Validate & Ground Assessments
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Click here to view and download the Discussion Guide to utilize with your Group and/or Team over the next 12 months. The Guide and questions will be updated each month to reflect the TOTM concept.
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“The essence of a cohesive leadership team is trust.”
Patrick Lencioni, The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive
As we enter the final quarter of Developing A Leadership Mindset, we will be using Patrick Lencioni’s The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive as our reading recommendation. Our tenth Developing A Leadership Mindset Tenet is Validating and Grounding Assessments.
Although you may not have the word executive in your title, you are indeed the “executive responsible for others” in your leadership role. Lencioni outlines the Four Obsessions as disciplines in his writing:
Build and maintain a cohesive leadership team
Create organizational clarity
Overcommunicate organizational clarity
Reinforce organizational clarity through human systems
Organizational health and an organization that is smart are both important according to Lencioni. So why do leaders tend to avoid the pursuit of organizational health? Perhaps it is because organizational health starts with the health of the leader themselves.
Lencioni sums it up this way:
“But perhaps most important of all, organizational health is often neglected because it involves facing realities of human behavior that even the most committed executive is tempted to avoid. It requires levels of discipline and courage that only a truly extraordinary executive is willing to embrace.”
Patrick Lencioni, The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive
If you lead others, you are operating in an “executive capacity.” You don’t need a Chief Executive Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Operating Officer, or any other Chief title to be the person responsible for leading those in your care.
Validating and grounding assessments are a critical component of creating organizational health, which is rooted is trust. I am convinced trust and caring are the foundation of all relationships. When trust is absent or there are low levels of trust in a relationship between a leader and another, it may be a result of the assumptions and assessments we have made about an individual, a team, or an organization.
When we miss validating and grounding our assessments, we approach any given situation and or communication transaction from an unbalanced, inaccurate standpoint or perspective. When our perspective is off from the very beginning of a communication engagement it is literally impossible to expect a positive and or productive intended/desired outcome.
If you find yourself in a situation where you do not trust a colleague on your Team, it is imperative you examine your leadership mindset. What assessments are you making and telling yourself about yourself and your colleague that are causing you to mistrust your team member?
As a leader, regardless of your position in your organization, you are a member of the leadership team by virtue of your presence on a team. Developing a healthy leadership mindset takes discipline and courage, as Lencioni notes, if we are to be healthy members of a team.
Many years ago, I had one of the first opportunities to learn and experience the validate and ground assessments lesson. I was invited to give a presentation to a business group in the mid-west region of the United States. As the participants gathered, I noticed a gentleman sitting in the front row, first seat on the aisle. He had a rather stern look on his face and seemed very intense.
As the presentation proceeded, he would alternatively lean forward with his hands on his knees and sit back with his arms folded across his barrel chest. My assumption was, “this guy hates what I’m sharing, hates my presentation style, is sorry he got stuck in the front row and for some unknown reason doesn’t like me and probably thinks this material is not helpful.”
I went into my Excellence In Speaking Institute newly trained mindset and spoke to the broad audience as much as possible while doing everything I could to not be distracted by the clearly unhappy gentleman in the front row.
At the end of the presentation, I was more than relieved to shuffle away with whatever bit of emotional energy I had left. I was furiously making mental notes on how I would try to do much better the next time and already contemplating all the ways I could have been more prepared, provided information with more gravitas, and left determined to work on my story telling and presentation skills.
As I tried to slink past the gentleman, he turned and grabbed my hands with his burly hands, looked me straight in the eyes and said, “that was the best presentation I’ve ever heard!” I was awash with confusion as I had spent a significant amount of time during my presentation making up my mind about what this gentleman was thinking, what he believed, and how unhappy and disengaged he apparently was the entire time he was present.
I recall to this day the blinding flash of humility and embarrassment I felt. I was humbled and embarrassed because I realized the amount of hubris it takes for one to take residence in the mind, heart, and soul of another human without regard to their personhood. Ouch. The biggest lesson wasn’t that I was thankfully more impactful as a presenter than I had thought. No, the biggest, most humbling lesson was I had mastered the ability to inaccurately think for another human.
We use our own personal lens, values, and beliefs in response to the actions of others when trying to validate and ground assessments – I call it the projection factor and find myself engaging in this practice frequently, in fact, daily. Ask yourself, what lens am I using to see this person and or situation that I may be projecting on another person?
Record the statements you make about yourself, and others, and become hyper away of statements such as:
“If that were me…”
“You would think that someone would…”
“Doesn’t everybody...”
“I think the reason they...”
Recently, I came across four recommendations in an article by Dr. Caroline Leaf on “How to NOT take things personally,” which I think can help us avoid making inaccurate assessments:
Be careful of turning assumptions into facts. Rather, ask for clarification.
Be mindful of overthinking and have a plan in place to stop negative rumination, like temporary distraction or positive rumination.
Remember, other people’s opinions are based on their own experiences and perceptions, not yours.
At the end of the day, sometimes you will be a villain in someone else’s narrative, but you don’t have to commit to those who are committed to misunderstanding you. (Use grace and humility to move toward another person as you seek to build/re-build trust.)
An extraordinary human being used to share with me, “assume no ill intent” when thinking about others. It can be a humbling process but is and can be freeing to stop spending energy holding tightly to unhealthy beliefs, paradigms, and perspectives that take tremendous energy to self-validate. Shifting energy to engaging in a state of curiosity, possibilities thinking, and learning about others allows one to loosen their grip on self-focus and shift the leader’s mindset to a focus on others.
I once heard a speaker say, ‘do you realize, you talk to yourself more than any other person?” We are constantly reinforcing our assessments about the motives and behaviors of others through the strongest lens on earth – our own lens. Three characteristics to practice are grace – for yourself and others, patience – for yourself and others, and the willingness to be humble.
Developing a leadership mindset and actively practicing validating and grounding assessments is daunting. The filters and framework with which we view others is deeply rooted in our values and beliefs. One of the greatest leadership challenges we have is with empathy and humility; developing the ability to maintain our values and beliefs while building trust with others.
If we want to be and become more effective as leaders, we must be obsessed with the desire to have the daily discipline and courage to validate and ground our assessments about ourselves and others if we truly want to live extraordinary lives.
-LS
Group Discussion
Guide
Click here to view and download the Discussion Guide to utilize with your Group and/or Team over the next 12 months. The Guide and questions will be updated each month.
Recommended Quarterly Reading
The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive
By Patrick Lencioni
2023
Managing From The Inside Out
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