Why leaders may benefit from having an ‘outsider mentality’

Stepping back can help leaders solve the trickier challenges they face 

CREDIT: This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared on Management Today

Often people overcomplicate things at work. In business, most answers are very simple and invariably always hiding in plain sight. 

The Koreans have a proverb, “The frog in the well never sees the ocean”. This piece of ancient wisdom is pertinent to CEOs of businesses, large and small; when you are consumed by the day-to-day daily tasks, it is hard to take a more 360-view. However, usually, the only thing that gives you perspective is distance. 

As humans, we tend to tune out the things we don’t consider to be immediately relevant. Psychologists call this ‘habituation’, and it is often fatal to business success. In our work lives, we need to make sure that we don’t miss the obvious answers to our problems. Habituation in business is bad news. Often those you work with or for cannot tell the difference between what you do, and what others do; as a result, you are both easily overlooked.

If you detach emotionally from the sector, you will see that everyone is doing the same things, in the same ways, with the same words or approaches. To solve, this it is worth not just finding different answers to problems, but simple ones. The key to this is to find what is in plain sight – which you may have missed by being too close or invested.

A recent project for The Gym Group showed that the whole industry is obsessed with how people feel walking OUT of the gym, rather than concentrating on how they feel walking INTO it. As a result, they missed the barrier that some people believe that gyms are not for people like them. 

So, try to identify the tropes of your business category and  work out what your consumers need or buy, rather than just what you have or sell. “In the factory, we make cosmetics. In the drugstore, we sell hope,” Charles Revson, the founder of Revlon, said.

You don’t need to invent something new, or make anything up. You simply need to stand back and adopt an outsider’s perspective and look with fresh eyes. As German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, “The problem is not so much to see what nobody has yet seen, as to think what nobody has yet thought concerning that which everybody sees.”