Change yourself first.
まず自分自身を変えよう。
Deep in one’s heart, no one wants to change anything—even in a business environment.
If you worked for a company as a consultant, you would sometimes face a weird situation: employees of the company do whatever they can do to prove the consultant wrong. They refuse to cooperate with the consultant, either aggressively or passive-aggressively. Even if the company clearly has a problem (or problems) to solve, it’s not rare that their employees become quite reluctant.
Why does that happen? Ninety-nine percent of the time, the management of the company (who requested a consultant to work for the company) is the root cause. They expect a consultant to change their employees and solve their problems, without changing themselves. They also expect their employees to work together with the consultant, without giving the employees any incentive for that.
Then their employees start thinking this way: “Wait a minute. We don’t have to change. We work really hard every day, and nothing is wrong with us. If there’s any problem with this company, it is the company’s management who needs to change!” And they figure out hundreds of creative ways to lead a consultant into failure because that’s one of the easy ways to prove the management wrong—and prove them right.
A consultant is an outsider. And as the old saying goes, an outsider often has the best perspective. But in order to use the outsider effectively, the management of the company needs to change their mindset before changing their employees and the company. They need to accept that they need to change themselves to make the company better, and also accept the outsider’s view—which is almost always uncomfortable—to be the better version of themselves and the company.
Even if you change yourself, others don’t always change themselves accordingly. But at least, your perspective changes as you change, and that gives you new ideas to make the current situation better.
Always change yourself first. That’s the only way to change the world around you.