Good morning from a rainy and cold downtown Toronto. I’m here for meetings and workshops and am glad, quite frankly, of the fireplace in the lobby of my hotel as I write. Yesterday I was facilitating a workshop with a wonderful psychometric tool called DiSC with a group of colleagues. It was a great day. Early in the workshop we explored a very interesting image, called the Judgment to Value ladder. It is a simple but powerful image about how we most often behave with other people.

At the bottom of this ladder is “Judging”. Our initial response to people we don’t know is rooted at the very back of our brains, the “lizard brain” at the top of our spinal column. We look at the person and judge, first, “friend or foe” and then how they fit into the hierarchy of our community. So for example, if someone cuts you off in traffic, we don’t take a lot of time to try and work out why they did that,  we immediately judge them as foe, and our responses to them are filled with anger and blustering threats. Or we might look at how they are dressed and fit them into our preconceived groupings of where people are in our hierarchies; consider for example your response to people’s clothes and what judgements we make about everything from their shoes to their accessories. I recall an old friend showing up at my nephew’s Bar Mitzvah in a suit jacket, tee shirt, cargo shorts and ankle boots. The gaggle of wealthy 12 and 13 year olds were snickering behind his back because he was so “obviously” out of touch with their understanding of reality.

As leaders we know that we cannot run an organization simply on such judgements. The subsequent levels on the ladder lead us progressively to stronger relationships. One rung up from judgement is “understanding” where I gain some insight into why a person might have cut me off in traffic (swerving because of another driver for example.) Or I might see their choice of clothes not as a sign of a particular economic status, rather as a political statement. The young people at the Bar Mitzvah had no idea that our friend was actually a famous artist whose work hangs in hotel lobbies and large family homes around the world. I understood, because I had known him since were 10 years old that  he was wearing what he was wearing precisely because he was going to be surrounded by very wealthy people with matching belts and shoes and he wanted to push back against that. And that leads to the next two rungs, the first, “appreciating” and then “respecting”. There will be those of us who get stuck in our judgement, even if we do understand where the other person is coming from, but strong relationships are built when we can appreciate and even respect that our old friend is an artist through and through, and may revel in pushing back against the norm. And finally, we can find ourselves in fact “valuing” the person’s strength, courage and position, even if we ourselves would do it differently. And it is out of such valuing that truly strong relationships are built.