I come across this situation every now and then. When someone has an idea for my company or project. I deny the idea without providing very much context, in the greater vision it’s a bad idea.
This may sound acceptable, but actually it isn’t productive. And this situation I notice often occurs because I believe other people can’t do it as good as I can, or I’m afraid that they won’t understand or agree upon my standard.
In such a conversation today, I’ve learnt that the exchanging of ideas is only possible when you provide the right context. What happened here today is that I had provided way too less context to someone. And thus bad ideas for my project were handed to me.
My lesson came from the moment that context and my vision was asked for. I hadn’t thought about sharing my whole vision and extensive context.
Firstly thats because I had the blind spot for thinking that I myself could be the only one to understand this from my point of view, in the current worldview.
And secondly, I thought other people would think “there’s reinier again with yet another idea”, and that they would not appreciate my monologue(s) on my project.
Wrong and wrong. Leadership, amongst other things, is about providing context to the people you seek to serve, the people you’re on the bus with.
“Tell me more about your vision, I want to help you, but, clearly I need to understand you first.”