I’ve been interviewing candidates for a job in my company over the past week or so, and have noticed an interesting thing. Although every person I’ve spoken to has been smart and accomplished, some seem to have a very accurate sense of how they’re perceived and some don’t. Listening to one of the candidates describe herself as warm, personable and open, I immediately thought – “Really? I’m experiencing you as cool, reserved and professional.”
It’s not that either set of characteristics is better or worse: there was simply a big gap between her self-perception and how she was actually behaving. This is a problem: when you’re not accurate in your self-perceptions, it calls into question the accuracy of your other perceptions. It also makes it difficult to understand others’ reactions to you – if you think you’re warm, and others see you as cool, you’re going to be confused by how they react to you. And it will be harder to improve your relationships or your results going forward.
This phenomenon also happens in organizations: companies often have inaccurate “self-perceptions.” For example, Proteus did some leadership development work with Blockbuster in 03-04, and it was clear to us that they thought they were strong and viable, and that they had a handle on how to evolve their business premise (they were also dismissing Netflix as a fly-by-night upstart – as I said, false self-perception is often accompanied by other flawed perceptions). They really didn’t want to hear that the world was changing underneath them in ways that they weren’t, at that time, equipped to handle.
On the other hand, some of our current clients are doing a great job of being bracingly honest about themselves. For instance, we’ve been working with Discovery Communications over the past six months or so. They had come to understand that, while they have a great reputation as a distribution company, their creative reputation had become tarnished. Rather than avoiding or downplaying that negative truth, they acted. They’re looking at their creative processes and assumptions from top to bottom, and deciding how to change them. Their focus on reinvigorating this area of their business has already begun to have an impact: they've recently launched both new shows and a whole new network - OWN - in ways that are capturing the viewers' attention (as witness some of their impressive rating successes since the first of the year) .
An accurate appraisal of yourself and your organization – strengths and weaknesses, good news and bad – is the only useful starting point for any kind of real change. Unless you know where you’re starting from, it’s impossible to chart a path to where you need to go.
