Insight has a number of meanings, but here, we are talking about developing a deep understanding of one’s self. Insight is an important part of emotional intelligence and can be very beneficial as a leader because when you can understand and accept yourself, it is far easier to extend these kindnesses to others. But in leadership, the other half of insight is outsight, or the ability to see beyond yourself, beyond your singular perspective.
“Outsight is the ability to see beyond yourself and your individual perspective.”
While insight is the ability to see and understand things within yourself, outsight is the ability to see external things more clearly. If insight can be viewed as developing an understanding of yourself, your motivations, preferences and perspectives, outsight is developing an understanding of others’ motivations, preferences and perspectives.
"When we can see beyond ourselves and seek to understand more about what is going on beyond us, we tend to make better decisions because we can see the bigger picture."
While insight is a critical part of your leadership skill set, outsight, though less talked about, is equally important because as leaders we so often manage large groups of diverse individuals. When we can see beyond ourselves and seek to understand more about what is going on beyond us, we tend to make better decisions because we can see the bigger picture. To illustrate the usefulness of both insight and outsight, imagine the following scenario:
You have two employees, Kathy and John, in conflict asking for your input. Insight into your own feeling about the conflict tells you that you really hate to be interrupted by an issue that from your perspective, they should be able to resolve without your involvement. If you act on this perspective alone, you might tell them to work it out on their own and leave you out of it.
But let’s imagine that you used outsight to uncover some of the feeling and thinking of both Kathy and John. You might uncover that Kathy feels like John is scared to make decisions and drags out issues that have a direct impact on her. Kathy feels like her momentum is slowed down by John’s hesitance so she leans on him. For his part, John feels pressured by Kathy but also remembers a time or two when you were angry and disappointed that he made a critical error. He gets nervous about taking decisive action.
If you follow just your insight and tell the two to figure it out, you might have them in your office again tomorrow and the day after that with a different version of the same issue rearing it’s head. On the other hand, if you use outsight to uncover at least some of John and Kathy’s perspectives, you could give Kathy some needed decision making power and reassure John that you expect some mistakes to happen and he has your support and trust. By trying to act with each individuals’ motives and thoughts in mind, you have a better chance of real and lasting resolution.
Insight can be developed through practice. In fact, insight meditation uses sharply focused attention on observing how your body feels and thoughts in your mind in order to develop a greater insight into what’s real versus what your mind creates. Like insight, outsight is something you can also get better at with practice. How can you work to develop outsight? Next time you experience or observe conflict or maybe even just an everyday interaction, ask yourself the following:
How do I feel about this?
How might my feelings on this differ from others?
What is most important to me?
What is most important to the individuals around me?
What am I inferring from this?
How might that be different from how others interpret the interaction?
In asking these kind of questions, and quite often this reflective thinking will happen after an interaction, we work on both insight and outsight. We pause to really understand how we think about things and then we push that understanding beyond ourselves to understand the ways in which others might see a situation. As leaders, this kind of practice can help us widen our view, see further past the horizon and help us better mobilize out people in the direction of our visions.
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