The Outward Mindset: How to Change Lives and Transform Organizations

“It is the focus on success—focusing on a result in a way that focuses on others—that is so accelerating.

Then ask questions that might spark ideas about what adjustments might be helpful: What can we do to help others understand how we value and appreciate them? What can we do to more fully understand others’ viewpoints and concerns? What trappings of leadership currently exist in the organization? Which of these trappings and differences make good bu

However, very often, people in organizations mostly identify around their separate, individual roles. They don’t have an understanding of how their own roles are essential to the overall collective result of the organization.

What is that constant? In each case, the leaders involved their organizations in pursuing a collective result—that is, a result that at once involved all the people in something much bigger than themselves and required that everyone join together with others in order for their efforts to succeed.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself as you utilize the outward-mindset-at-work framework for redefining your role in this way: • Toward your manager. Do I have a clear understanding of my manager’s objectives? What can I do to learn about them? What do I need to do to make sure that I am holding myself accountable for my contribution to my

‘Hmm, that sounds like quite the conundrum. I look forward to hearing your best thinking about how we should fix that.’ At the end of the day, my leadership effectiveness is measured not by what I am able to accomplish but by what those whom I lead are able to accomplish.”

Systems and processes that are designed to manage objects rather than empower people have widespread negative consequences. Efforts to rethink those systems and processes from an outward-mindset perspective can deliver huge benefits.

What can I do to be more helpful at work? What can I do to be more helpful at home? What can I do to be more helpful to those I know and to those I don’t? What can I do? And will I see myself and others in ways that will enable me to do what I can do?

Without realizing it, too many leaders assume that the role of leadership is to control. They espouse Plato’s “division of labor,” which, according to social thinker Hannah Arendt, has influenced government and military structures for thousands of years.