As shared in a Knowledge@Wharton article, a few years ago an internationally recognised thought leader in management and workplace dynamics proposed the following to a group of Fortune 500 CEOs: ‘We already have good evidence that as long as people are in the office half the week, you can get more productivity, more satisfaction, higher retention, and no cost to collaboration by letting people work from anywhere the other half of the week … Let’s just run a remote Friday experiment, give people one day a week to work from wherever they want.’ All of the CEO’s turned him down … Then came Covid 19 and the rest is history.
The story begs the question: How open are we to different ideas or views? How often do we let our impulsiveness overshadow our ability to think fresh and creative? To what degree are we prone to prefer what we feel is safe, not questioning our thinking about what ‘safe’ means? Are we not mostly more pre-disposed to winning arguments than curious to learn more, think deeper and allow for new wisdom to emerge?
I believe we easily fall into these traps if we are not conscious and aware of them. We have formed behaviours and thinking patterns over many years that are not serving us well in our day. We relied on argument and logic to proof our point which resulted mostly in defending the status quo. Today emotional intelligence is required to collaboratively respond to work challenges. So-called soft skills became hard skills and at the core of success in business. Pause, rethink and unlearn.
Author: Dr Gerhard van Rensburg
We have formed behaviours and thinking patterns over many years that are not serving us well in our day.
