Jonas Stegmüller

My most impactful learning experience after 2 years in change management

Hello there, my name is Jonas and I've known Johannes for more than 25 years now. Since approx. 2 years I'm working as the Assistant to the CEOs of SATA. Through one of my colleagues I started being interested in psychology, understanding how the human brain works and how interactions between humans are influenced.

I'd like to start my post with a quote by Carl G. Jung: "You are what you do, not what you say!".

I've read that sentence a couple of years ago but didn't really understand what he meant by that up until three or four months ago. I have been working in change management and while doing that I've been talking to a lot of different people about the values they hold high, what is most important to them and what they think the company I work for is lacking. During these talks one topic came up very frequently: communication. I want to use that as an example, however the learning can be applied to every value you may think of at the moment.

Let me give you a little bit of context for why the realisation was of practical importance for my job: The company I work for has had troubles with their working environment, some might describe it as toxic and that it is most visible by how people communicate. However, I couldn't really understand why that was the case, because, whenever I was speaking to my colleagues separately or in small groups, it has always been respectful, constructive and non-toxic. Almost everyone described themselves as someone who puts effort into communicating as early as possible or being as transparent as possible. Therefore I have been thinking a lot about how it could be that the communication in the company I work for was described as poorly even if everyone was communicating the best they could?

After a while I realised this: Descriptions of values are entirely subjective. Now, this might sound like a no-brainer but think about it for a second: Have you ever met someone that would describe him-or herself as bad communicator, or even a liar? I haven't.

But what I have encountered were situations in which I asked myself: How could anyone not tell this specific information beforehand?

With this in mind, I realized another important element of values: most of the time, there is no right or wrong. There are simply different (subjective) interpretations of the same situation and how to act in the best way in a given situation. Both parties could be 100% within their personal moral standard (i.e. communicating as early as possible with all necessary information included) but their actions could be entirely different.

After realising the subjective nature of values, I started to think about this whenever someone is saying they hold this or that value high. I began to approach people with a mindset that Jordan Peterson refers to as "Alert Neutrality". One might say he himself or she herself is a good communicator/ honest or whatever value it might be, but it's up to their actions to determine whether we have the same interpretation of "good".