If you sail, you use the environment (wind) to help you move from one destination to another.
As a farmer, you use the environment (sun, rainfall, and soil) to grow the crops that nourish others.
As a leader, how do you use your environment?
Leaders improve, enable others and create more significant results when they understand how others experience them. Sometimes, leaders send messages to others, “You shouldn’t disagree with me”, or “Tell me what I want to hear, not what is really going on”.
This is not an environment where leaders, or the people that report into such leaders, play at their best.
People walk on eggshells, trying to say what they think the leader wants to hear and then leaders don’t get a true picture of the environment around them.
Organizations use sophisticated tools such as 360-degree feedback processes and multi-rater feedback inventories, yet none of these work as well as someone speaking to those people in the leader’s immediate environment and playing that feedback back to the leader, in some cases, anonymously, yet concretely.