‘Be the Change You Want To See’

As a Leader, we always spend a lot of time trying to change other people. There is, after all, so much wrong with them: they’re selfish, arrogant, bullying, weak, cold, needy and so on. So we try to point this out – and often meet with resistance, denial or sheer indifference with our team members. This can be very agitating and hence renders us cross and severe and most importantly derails us from our business objectives.

In our behavior, we tend to be making an implicit distinction between two projects: getting other people to change – and changing ourselves. While, from the outset we agree that we may have to develop in certain ways, but largely we invest our energies on on altering others.

We vow that we’ll be nicer if they’re nicer, that we’ll be less forceful if they give up complaining. However, we’re prone to miss an important insight: changing how you behave to others can be the fastest way to alter how others behave towards you, especially your team, your stakeholders and your customers. People tend – to a remarkable extent – to mirror behavior, especially of their supervisor.

If someone is aggressive around them, they become aggressive back. If someone is gentle, they become soft in return. If someone acts wisely, it’ll draw any latent reserves of wisdom out of the audience. We’re often in the paradoxical position of advocating one kind of behavior while making use of quite another. We might quite angrily suggest that someone else calm down. Or we may bullyingly insist to a person that they try to be more empathetic. It’s the agitation and anxiety of trying to teach that can easily take us far from the behavior we’re advocating.

Here it bears to remember a saying by Mahatma Gandhi:‘Be the change you want to see.’It captures something key: how sensible it may often be to give up on teaching directly in order to try teach by example. This has one great advantage: we can control ourselves while it’s remarkably hard to exert any sort of direct control over anyone else, despite of them reporting into you. Our disappointment with other people should be redirected towards exerting control over the one thing we can reliably command: ourselves. Seeing us exhibiting certain virtues has a remarkable ability to inspire others into imitating us. And this is how great leaders inspire action not by the virtue of their positional power but by displaying the strength and maturity to have started to become the change they want to see in others.