I’m astonished by the number of people who bristle when you challenge them. Even if you challenge them on observable behavior (i.e. not letting others complete their sentences, or pecking at their “Crackberry” during a critical presentation, or being habitually late armed with a newly varnished excuse each time), they act as if you’ve launched an existential attack on the very basis of their being or worth.

Here is an anomaly. We believe we know what we’re capable of. So rather than being judged on what we do, we expect people to give us a break on the basis of what we’re capable of. The average person will not oblige. Life is short, they’ll extrapolate from their present experience of you. That’s the impetus to get the job done today, to get your act together now, to do what you say and finish what you start. Despite that, you will have blinkers and issues — we all do. Great leaders will see past the mists of your limitations and the storm clouds in your emotional weather systems and glimpse your larger abilities and perhaps even your positive intent. They will then challenge you to step up to the first and better exemplify the second. They will customize how they engage you, reinforce you and enroll you accordingly. When you experience such a leader or team…hallelujah! But if you need such a leader or team to come through…your life will be one of perennial disappointment and vexation.

Most of us judge others on the impact they have on us. Whether they intended it or not seems not to matter. “It hurt!” And if you didn’t know it would hurt me…well you should have! Or so is the implication inherent in our bruised outrage. On the other hand if we have a negative impact on someone else, and we know it’s not what we intended, we feel a sense of injustice if the other person judges us on impact rather than intent. Of course they often don’t know our intent, but damn it, they should! Or again, so is the implication as we nurse our bitterness. Always become a student of impact, and explore intent. Defer reactions until you’re on the other side of that exploration.

So, should we be judged by actions or by potential? Should we be judged by impact or intent? Both.

We must drive our actions and build confidence in ourselves and others by reaching for our potential, “failing forward” if we must.

We must be sensitive to impact and taper communication to the receiver, rather than exalting the sender (us). At the same time, we must drive the real intent forward if it really matters. We can’t let volatility of impact have us withdraw…that’s just a form of manipulation. Similarly we must make ourselves easy to engage…less prickles and more hospitality for collaboration.

Let’s ask to be judged by who we are today, and coached towards who we can become. Let’s own our impact, but share our intent. Let’s share impact on us, and be open to understanding the best intent of the other person. As we do, we improve our accountability and our capacity, both for performance and building productive relationships with others.

My co-author Alan Weiss and I received some unsolicited, hopefully well-intended, feedback about our book, THE GLOBAL CONSULTANT. The person bristled at our suggesting the world by and large sought out American thought-leadership in business and management.

In acknowledging other world-class centers of learning however, by error when we wrote our draft, we placed INSEAD in Switzerland rather than France (it also has a campus in Singapore). We may have had IMD in mind, or we might have just made an honest error. Alas, three sets of editors (two in Singapore, and one in the United Kingdom) failed to catch it, and it made it’s way into print.

It is one line in a 284 page book, commending INSEAD by the way (though this writer suggested we had insulted INSEAD by getting its location wrong, — AND he suggested we may have offended IMD too on the off chance we actually had it in mind!). Surely INSEAD’s self-esteem is not so precarious, even if this writer is demonstrating that his own might be.

This one oversight, seems to draw fire from more than one person who seems unsettled by some of our observations, and can find nothing substantive in the book to decry. People have said imperiously that this error erodes our overall credibility,  even that it shows we don’t know anything about Europe — thereby displaying their loose handle on logic (how does getting a location of a university wrong accidentally, show anything about your overall cultural, economic, historical or other knowledge of an entire Continent?).

I mention this because if I read a 240 (or so) page book, and wrote in, spending several paragraphs on a minor publishing gaffe , I’d have to wonder what the book stirred in me. A desire for real learning would have me wondering why I’m so bothered, why I needed to find such a dubious scapegoat within the book so that I could vent.

This particular writer caps his comments by saying he hopes we “appreciate” the input “in the spirit of learning”.  Well, we’re happy to learn of an error, even a truly inadvertent one like this. But the “spirit of learning” is the last thing that comes across in the communication. So, let’s just use this as a quick case-study on offering input that truly might stimulate learning.

Stated as it is, with such sweepingly excessive conclusions, this communication makes one wonder at the motivation for the observations. This distracts from any “learning” that may otherwise take place. So, first if you want to communicate a view, keep the focus on the learning you want to share, or the real point, minimize off-ramps and gratuitous secondary conclusions from your observations.

Then, give prime-time to what really matters to you in the communication. And be honest as to whether you’re sharing that you’re just emotionally miffed for whatever personal reason, or making a point you want intellectual engagement on.

The truth is the writer seems to really be annoyed about the perceived US-centrism of some of our comments in the opening chapters (he confessed to only having made it to page 39). Our actual point was that in an earlier age, we would have sounded more French-centric or English-centric, tomorrow we may be more China-centric. At the time of writing, we were speaking about American predominance in the world of management thinking and also global business given the overall size of the US economy. It was factual, not subjective. It wasn’t a paean to cultural or economic “manifest destiny”. It was about facing facts — so we can build on them –  for consulting and business success. We clearly mentioned that as these facts change, so would the specifics of our advice. We’d have suggested learning French in the 18th century, do suggest English for today and may suggest Mandarin and Hindi 20 or so years from now. Let’s see.

Had the writer focused their comments on this issue, we might have had a fascinating and illuminating dialogue. Harping on a relatively trivial reference (trivial to the sweep of the book and the point being made), was a distraction and an emotional indulgence that was intriguing, but not in the way intended.

Finally, choose your irritations carefully. Opt to be far more often amused or even bemused if you like. And if irritation keeps getting the better of you, ask first what YOU can learn from it, before asking others to be educated by a display of your annoyance, especially when accompanied by rickety logic and odd inductive liberties you’re taking. The more you come from composure, are relaxed and flexible, the more you are likely to generate as well as communicate points worth learning from. You don’t need to get your hackles up to be impactful. On the contrary.

Reflexive ire and pulpit pounding don’t produce the spirit of learning. The spirit of learning requires curiosity and exploration, enrolling someone in dialogue, sharing and owning our own feelings and reactions, and thereby irrigating the possibility that we all might just discover something new.