Virtue:
Alertness
Other names:
Circumspection; situational awareness; L. circumspectio
Definition:
“Careful observation with a view to wise conduct” (Deferrari)
"Ability to take all relevant circumstances into account" (Freddoso)
Advice:
Empirical Research:
Open-Mindedness, as studied by psychologists, is an aspect of the virtue of Circumspection. Open-mindedness involves willingness to search for and fairly weigh evidence against one's own position (CSV). Effective measures of open-mindedness focus on assessing a person's thinking strategies, rather than on the contents of their thoughts or beliefs (e.g. Stanovich & West, 1998). Stanovich and West (1997) find that open-mindedness is linked to better argumentation and reasoning according to the Argument Evaluation Test.
Case examples:
Gifts of the Holy Spirit
Further reading:
Vices opposed:
Thoughtlessness, failing to "to judge rightly through contempt or neglect of those things on which a right judgment depends" (II-II Q. 52, A. 4)
Case Study 1
ReplyDeleteRobert Luddy is president of CaptiveAir in Raleigh, North Carolina, and author of Entrepreneurial Life: The Path from Startup to Market Leader. In his book, he explains how a leader must practice the virtue of circumspection in setting an example for his subordinates.
"Although sometimes overlooked, corporate culture often determines the overall direction of a company’s motion; it is important to make sure that the majority of your team is moving toward your goals. The entrepreneur and other main drivers must set the example and live by it consistently in order to show employees how things are best performed. For example, I am a huge proponent of being on time for work. In order to set a positive example, I arrive an hour before my team each morning, and usually stay later than most employees. I never ask my employees to work harder than I do, but my behavior serves as a daily reminder and inspiration to reach higher. The culture should flow from the top down, spreading attitudes, ideals, and key objectives to every level of the team.
"Employees are sometimes dubious about lofty goals and may assume that goals cannot be met, so they must continually be encouraged to find new ways to win. They must embrace creativity, curiosity, and constructive conflict with speed, agility, and adaptation, but these traits are only obtainable if the leader personally reflects and communicates all of these values first." (Luddy, Entrepreneurial Life, ch.6)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn his autobiography, Pizza Tiger, Tom Monaghan explains his developing strategy of business management. "My main resolution, which I intended to make every executive and supervisor at the company make with me, was to visit the stores. You don't get what you expect unless you inspect. When you ask questions on the telephone, you get the answer you deserve to hear. If you visit the store in person, though, you get thousands of impressions, a lot of them pointing to things that need improvement. When a store is running smoothly, visiting it seems like a waste of time. But just stop visiting that store for a few months, and it will deteriorate dramatically. I learned that lesson the hard way, through experience.
"More than once, I have walked into a store and found the situation so bad that the manager had to be fired on the spot. Tom Ciccarelli, the president of the North American Pizza Association and publisher of its magazine, was traveling with me on one of these occasions. He was waiting in the car because my intention had been to simply walk into the store, say hello, look things over and leave. Imagine his surprise when I came out and told him, 'Come on in. You're answering phones, and I'm making pizzas and tending the ovens. I just fired the manager.' We put in a hard night's work, and as we were closing, Ciccarelli said to me, 'I think I learned more about the pizza business tonight than I did in a year of running the North American Pizza Association.'" (Monaghan, Pizza Tiger, pp. 164-65)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn Pizza Tiger, Tom Monaghan explains how he goes about weighing decisions relative to circumstances. "I reach decisions by making lists on my yellow legal pads. Down one side of a page, I'll write all the reasons I can think of in favor of a given course of action. On the other side, I list every reason I can think of against it. Thinking of arguments for and against a decision is where my ability to dream comes in handy: I imagine the decision that has been made. I see in my mind's eye how it affects people and the way they react. If it's a complicated issue, with many reasons for it and a lot of others against, I will break each point down into sublists and assign a kind of point value so I can weigh them against each other." (Monaghan, Pizza Tiger, p. 242)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn Tough Choices, Carly Fiorina discusses the lessons she learned in alertness while working with lawyer Stanley Dees when AT&T was forced to bring a lawsuit against GSA. "Stanley and his lawyers wanted my full participation in the preparation for the case, so he asked me to sit in on some of the GSA officials’ depositions. I sat across the table from people I’d worked with and thought I knew, and I watched some of them lie about events, about themselves, about me. I knew they were lying because I knew the facts. Stanley knew they were lying because he’d seen so many others do the same. That was interesting to me: that if you’d seen enough people lie and enough tell the truth, the difference was perceptible in how they held their heads, where they focused their eyes, the tone and tenor of their voices. Watching them made me both angry and sad. The experience reminded me yet again to watch people carefully because the words people say aren’t always the best indicator of what they’re really thinking, feeling or intending. There will be times in every career when it will be vital to know whether what someone says is what he or she means. When I’ve missed this in my own career, the consequences have always been dire." (Fiorina, Tough Choices, ch. 10)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn his book, The Pope & the CEO, Andreas Widmer, businessman and former Swiss Guard for John Paul II, explains how the late Pope was able to maintain situational awareness in the midst of his many duties, offering an example of leadership to secular professionals no less than clergymen. "He was attentive to us in the small things, and so we were all the more willing to help him out in the big things.
"One story that illustrates this was told to me by a fellow Swiss Guard, Bernard. One sweltering summer day, he stood guard at the summer residence, Castel Gandolfo, which is just outside Rome. He was in the center of the courtyard, dripping with sweat thanks to his heavy uniform and the hot Italian sun, when the pope and a few colleagues emerged from one door and walked directly into another. They never stepped out into the courtyard, just skirted around its edges as they walked from one door to the next. Bernard saluted them, but doubted at the time that they saw him. He, however, was wrong in the case of John Paul II. Just moments after the pope disappeared behind the door, one of the religious sisters who worked with him came into the courtyard with a pitcher of water. John Paul II thought Bernard might be thirsty, standing in the hot sun, and requested the water be sent out.
"John Paul II never failed to see those in front of him. People were never less important to him than his immediate tasks or long-term goals. That’s why his presence in the moment wasn’t just one of attentiveness, but also of understanding."
(Widmer, The Pope & the CEO, ch. 5)
ReplyDeleteCase Study
ReplyDeleteIn his book, Thinking Outside the Box: The Wine Group Story, Arthur Ciocca, founder of Wine Group, Inc., explains how he learned the value of maintaining simplicity in company goals and projects early in his tenure as CEO of Franzia. “There was a lot to learn and a lot to do. The mission seemed overwhelming. I found that people were getting lost in the details. Sometimes the solution to a problem was worse than the problem itself. I found myself getting bogged down with long complex memos from subordinates. When I accepted these undeveloped ideas, they became my problem. Since I couldn’t afford to get lost in the details, I would simply scribble across the top of long, rambling letters: ‘If you can’t express this idea in a paragraph or two, it probably isn’t thought-through enough to consider.’
“It wasn’t long before I was being brought more solutions than problems. [One of our key cultural values] was born: ‘Keep it Simple.’ By keeping it simple, I was able to avoid continually being in a reactionary mode and was able to spend more time actively building the organization, focusing on strategic issues and charting the course for the organization.” (Ciocca, Thinking Outside the Box, p. 17)