to achieve it. Sometimes these disagreements will spark tensions between people and strain their relationships, especially if they prove hard to resolve. This is inevitable. But what you make of disagreements—and the relationships troubles they spark—depends on how you see things.

In my studies of leaders and their teams, I have uncovered two different perspectives: an either/or perspective and a relational perspective. These two perspectives cast substantive disagreements and relationship troubles in a very different light, leading some relationships to grow stronger with time, others more fragile.

All of us lose perspective from time to time, seeing things in purely either/or terms and getting mad as hell. But some people are more able than others to shift perspective—even in the heat of the moment. These people help each other move up the continuum from a relatively simplistic either/or perspective to a more complex relational perspective, so they can spring back quickly and turn potentially vicious cycles into more virtuous ones.

This, I discovered, is the key to resilience.