In chapter 3, we introduced the inward and outward mindsets and saw both at work in Louise Francesconi’s executive team. Their shift from an inward to an outward mindset illustrates how people are able to consider better possibilities when their mind-sets are outward because they see beyond themselves and can think beyond narrow self-interest.
A shift to an outward mindset also changes how people see, regard, and engage with others. We saw this too in the experience of Louise’s team. As their mindsets turned outward, they began to see and consider not only their own needs but also the needs and objectives of others—the needs of their colleagues and of those who might be affected by potential layoffs. Breakthroughs came as they began considering others in this way. Seeing others differently, they began thinking and behaving differently.
Diagrams 7 and 8 on the next page illustrate the differences in how one behaves and engages with others depending on one’s mindset. The triangles in these diagrams represent my objectives and behaviors relative to other people. With an outward mindset, my objectives and behaviors take others into account; the triangle points outward. With an inward mindset, my objectives and behaviors are self-focused; the triangle points inward.
Another element on the diagrams communicates the key difference in how I see others in these two mindsets. With an outward mindset, I am alive to and interested in others’ needs, objectives, and challenges; I see others as people. With an inward mindset, on the other hand, I become self-focused and see others not as people with their own needs, objectives, and challenges but as objects to help me with mine. Those that can help me, I see as vehicles. Those that make things more difficult for me, I see as obstacles. Those whose help wouldn’t matter become irrelevant to me.
Diagram 7. The Outward Mindset and Others
Diagram 8. The Inward Mindset and Others
Don’t confuse introspection with an inward mindset. One can introspect in a self-centered way, which would indicate an inward mindset. However, a person also can introspect about one’s connections with others, which is the very essence of what we are calling outwardness. Sometimes it is helpful to look inside to see how one is connected with what is outside.
This kind of outward-mindset introspection is a strategic imperative for the healthcare company that we discussed in chapter 1. Its success is directly tied to how the employees of that company purposely reflect on how they are with others, trying to become aware of and interested in the needs, objectives, and challenges of their coworkers and customers.
One of the first facilities the company purchased had experienced perennial struggles, both clinically and financially. The facility was led by an interdisciplinary team of talented department heads who had, over time, forgotten the reason they entered healthcare. Years of inwardly focused management had invited and reinforced an inward focus in them, often leaving them blind to their impact on each other and, most importantly, the patients in their care. During the first few months after the acquisition of this facility, an elderly Vietnamese patient was admitted from the local hospital.
While traveling back to Vietnam after visiting her children in another location in the United States, this patient had experienced major health complications. Unable to speak English and with no family nearby, she was powerless to communicate with the staff at even the most basic levels and quickly became a problem. One behavioral outburst followed another—first she threw her food and then her urinal—each eruption accompanied by yells and rants in a language none of the staff understood. “She has to be discharged,” one department leader demanded in the next department-head meeting. “Surely there is a behavioral unit that will accept her.” Another agreed: “At the very least, we have to get the physician to prescribe medication to calm her down.”
With these two options on the table, the team stood to leave the meeting. “What would it be like to be her?” one of the team members asked quietly, almost to herself, giving voice to an outward-mindset question. Everyone stopped. “I’m just thinking about what it would be like to be Ms. Tham,” she continued. “She is far from home. She can’t communicate. She can’t understand what is going on. She doesn’t know why we are keeping her here or if she’ll ever get home. I wonder what she’s thinking? What would that be like?”
Everyone sat down again. After a few moments, the dietary supervisor spoke up: “You know, there is a little Vietnamese store by my house. I think it might make a difference if she could eat what she’s used to eating. I’ll get some recipes online and see what we could do in the kitchen.” The social services director began searching for local Vietnamese community groups and within the week had a lineup of volunteers to be at Ms. Tham’s bedside spending one-on-one time in conversation and providing translation services for the nurses. Soon the entire staff had rallied to find ways not only to make Ms. Tham’s stay bearable but to enrich it. She was no longer an object to the people in the facility; she had become a person to them—a person whom they desired to help.
