The sages say that life is created in each moment.
Every moment we spend interacting with colleagues and stakeholders at work is an opportunity to build positive perceptions of our personal brand and the team or organization we represent.
Whether these interactions occur in formal meetings or informal corridor conversations is less important than the realization that such moments pass quickly.
And before we know it we’re saying goodbye.
Do we ever stop to consider what we leave behind every time we say goodbye?
The moments we spend with our colleagues and stakeholders give us the prospect of cultivation. These moments are fertile grounds upon which we can sow seeds of misunderstanding, confrontation, and all sorts of negative sentiments.
Or we can choose to use those moments to sprinkle gold dust, and cultivate a different set of emotions and perceptions more conducive to our organizational wellbeing and work success.
People who are highly effective operators are very aware of what they’re cultivating from moment to moment.
But for many us, unschooled in such matters though highly proficient in the technical aspects of our jobs, we often only realize what we’ve sown when we come to say goodbye—the responses and body language of the person(s) we’ve been interacting with are typical telltale signs.
Quite often, we sow the wrong seeds or read the signs wrongly simply because we may be handicapped by our own personal bias; because our perspectives on all aspects of life are shaped by the environments we’ve grown up in (biologically and professionally) and the “scripts” we’ve picked up from others in those environments.
The scripts are the subliminal programming of our worldviews—our beliefs, values and how we perceive and interpret life, including our work life.
And most of us are not even aware of this.
For instance, many managers who spend their formative professional years in organizations where authoritarian or Tayloristic leadership prevails end up embodying similar regressive, bully-boy leadership styles when they themselves become senior leaders …
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