How Galileo will make you a better leader

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When I am in an airport, I love walking on the moving walkways. These “people movers” are designed to help busy travelers get to their gate expediently and hopefully make their connection on time.

The physical sensation has always been fascinating to me. Once you are on the moving floor, if you simply look down at your feet, you won’t notice that you are moving any faster than you were before you stepped onto the platform. But, if you look over at the coffee stand with the crazy-long line as you are walking, you feel like The Flash on his way to conquer the supervillain du jour.

This phenomenon is known as Galilean Relativity. To illustrate this idea, let’s say I drop a pen while walking on the moving platform. Galilean Relativity suggests that the pen will behave according to the regular laws of physics from my perspective because the platform, the pen, and I are all moving at the same constant velocity with respect to one another. In non-sciency terms — the pen will drop straight down to the ground like I’d expect it would.

However, consider the perspective of someone drinking their freshly brewed pour-over (let’s call the coffee guy “Bob”). From his perspective, the pen not only traveled down relative to where it fell out of my hand but also traveled forward along the plane we were moving in. I didn’t notice the two directions of motion, but Bob did.

Galileo explained this concept using the analogy of a ship. He said that someone who was belowdecks playing a gentlemanly (or gentlewomanly?) game of billiards wouldn’t be able to tell that the ship was moving. The billiards balls would react just as they would on solid ground (assuming of course the ship was traveling at a constant velocity on an unchanging plane). However, if a magical fish with X-ray vision happened to look up at the ship, she would see the movement of the billiards balls quite differently.

We experience this when flying on an airplane. Once we’ve reached our cruising altitude of 33,000 feet and the captain has turned off the fasten seatbelt sign indicating that we are now free to move about the cabin, we don’t even notice that we are in motion (again, assuming there’s no turbulence). But my son whose feet are firmly planted on the ground looking up and pointing shouting “Daddy, look! An airplane!”, certainly can see motion happening.

Now I know what you’re likely thinking. Trevor, would you get to the point already? What does some long-dead astronomer have to do with leadership? Well, friend, I’m so glad you asked.

Your Perspective is Wrong…

Or at least, it’s not the whole story. As a leader, what you are seeing and experiencing is only a part of reality. Just like Galileo’s theory, there can be a misalignment between what we are seeing and the results that are actually being created in the world. The pen may be resting at the bottom of my feet on the people-mover, but it is 10 yards ahead of where it was dropped according to coffee-guy-Bob.

Understanding this can level up your leadership in a meaningful way. Begin to assume that the way you are seeing that situation is flawed in some way. There is a gap between your perspective and the reality that’s actually at play. And simply knowing that your perspective is just a singular sliver of reality can dramatically increase your effectiveness.

So, on to the practical stuff.

Six Ways to Improve Your Perspective as a Leader

Once we know our perspective is flawed, we can search for other perspectives to fill in the gaps in our understanding. Here are a few ways to do that.

1) Be infinitely curious.

Curiosity is actually my go-to cure for most of my flaws as a leader (and as a human being in general for that matter). Didn’t get the response I was looking for from my team? Get curious. Didn’t get that promotion I was expecting? Get curious. One of my direct reports didn’t complete a commitment on time? Get curious. Get left off the invite list for an epic inter-office taco lunch outing? Get mad. Then remember my own rules and get curious.

Curiosity pulls our brains out of the usual “must find a way to be right” programming and into the glorious hippocampian (not a real word), wonder-center part of our brain. It allows us to explore the possibility that we were wrong (*gasp*). But more on that in a future issue. Suffice it to say, you can’t even begin to expand your perspective without first being curious about what other perspectives might exist.

2) Ask a lot of questions. Then ask more.

Closely tied to #1, asking questions is putting action to our curiosity. It’s not enough for me to wonder about what I’m missing. I then get to actually explore that through inquiry. Some of my favorite questions to ask when I’m trying to expand my perspective are:

• What am I not seeing here? What am I missing?

• How are you seeing the situation from your point of view?

• If we were to ask our customers, what might they say?

• Do we have any data that backs up our thinking? That contradicts it?

• If we went ahead and assumed we were wrong about this, where would that error most likely be?

3) Now, shut up and listen!

You’ve gotten curious, you’ve asked some great questions of yourself and others, and now you have to genuinely listen. Listen to what others are telling you. Deeply consider how they are seeing the world and how events are occurring to them. Dial up the empathy, kick judgment in the gut, and seek to understand. If you’ve created a culture where your team feels safe to share (and kudos to you if you have), then be careful not to erode that trust by not listening attentively.

4) Level up in the diversity department.

And I don’t only mean diversity in the sense of our normal demographics. Obviously, diversity in race, gender, socioeconomic status, etc. will increase the perspectives and provide a more complete picture. But in the context of an organization, look for other ways to diversify your inputs as well. Ensure you are hearing from people at all levels of the organizational chart. The perspective of your most tenured employee is likely much different from your brand-new hire. What about personality differences? There is almost an infinite number of ways to diversify your perspective, and you really can’t overdo it.

5) Read more. Just do it.

While I highly recommend it, talking to a real live human being isn’t the only way to gain new perspectives. Books, podcasts, articles, YouTube videos, there is a plethora of ways to get into someone else’s head these days. No one can really claim ignorance anymore — if you want to know, there’s a way to find it (and quickly). The more well-read you are, the more complete your picture of the world will be.

6) Get a coach.

Ohh man. Here goes the coach guy with his “all roads lead to coaching” bit! Well, no, not quite. Sort of, I guess. Listen, something that we preach at Novus Global is that you can’t do surgery on yourself. Come to think of it, I suppose you could, but it likely wouldn’t go very well. Whether you hire a professional coach (from Novus Global of course) or invite a leader or colleague in your life to hold the space for it, having someone whose job it is to help you see what you are not seeing is critical to your growth as a leader.

A Question to Leave You With…

I never know how to end one of these things. Thinking I’m going to experiment with leaving you with a question each week to sit in. Let me know if its resourceful for you.

Who’s perspective on your team (or in your world) have you not considered? What do you want to do about it?

Go out and lead meaningfully friends.

Trevor

PS - If you found this valuable in any way, I have two requests. One, would you reply and let me know? I’d love to hear from you. Second, would you consider forwarding this to a friend or colleague who might also be eager to grow as a leader? I would be honored to be trusted with your people and promise to serve them as powerfully as I intend on serving you.

h/t to Farnam Street for their work on mental models which inspired this post.

If you’re ready to dig in some more, here are a few ways you can grow meaningfully as a leader:

1. Have you ever considered hiring a coach? Click here to schedule a no-cost, 15-minute discovery call with me where we’ll explore how coaching might just be the greatest next step for your growth.

2. Check out the latest episode of the Beyond High Performance podcast from my fellow coaches at Novus Global.

3. Want to learn what motivates you? Check out our free 5i Assessment to find out!