How often in business, actually let’s start again, how often in life as well as in business have we opened our mouth as parents, spouses, business owners or managers before we have allowed our brain to digest any facts…even just one real fact.
Before we know it we’ve just judged and made a decision, putting our foot in it and creating an awkward situation for ourselves that didn’t even need to exist all because we opened our mouth without giving the other person the time to speak, we failed to gather any proper information and we forgot that we have two ears and one mouth as listening is usually far more important than speaking.
Let’s watch the below YouTube video short of one of the greatest football managers of all time Sir Alex Ferguson.
Five major takeaway’s from that video.
It’s easy to judge too quickly - Your existing demeanour and character can influence your decisions too hastily. You never know what is going on in someones life or what they are thinking. Your decision to judge too quickly could make matters much worse for that person and possibly even for the decision maker as well.
We need to quickly adapt to situations - Having put himself in an awkward situation with the football player Sir Alex had to literally think quickly on his feet and smooth the situation out by agreeing to the time off. There’s usually plenty of time afterwards to gather more information, usually quickly getting back on track in situations first is a much better scenario to be in.
Learn from awkward situations - From that day forward Sir Alex handled those situations much better because he realised his initial response was not the best for those situations, so he adapted and changed his process for dealing with future requests for time off from his players. Life and business is an evolving game that you need to adapt to many, many times over.
Empathy is one of the best tool you can have - If I could only receive one life skill and business tool to use then I would choose Empathy. Having the ability to understand and share the feelings of another will 10X your decision making ability. Even just putting yourself in 10% of the other persons shoes could dramatically change your thoughts and decisions all because you now have another perspective to work with other than your own.
Health and Family Matters - How often have we all put our business and work before our own health and family. I bet for most small business owners and managers it’s constantly a high percentage of the time. We fail to stop and take a moment to reflect and before we know it our health and family life suffers. Usually it takes some kind of health issue or sad occasion in our life before we stop and contemplate - perhaps we should stop and evaluate our current work life balance before it’s too late.
So the next time you and I are in situations when we have to make decisions that involve people, let’s just pause, even for a few seconds and let the other person finish speaking, give ourselves time to gather more facts and if required ask better questions to gather those facts.
If Sir Alex Ferguson the hard hitting Glaswegian football manager can change his ways then I’m very sure you and I can as well.