Being free of judgement

Are you able to be free of judgement? Or at least to postpone your judgement until you have well and truly heard all voices?

Looking at a situation without blame or judgement is not naturally easy. And that definitely has its uses. Thanks to our judgements, we do not have to allow everything, for example. We make selections in what we see and do, and in this way we keep the world in order and understandable.

However, the systemic approach requires you to be able to look without judgement. Only then can you, as a leader, be available to everyone and everything in the organisation, without excluding anyone. And because you do not have to commit to anything, you can incorporate multiple perspectives. When you have a judgement, you no longer see the reason why something happened the way it did.

Judgements therefore close you off to some of the available information. But they also close you off to some of the potential, both your own and that of the organisation.

Being free of judgement is therefore an important skill to use as a systemic leader. As soon as you show your willingness to discover that something may be different than you thought, you will learn from it. But how do you do that? How do you avoid getting stuck in a given situation? How can you take in what else there is?

As soon as you notice that you have formed a judgement, you have a choice. You can set aside your own judgement and start afresh with a clean slate. Or you can cross over to the other side: take a multi-partisan stance by trying to connect with what the other person is saying.

But it is not only within the situation that you have a choice to make! You also have a personal choice to make. Namely: are you prepared to know and investigate your own judgements? What are the themes that you hold a strong judgement about? Where is this judgement possibly coming from, with what is it connected and what is the importance?

Systemic leadership certainly requires a level of personal efforts. Are you prepared to do this?