Hi,

I’ve been running surveys and interpreting results for clients for 19 years. Helping founders & CEOs understand what their teams are really saying is core to what we do.

About 12 years ago, I did my first 360 on myself.

I had seven staff, and I was completely blindsided by what came back.

watts not working: Thinking that because you’re an expert at something, you can apply that expertise to yourself.

I know how to read survey results. I do it for clients constantly. I know what people mean when they say one thing and feel another. I know how to find the gap between the question and the answer.

None of that helped me when it was my own results sitting in front of me.

I read them. And then I had my coach go through them with me.

watts really happening: The results aren’t always what they seem – and you will always read them through the lens of what you already believe about yourself.

Here’s the one that annoyed me. The feedback from my team was that they didn’t feel I considered them enough when making decisions. My own feedback on myself – what I identified as my biggest area for improvement – was the opposite. I felt I was taking too much of their personal situations into account. I was losing sleep over it. Lying awake thinking “I know she’s about to go on vacation” or “I know he’s going through something difficult right now.” I was carrying all of it when I should have been making cleaner business decisions.

So there I was. My team thought I wasn’t considering them at all. I thought I was considering them too much.

Both were true.

When I read those results alone, I was defensive and upset – feeling like they had absolutely no idea of the stress I was carrying for them. Which, honestly, is a bit rich. My instinct was to just stop considering them altogether. Then I sat down with my coach and everything shifted.

What was actually happening was that I was doing all of this considering completely invisibly. They never saw it. They experienced the decision – not the sleepless night behind it. So from where they sat, I was making calls without any thought for them at all.

The fix wasn’t to stop caring. It wasn’t to care more either. It was to communicate the consideration so my team could actually feel it.

watts working: Having someone who can see what you can’t see about yourself.

My coach didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know about my team or about myself. What he did was hold the results in a way I couldn’t – without my history, without my defensiveness, without my blind spots. He could see the whole picture. I could only see my version of it.

watts the real game changer: Running a survey and then reading the results yourself is like operating on yourself. You might be the most qualified person in the room. It doesn’t matter. You still can’t see what you can’t see.

This is why our PX Baseline™ isn’t just a survey. It’s a survey plus the expert interpretation of what your team is actually telling you – and what to do about it. Because the results are rarely just as they seem.

And the gap between what you think they mean and what they actually mean is exactly where the most important work lives.

Have a week of seeing what you can’t see!

Sel Watts

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P.S. We invite you to visit our website and learn more about the PX Baseline™