When you enter a meeting, what is your approach or mind-set most often?
Do you go with a clear set of views but open to editing and modifying them based on emerging inputs – like an editable word document?
Or do you go in there with a clear but inflexible and fixed set of views, intending only to sell and not listen or open to change – like a read only PDF?
Ask people close to you, this question about yourself.
Ask yourself how you feel, dealing with someone who has editable views versus someone who is read only?
If you are a Coach, this might be a useful question to ask the leader you are coaching.
In a world full of uncertainties and multitude of possibilities, it may help to be open to new insights, views and opinions, give others the opportunity to add value, for you to state things in a way that you can save face respectfully, retract from a position easily and not get stuck or be seen as stuck.
Of course, I must hasten to add to comfort a few that unending editing is paralyzing. We must pdf at some stage and move on but then virtue as we all know likes between the extremes.
