The Leader Within Naive Realism - Keeping Your Foot on the Gas While Helping Others Catch Up

Building the Leader Within: Naive Realism - George Carlin once observed, "Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?"

It's funny because it's true. It's also a perfect example of naive realism: the tendency to believe our own perception is the only accurate one. If you see it differently, you must be wrong.

I catch myself doing this on the highway. When a car pushes up behind me, I speed up until I clear a line of traffic and can move over. Once I'm out front, I ease off, and now the people behind me want to pass. On a long trip without cruise control, the back-and-forth gets frustrating.

Leadership works the same way. We push for progress and ask people to speed up. Once we're "ahead," we slow down to let others catch up. That isn't losing focus. It's making room for the people who didn't accelerate with us. Then it's time to push again. You will never see everyone moving at the same speed.

In The Leader Within, I lean on Robert Kegan's stages of adult development, which separate what we are subject to from what we can hold as an object. When we are subject to a perception, we can't see it. It simply feels like reality. Growth is the ability to step back, examine our own view, and treat it as one perspective among many. Carlin's drivers are subject to their speedometers.

For leaders, this matters because, as I write in the book, "Leadership is held in other people's perception of me." It doesn't live in my intelligence or my intentions. I once worked with a leader whose behavior in meetings was being read as selfish. They weren't selfish, but their reality differed from the reality of the people watching them. Once they understood that perception shapes how others see us, their meeting behavior changed.

It's also why we need an outside view. It is hard to fully detach from a situation we're living in. That's the case for a coach, or even a trusted colleague, who can point out the blind spots we can't see ourselves.

Try this on your next push for change. Step out of your own view and ask what the people you lead are experiencing, how those experiences make them think and feel about you, and how to communicate what's needed in a way that fits their perspective.

Keeping your foot on the gas while helping others catch up is the job. It has little to do with idiots and maniacs. It's leadership.