The Power Perception

A conversation that my brilliant friend, Mel Francis, FRM, MBA , and I often have is about perception. Mel and I have often talked at length about leadership philosophies, and I remember early in my leadership journey feeling particularly frustrated and feeling that my message wasn’t being heard. Mel said that perception is not reality, but perception is everything. I hear him saying this to me often when I am coaching and mentoring, and I agree with it more with each conversation I have with colleagues, customers, friends, and family.

After years of reading and learning through doing, I have a better understanding how each person derives value from interactions differently. This is true not only for value, but our perceptions are often influenced by our emotions, environments, and the interpretation and subsequent actions by the receiver.

I took a Communications course last month, and it began with an introduction to the four communication building blocks. The first, and the most important in my opinion, is People. To think about the other person’s perspective and perception around the message you are sharing. Perceptions and perspectives aren’t the same thing, and if you don’t understand or consider how they impact your communications, the lines will suffer.

I’ve followed many of the teachings of John Maxwell and his coaching group, and I appreciated Pauline Roose Moore’s differentiation between perception and perspective: “Perception is what you interpret. It is your understanding of a given situation, person, or object. It is the meaning you assign to any given stimulus. Perspective is your point of view.”

While you can't control someone else’s perception, you can do your level best to understand it and the message from the other’s perspective.

Time for a story:

A friend of mine, I’ll call her Sharon, was telling me about an issue at her company last year. One of their customers wasn’t delivered an important package. There was an issue with the line that day and Sharon’s colleague, Lois, hadn’t finished the order task that their customer was pending. In fact, there’s was a system outage that took everything offline and caused a back up in all the shipments, and Lois shut down her email trying to put out one fire at a time.

Since it was a time sensitive package that Sharon was trying to get out to the customer, when Sharon wasn’t getting a response from Lois she asked her manager, Bram, to help getting Lois’s attention to this important order. Sharon asked Bram to ‘just nudge Lois for me’.

Well, if everything didn’t just go all the way upside down!

Bram, took an abrupt approach and tried to muscle an immediate result out of Lois. Lois instead of joining the cause, got quite angry with Sharon thinking that this was an effort to make Lois look back, and Lois completely stopped talking to Sharon. Sharon was terribly upset by all of this. She looked to Bram to simply step in and help move the problem to resolution, not thinking that she would have to ask Bram to consider what other escalations Lois was facing. Bram, thinking his approach was being direct rather than abrupt, failed to see how this was a problem, and told Sharon she just needed to calm down. (Ouch!) Lois saw Sharon’s escalation as an attack on her character and capability, rather than an attempt reach resolution.

In this whole skinnamarink, the customer’s issue was still not resolved, and the package wasn’t shipped. So, now Sharon and Lois are upset, with potential damage to their working relationship. And Bram is convinced that this wasn’t a problem, and everyone should just move on.

There’s clearly a communication issue, but what I want to explore here is how the issue exists as a result of a critical failing in understanding each other’s perception and reality of the problem. While the core focus should have been the client, the broken communication chain acted like an infection of an injury.

Sharon didn’t mean to cause waves; she was trying to get the package delivered. Her perception was that Lois was ignoring her requests and asked Bram to check in for detail on the situation. Bram’s perception of the problem was that the because Sharon was being ignored, so was the customer. Bram didn’t consider what the greater issue at hand was, or Lois’ perception of the issue. It was nothing personal, but rather a matter of dealing with priority. Lois, feeling attacked and maybe betrayed that Sharon had gone to Bram, had clouded judgment around the fact that Sharon was trying to find resolution for their client.

From Sharon not knowing enough about Lois’ workload, to Bram’s insensitivity to where and why Lois and her team missed the mark, to finally Lois taking her final frustration out on Sharon by choosing to ignore her, no one took perception into consideration.

We all run into have situations like this, and no one wins. It’s a good reminder that we need to slow down. Sure, you’re going to get angry – I get angry too when things go sideways. I get especially angry when something goes wrong, and a customer is on the receiving end but I feel like we need to move faster than the fire before we burn down the house. Getting angry isn’t solving anything, and I have to remind myself of this all the time. And the first thing I remind myself of is: perception is not reality, but perception is everything.

Taking a minute to reflect calmly on the situation and think not just about what happened, but what I need to do to fix or escalate the situation: What does my message need to be? Is my message clear? How will my message be received? Am I thinking only about my perspective?

One of my favourite books on this topic is “Perception -How Our Bodies Shape Our Minds”, by Dennis Proffitt and Drake Baer. I read this a few years ago, and I’ll paraphrase something that I often reflect on regarding perception: Proffitt and Baer describe how perception is different to everyone – to me a hill might look like an easy climb, and to you a daunting mountain. Our perception is how we interpret what’s in front of us.

In communication perception is important - it’s not the climb that matters but that we reach the pinnacle together.