Notice how the team members exercised their best thinking when they began to see and consider Ms. Tham as a person. The same could be said of Chip’s squad members and Louise’s executive team. Seeing people as people rather than as objects enables better thinking because such thinking is done in response to the truth: others really are people and not objects.
This truth, once seen, enables change even where change seems most unlikely. For example, consider the story of Ivan Cornia and his father, William.
Ivan was born in 1929. During the years of the Great Depression, his father sandwiched long days manning the local canal between morning and evening work on the family farm. William’s boss on his day job was a very difficult man, and William often returned home from his shift in an angry mood. He tried to find refuge in the bottle, and the mixture of anger and alcohol drove him to violence, starting with the animals on the family farm. For example, on one occasion when reshoeing one of his horses, the horse jerked its foot and ripped William’s leg open. William jumped up, grabbed a metal rasp, and crashed it against the horse’s head. Young Ivan was holding the horse by its bridle at the time, and twelve hundred pounds of horseflesh collapsed to the ground at his feet. Ivan thought his father had killed it.
Ivan had witnessed his father beating sheep, cows, goats, and dogs numerous times. He lived in constant fear that he would be next.
One early morning, Ivan and his father were in the barn together. Ivan was milking one of the cows while his father was taking care of other chores. As Ivan milked his cow, the cow in the next stall switched its tail, which was just long enough to reach Ivan. One of the burrs on the end of the cow’s tail caught Ivan in the eye. Without thinking, Ivan leapt up, grabbed the metal milk stool he had been sitting on, and, while shouting the vile obscenities he had heard his father yell, began beating the cow violently. When he had unleashed all his anger, he put the stool back down and collapsed onto it, readying himself to continue milking. But then something horrifying occurred to him: the cow he had just pulverized was his father’s favorite cow, and his father was working barely twenty feet behind him. Ivan began quivering and sunk lower on his stool. He buried his head into the flank of the cow and waited, heart pounding, sure that the time for his beating had come.
But his father didn’t come. Besides Ivan’s heavy breathing, the barn lay shrouded in silence.
After what seemed like an eternity, Ivan’s father quietly approached and placed a stool next to his son. Then he heard his father softly say, “Ivan, if you’ll stop, I’ll stop.”
Recalling this story some seventy years later, Ivan said that from that moment on he’d never known a more gentle, helpful, and kind human being. William Cornia completely and irrevocably changed his life—all at once. No more violence, no more vile language, no more alcohol. He became a different person in an instant. No one who knew William at the time would have guessed that he could change like this, and certainly not all at once. How was he able to do it?
William found the ability to do what he had previously been unable to do in the moment he saw the needs of his son and realized that he was responsible for his impact on his boy. William’s change was dramatic because it was not merely a change in what he did; it was a change in how he saw and thought.
Rok Zorko, vice president of product development for the very successful app-development company, Outfit7, said, “It is an eye-opener to realize that you are not to treat people as objects but to treat them as people. Once you have this knowledge, you can never unthink it.” Evidently, this was true for William Cornia as well. Once he saw the impact he had on his son, he could not unsee it. Seeing Ivan in this way was William’s escape from his inward mindset.
William, Louise and her executive team, Chip and his SWAT squad, and the healthcare workers with Ms. Tham were able to move to an outward mindset when they saw beyond themselves and discovered the needs of those around them. Through the rest of this book, we will consider many additional real-life examples to further explore the differences in the inward and outward mindsets and to help illuminate how to live and work more consistently with an outward mindset.
In part II, we explore the inward and outward mindsets in more depth. We discuss how people get in their own way by adopting an inward mindset, and we consider the consequences of an inward mindset both personally and organizationally. We contrast the inward mindset with the way individuals and organizations function when their mindsets are outward.
In part III, we detail the outward-mindset pattern, a step-by-step blueprint that, if implemented, enables a person or organization to consistently operate with an outward mindset.
In part IV, we present important issues to consider and helpful actions that individuals and organizations can take to implement an outward-mindset approach within groups of people, including across entire organizations.