You cannot eyesight is limited. You cannot see a building from inside and outside at the same time. You cannot see a building from the front and the back at the same time. You cannot see the details of things that are far away from you. So what?….As a manager you see things from one side and in many cases you need to see the other sides. You need to see what they see.
Departments (islands) of the same organizations
Every manager or employee in one department of af a big organization knows aht he is doing and what others are doing around him in the same department. But when it comes to other departments, he does not know much. He knows they are doing so and so but he does not know their capabilities, their problems, their challenges, what they can do in few minutes and what they can do in hours.days …
The result is that the departments are islands and population in those islands really need some tourism in other departments. We need to understand each other. The design department should know the capabilities of the manufacturing so that the design department will not ask for impossible or very difficult/expensive processing. The IT department needs to know what other departments need and they need to know what the IT can do and cannot do. The maintenance people should see the plant from the operation view and the operation people should see it from the maintenance view. We need to see what other see.
Managers and their decisions
Managers see their decisions from their sides while employees see it from a different side. The manager takes the decision based on certain information and obviously he is biased towards his decision. The employees may not the information the manager knows and may know other information that he does not know. The employees see the decision from their side. They see the results and may feel it themselves.
The point is that the manager needs to see what employees see and sometimes need to show them what he sees. Managers need to do that before and after taking the decision. Obviously, it is not the same case for every decision but it is important for the decisions that affects the employees and the way of doing work.
The produce and the customer
The producer likes his product, of course, and he knows the details of the manufacturing and the financial data. The customer is using the product and he sees it differently. The customer knows nothing about the manufacturing and the financial data. He likes and hates certain things in the product.
The producer needs to know what the customer sees in his product. He needs these information in order to imporve the product. All the managers in the producing company needs to get information about the customer view of the product.
The trainer and the trainees
The training knows the training material and thus he feels it is so easy. The trainer may have never heard about the training topic and so he thinks it is so difficult. The trainer may not feel tired quickly because he is talking about something he knows but the trainer gets tired because he is trying to understand new things.
The trainer needs to see things from the trainers view. He needs to know when they are tired, how do they feel, whether they understand or not.
Simply, we need to communicate, to visit each other, to listen to each other. We need to realize that we can’t see from all sides and that we need to get help from the others to see what they see.
