Achieving a Balance: Control, Harmony and Humility

In his fascinating book, Coaching across Cultures: New Tools for Leveraging National, Corporate, and Professional Differences, Philippe Rosinski explains how to maintain a balance between control, harmony, and humility.

When you have a goal, during the process you follow to achieve the goal, you have the choice whether or not to maintain balance between the three elements mentioned above. First is control. Control is the ability you have to exert your energy to get things done. It has both a positive and negative side. The positive side is your proactive side: your ability to look for ways to improve the situation and make your results better. The negative side is your blindness to the other two elements, harmony and humility, and your insistence that your goal be accomplished even if it harms other people or the environment. Harmony is your ability to listen to your needs and the needs of others and make the best choices to meet those needs, even if it means altering some aspects of the end results of the goal. Humility is your acceptance of the natural limitations you have as a human being and your ability to learn to work with what you have. You learn to work within your current situation to make it the best it can be for accomplishing your goal.

Now, let's look at two scenarios which test our ability to maintain balance.

The first is a physical goal: It involves building a custom home for your family. You have decided to build your home in the countryside, far away from city pollution, noise and crime. Your blueprints for the home include building the house on top of a hill overlooking the city. However, when you meet with the architect, she reminds you of a zoning law which prohibits building in the spot you mentioned. In order to respect the harmony of the land, you must choose to build on a nearby location, so you decide to move the location of the house. Next, you show the architect your ideas for the house, which includes two swimming pools, one outdoors and one indoors. The architect then informs you that in addition to drinking water, the water you will need to supply for both pools will exceed the amount allowed by the city. If you go ahead and build both pools, you will need so much water that you will have to tap a well that is not on your property, but that belongs to another. So, in order to work with your natural limits and achieve harmony, you decide to build only one pool. Finally, your plan is to complete building within 4 months. However, because of several big storms which prohibit the workers from working every day, workers are estimating the completion of the project in 8 months. Using your control abilities, you decide to hire a second team of workers to help the first team. In this way, your project can be completed in 6 rather than 8 months. You have just learned to balance your humility, your natural limits, with control, your ability to make the situation better.

The second and final scenario involves the personal and professional goal of becoming a successful leader. In the process of achieving this goal, you must also balance control, harmony, and humility. First of all, you have control, the power to make big decisions regarding the resources and limits of your projects. You will want your best workers to work for you, and give you their best efforts. You will also want the best technology available as tools. Finally, you would like to complete your projects within a period of time that still allows you to remain competitive and satisfy customers' needs. You will often feel pressure to complete projects faster and to ask more of your workers. You will always want better and better tools. Now, the key to achieving the balance is priority. Every day, you have the power to look closely at the current progress and the situations you are in, and make the best choices available to you. You will definitely encounter obstacles along the way. You may find that your workers are spreading their energies too thin - working on several projects at a time and therefore, only able to work minimally on the projects that are a higher priority. You can either remove some of them from one or two projects, make a high priority for one particular project and have them work intensively on it, or bring in others to collaborate. Your natural limitations of humility will tell you what is possible. You must also maintain the harmony of your workers, by not overworking them to the point of exhausting them. Maybe a new tool is within your budget that may help increase efficiency. If there is a solution that can benefit everyone involved and it is within your budget and other limits, do it. If not, use humility to accept what you cannot change.