Why Do People Constantly Look in the Rear View Mirror?
In presentations, we often ask the audience, “How many of you got into construction because you wanted to manage people?” You can guess the answer, right? The fact remains, however, that as you move up the ladder in this industry, your success less and less depends on the tasks you do and more and more on how you can inspire greater quantities of discretionary effort from those around you.
Please tune in this week as Wayne relates an incredibly powerful analogy from Senior FBI Consultant Doug McCright and what it means for strong-willed people dealing with other strong-willed people in the fast paced construction environment. We’d like to hear what similar types of analogies have worked for you in the context of your business. Please share with us in the comments section below.
With all the disturbing news about “The Great Resignation” swirling about, what can you do to demonstrate care and concern for your employees? Invest in their futures (and yours!) by enrolling them in The Contractor Business Boot Camp. Our next class is in Dallas Nov. 3-4, 2022. Please contact Charlotte at [email protected] for more information.
Hi, everyone. This is Wayne Rivers at FBI, and We Build Better Contractors.
This week, I want to ask the question, why do people in business and in life spend so much time looking in the rear-view
mirror? We were having our quarterly strategic planning session recently and one of our consultants, Doug McWright,
was talking about a situation with which he was wrestling. It happened to be a family construction business in this case,
but this applies to non-family businesses, too. I think at least 50% of our members are not technically family businesses
anymore. They probably started out that way, but they certainly are not today. But this is important because I think this
continual looking in the rear-view mirror often holds people back, and it was certainly holding this particular contractor
back.
Doug used a wonderful analogy for these folks, and all of us in the meeting were fairly taken with it. Doug said, "You've
got to think about this in an analogous way." Think about driving your car and think about the relative sizes between the
windshield out of which you look forward and the rear-view mirror in which you look to see backwards. That's about how
much time that you should spend in meetings or in discussions looking forward versus looking backwards. The windshield
is at least 10 times bigger than the rear-view mirror, and you should spend the vast majority of your time looking forward
and not in reverse.
There's nothing we can do to change the past at this point. We can think about it differently, we can react to it differently,
we can accept, and we can move on, we can forgive, we can do lots of things, but we really can't change the past. There's
nothing any single human being on earth can do about things that have taken place in the past.
I talked to a friend of mine who's a psychiatrist about this phenomenon, and she said that there are genuinely upsetting
memories that people carry with them. Sometimes they're real hurts. Even physical hurts that they carry. They see carrying
these insults, hurts, injuries as carrying a debt. They're carrying a debt that someone else owes to them, and they often in
business have perceptions of favoritism, that one family member was treated more favorably than another at a certain
time, and that led to another series of events.
My guys inside, I've talked to them about Doug's analogy and what the psychiatrist said, and they said they thought there
were three other reasons that people tend to look in the rear-view mirror. Number one, it's easier than dealing with the
vexing problems of the present and the future. The second thing is it allows people to feel morally superior, more virtuous
than others in the group if they keep bringing up these slights, hurts, insults, injuries, et cetera. The rear-view mirror view
is more tangible than things when we talk about the future.
In business, especially our members that are doing the strategic planning we recommend they do, to us, concrete people,
I happen to be one of those folks that likes tangible, concrete stuff, it's kind of difficult. It's very difficult, in fact, to look
into the future and peer into your crystal ball and try to determine where you're going to be in a year or three or five years
in terms of business. What's your revenue going to be? What's your head count going to be? What business are you going
to be in the sense of customers and lines of work and all kinds of other things? It's tough. It's challenging. But that's part
about what I think makes it so rewarding.
Doug's analogy is terrific. Spend most of your time looking forward into the future through your windshield. The rear-view
mirror is a very useful tool and that can inform the future, but you shouldn't spend very much time looking backwards,
because there's not anything you can do about changing the past.
I'd like to hear what analogies or what, oh, I don't know what, what wisdom has been good for you in terms of building
your business and keeping people integrated and whole as a team. This is Wayne Rivers at FBI and We Build Better
Contractors.
