SmartPulse — our weekly nonscientific reader poll in SmartBrief on Leadership — tracks feedback from more than 160,000 business leaders. We run the poll question each Tuesday in our e-newsletter.
Last week, we asked: How well do leaders in your organization compromise with each other to achieve the best result?
- We always negotiate and compromise very well, and put the business first: 27.20%
- We often put the business first, but sometimes personal interests prevail: 50.29%
- We often put personal interests ahead of business interests: 15.46%
- We always put personal interests first, and don’t compromise well at all: 7.05%
Business first (most of the time). It’s encouraging to see the interests of the business tend to come first in the vast majority of circumstances but it’s troubling to see how often personal agendas enter the equation. Imagine how much more productive we’d be if we set aside personal interests and instead focused on making our businesses better. In the long run, doing so should reap larger rewards for each of us because our organization will perform better and be able to reward us more easily. For a week, try setting aside your personal interests (and encourage others to do the same) and see how much more “real” work you get done. You might be pleasantly surprised.
Mike Figliuolo is managing director of thoughtLEADERS and author of “One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership.”