Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, realized that being a good leader required being a good mind reader. “I see my task as serving the majority of people,” he said in an interview to Forbes. “The question is, how do you find out what they want?”
Research: Perspective-Taking Doesn’t Help You Understand What Others Want
In fact, it may even make it harder.
October 09, 2018
Summary.
Perspective-taking is a popular approach among business leaders for understanding the minds of their employees, customers, or competitors. It means doing your best to deliberately try to see things from the other person’s point of view, imagining that you were in their shoes. Social psychological research has demonstrated many benefits of perspective-taking — increased altruism, decreased stereotyping, and a stronger social bond with another person. But almost no research has investigated whether trying to take the perspective of another person actually increases your insight into what they truly think, feel, or want. New research finds that perspective-taking does not have the effect it’s often expected to. Rather, what seems to work best at helping someone understand what another person wants is simply asking them.