Ask anyone who grew up in the United States of America to write down their date of birth in numeric form and here’s the pattern you’ll most likely see: Month/Day/Year. Leave the US, however, and you usually see a different order: Day/Month/Year.
For example, Jackson Koivun, a native of California who recently won the 3M Open golf tournament, would naturally write 06/23/2005, while Master’s champion Rory McIlroy of Northern Ireland would probably write 04/06/1989. Yet both golfers were born in May.
When you think about it, the international approach is more logical. It starts with the most specific unit and works its way out to the broadest unit. That’s not the way we do it in the US, however, and occasionally it can trip us up. Our brains have been wired to look at those numbers and read Month/Day/Year, so that’s what we see.
I have a friend who glanced at the confirmation email for a trip he was making to Belize and freaked out momentarily because he thought it showed the wrong dates. He was calling the hotel when it dawned on him that the dates were correct; he was just seeing them wrong.
His initial reaction to see the pattern that fits his mental ruts illustrates the same problem we often face as leaders: we see things according to our expectations rather than as they really are. And our misinterpretations can cause confusion for our teams and damage to our organizations.
If you never travel outside the US or never do business internationally, you might not need to tweak your instincts so that you recognize the different ways dates might be represented. But it’s worth taking an inventory of your leadership world to see where your mental ruts might be taking you off track. Here are three areas to consider:
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Your People
When we think about other people, we instinctively put them in categories that are familiar. If we grew up in a white, middle-class suburb, then that shapes our view of the people we meet. The same is true if we grew up in a racially diverse inner-city neighborhood. What assumptions are you bringing to your discussions with the people around you – your employees, your peers, your investors, and your board members, for instance? And how can you suspend those assumptions until you have a clearer view of the reality?
Your Market
The slow death of many companies begins when their leaders fail to recognize that their market has morphed into something totally different. Technologies change markets. Competitors change markets. Regulations change markets. Consumer whims change markets. One day there are two daily newspapers in your city that arrive printed on paper that’s rolled up and delivered to your front door. The next day 90 percent of all news is delivered and consumed in digital form. If you are looking at realities in your market that are 10 years old, you’ll soon become yesterday’s news.
Your Influences
It’s easy to live in the comfort of our social bubbles. We make friends with people who have common interests, and we spend much of our time talking with them about the things we have in common. We also gravitate toward news and opinions that support the things we believe. But if we read only conservative or liberal political writings or hang out only with people who look and think like us, we can lose the ability to learn from those who are different.
Whether it’s our people, our markets, our influences, or some other category we might define, our default is to see what we expect to see. What’s comfortable. What we know. What to us is normal. Sometimes, that’s the reality. But sometimes it’s not. And the quicker we can recognize when it’s not, the better we can lead. Because if we have the dates wrong in our head, we’ll never show up on time.
