Leadership: “We have seen the enemy and he is us” Pogo
Why do the insignificant behaviors of other people get on our nerves at times? I remember experiencing a bad hair day because a colleague I would be spending a great deal of time with smacked his lips while chewing food. The closer people are to each other, the more powerful the annoyance factor seems to become. For years, I drove my family (all females) around the bend each time I left the toilet seat up…I couldn’tkeep a lid on it.
Overreaction to daily events is really about control and judging. Some people ( including a significant number of CEOs) spend an inordinate amount of time trying to get others to do as they do, believe as they believe, and feel as they feel . They focus on the faults of others because doing so is less painful than accepting…then having to deal with their own shortcomings. “I’ll feel better once I fix a few people out there” is an attitude that provides little in the way of performance improvement. CEOs caught in the “fix them” trap never get around to improving themselves and employees eventually begin to resent being “should on”.
The psychological term “projecting” suggests that we notice things in others because of what is going on in ourselves. Interpersonal problems therefore are best corrected from our own side of the fence. It’s amazing how quickly people change once we adjust our own attitudes and behavior. The best way to fix the culture of your company, is to fix yourself first. I heard a story that gets to the bottom line . A father wanting to occupy his children, gave them a magazine picture of the world that he had torn into a hundred pieces. After only a few minutes the children returned with the picture taped together. “How did you do it so fast”, the father inquired. The children responded, “there was a picture of a man on the back of the page. Once we got him back together, the world was fixed too.”