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welcome. We're going to talk about perspective.

Perspective is incredibly important to our understanding of leadership and

our ability to interact with one another.

When you think about perspective, I want you to think

about this giant monkey.

Is it a giant monkey, or is it a normal

sized monkey on a windshield?

We'll never know.

But perspective matters, something else matters to.

Yes, this is Justin Bieber, and he's a young kid

here. He has his whole life ahead of him.

He's optimistic he's looking towards the future.

He's kind of squinting into the sun, dreaming of what's

to come.

But if we had a little more context of this

photo, we might understand this situation totally differently.

The context matters as well.

This is just an artist interpretation of album covers, but

you think about perspective matters in terms of this giant

monkey. And I want you to think about Justin Bieber.

When you think about context now, context in a leadership

situation. We have leaders, we have followers, they have shared

goals and hopefully that they're pursuing those goals effectively.

But none of that can happen without considering the organizational

context that they're operating with them.

What's the culture of the organization.

What is the what are the unspoken norms happening at

that organization?

What are the expectations that people have of the organization

where they, um what's the mission of the organization, whether

it's a business or nonprofit or something else.

But the organizational context is critical to understanding what's happening

with those leaders and followers.

Similarly, we can put that into a cultural context that

all organizations that operate within a culture so what culture

is affecting that organization, which is then affecting the leaders

and followers and the pursuit of those shared goals.

So next thing we want to talk about is Berger

and Luckman theory of the social construction of reality.

The main question is, how do we build culture?

How do we build understanding of what's happening?

This is a sociology theory.

You've probably heard of it in your sociology classes.

It really helps us understand how I can see something,

and you can see something the exact same thing totally

different. I often ask my students in person, how many

of you when you move to Manhattan, Kansas, where K

state is located, did you feel like you were moving

to the big city.

And in a kind of typical class of this of

this subject, we get about half the room.

Half people would say I was moving to the big

city. There was a stoplight.

Um, Then I say, Well, how many of you thought

you were moving to the middle of nowhere and the

other half of the room raises their hand?

It's the exact same town, but yet we had completely

opposing understandings of what that town was going to be.

Some of y'all thought it was the middle of nowhere,

and some of you thought it was a big city,

same town, different understanding.

That's because your reality of what is Manhattan?

What the town is was shaped by your prior experiences.

So you understand this exact same town, this objective town,

to be totally different things, right?

So that's really critical.

So now when we think about perhaps this question of

what is leadership, it's pretty important to say, Okay, I'm

going to understand this concept coming from millions, and you're

going to understand this concept coming from your lands, and

that might lead us to a totally different understanding of

what a leader is or what it means to exercise

leadership. Our culture has critically affected our definition of leadership,

just as we have an understanding of leadership that's based

in, UM, theory and scholarship and best practices and leadership

here at the Staley School.

Other people disagree.

This is one version of what it means to exercise

leadership, and it's based in our culture.

Then maybe the harder question here is what happens when

you bump into somebody else and particularly try to exercise

leadership with them.

And you have different lenses.

You have different understandings of what it means to exercise

leadership or to succeed.

Yeah, another thing that shapes our understanding of anything, the

concept of leadership, what it means to move to the

town of Manhattan, what movies we like, what TV shows

we like, what cars we drive up music.

We listen to what we think success looks like who

we think should get stimulus money.

Everything is shaped by these cultural lenses that we have,

and those cultural lenses are often the big ones.

Race, class, gender, sexual identity, religion.

All of these things shape how we see literally everything,

including how we see ourselves knowing that culture matters that

context matters and that perspective matters is critical.

Before we start to take action, it's important to kind

of look within first before we take action in any

leadership setting or on any issue.

What is the organizational context?

What is the cultural context?

What is my lens on?

This opposed to someone else's?

Starting there can help us build empathy and understanding and

actually reach across lines of difference rather than say, Well,

I don't know why they're looking at it that way.

This is the right way to look at.

This is what it is.

This is the objective truth of this issue.

Keep in mind you have a perspective, even if it's

the majority one.

It's a perspective.

I have a perspective, and we're going to spend the

rest of this semester figuring out What do we do

when those two things clash?

What do we do when those two things bump into

each other in the real world, particularly when stakes are

high

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