Create Space
One of the worst failures I can imagine when working with others is to fail to consider their perspective and rigidly advocate for your own perspective and process without regard for the people around you. The hard part about when this happens is I can understand how someone can end up behaving this way even though they genuinely believe they’re doing the right thing.
It’s really easy to end up at a certain stage of development where you’re very ambitious, unaware of your limitations, focused only on things which you control (the most obvious being yourself and the amount of effort you put in to your work) and be in a situation where much of your capacity to have an impact seems to hinge on the people around you.
In this circumstance it’s remarkably easy to end up feeling like a bulldozer when having discussions and meetings that relate to your work. It might seem fair to you since you see the people around you as being like you: they have the capacity to take initiative and contribute, and they can just disagree with you if they want to advance the discussion, so long as they have the backbone and ambition to speak up. As long as you’re not telling them what to do and forcing them to do anything they don’t want to, there shouldn’t be a problem, you might think.
There’s so much wrong with this way of being that I find it impractical to describe here, and it’s unfortunate since it’s a way of being I expect most ambitious people to end up in at some point in their development. The saving grace is that people who end up in this state should also be open to growth and eventually recognize the error of their ways.
Nonetheless, it should be obvious to people in a clear thinking state of mind that the best way to approach discussing work with others is not to shove as much information in the air around them as you possibly can but rather to focus on creating space for mutual exploration of the topic at hand.
If you come in to a meeting or conversation with the expectation that you have a battle to win, and you already have decided what you think and that the outcome of the meeting has to be your counterpart(s) thinking what you think, there really isn’t much of a point to the meeting at all.
Even if you’re pretty confident you’ve thought a lot farther ahead than your counterpart you still can’t just shove all of your insight into their head at the point of a conversation. At that point you should take to trying to craft an interesting and engaging path to for them to come to organically see some of the insights you have, not just factually stating your perspective and expecting them to agree.
When you tell someone something you’re really telling them two things: the thing you’re telling them and that you’ve decided to tell them the thing that you’re telling them. They aren’t going to leave the conversation solely with the surface level subject matter of your statements rattling around their brain but also with the knowledge that you’re the kind of person who tells them the kind of things you just told them.
If you value the relationship with the person or people you’re discussing with, and have enough common sense to realize that most people, even those who haven’t yet developed the same ambition and passion as you, have the capacity to contribute something valuable to the discussion, then eventually you will come to pivot your sense of meetings from scenarios where you seek to prove your point or share information from your perspective to scenarios where you do your part to open up a healthy discussion of the topic at hand.
People are very unlikely to offer their genuine opinions when they feel threatened or imposed upon, nor are they likely to offer you a perspective that they believe you believe is wildly inferior to your own. It will just become quietly impossible for the people around you to tell you their true opinions / insights when you behave that way while collaborating.
The best outcome of a meeting when there is more on the docket than simply sharing factual information is both parties recognizing that they had a more limited view of the situation than they were aware of coming in, and that the perspective of the person they’re discussing with (as long as everyone is being honest enough to share a genuine insight), is worth considering.
If no one changed their mind after the meeting and both people came to see that their views were exactly the same, it wouldn’t be a very productive meeting if the goal is to collaboratively find new ways of thinking about a complicated topic. It’s good to disagree, even fundamentally, and it’s important to take steps to create spaces where even fundamental differences can arise and people can feel comfortable discussing them.
That’s a lot harder than drilling down into your own opinion and expressing it with the most clarity and veracity, and it’s a lot more valuable to the people around you.
Create space to disagree in a healthy way and you might find you gain more understanding, quicker progress and an improved rapport with your coworkers.