The Stories We Tell as Facts
It’s 2:50pm and Nate starts gathering all the things in preparation for his 3:00pm 1:1 with his new boss. This is only their third time meeting but it didn’t take Nate long to see that his boss likes to ask lots of questions. So Nate’s coming prepared this time.
“Hey Nate, come on in and take a seat. I’ve been thinking about Project X and I have an idea for how we can run the back end logistics differently to solve some of the problems we’ve been having.”
Nate thinks to himself, I was going to ask you how your weekend was, but sure we can just dive right in. He sits down and internally shuts down a bit. He was hoping to share some of what he prepared as a way of bringing the boss up to speed on what he and the org have tried in the past, what the results were and what questions still remain. Nate wants to ensure his boss immediately understands his value.
His boss, however, he’s ready to ideate, to solve, to look ahead — no need to review what’s been done or what didn’t work, let’s solve for the future.
The meeting ends.
Nate walks away concluding his boss doesn’t care about what he’s built, doesn’t value him, and isn’t even interested in building a real relationship.
The boss concludes Nate is not very engaged, even a bit skeptical, and assumes he’s stuck in the comfort zone of doing things the way he’s always done them.
Who’s right? Neither. They are both living inside the story they created.
