I’ve noticed a pattern many of the organizations with whom I work. People tend to think that their industry/type of business is different than any other. Within their industry, they think that their business has its own set of unique challenge. And, within their business, they believe that their department somehow is different from the rest of the organization. Some people even take it further to the functional or team level. I’m not sure why it happens, but it does.

The reality is that organizations are less unique than the people within them think. It’s true that at a certain level there are specific regulations, requirements, or issues that are unique to the organization. However, the broad issues that business face are the same. But why does that matter? It matters because I’ve seen three problems that leaders incur when they subscribe to the false belief that their organization is different:

Limited solutions
Face it, no matter what business you are in, most of the rest of the world isn’t in that business. Therefore, if you limit yourself to thinking that your problems are only unique to your type of business or industry, you immediately exclude a lot of potential solutions. A lot of the conventional wisdom surrounding innovation tells people to purposely look outside of their industry to find solutions to their problems. So, the problem that you are having providing a consistent customer experience? It’s the same issues for hospitals, call centers, retail stores, movie theaters, and even schools. Take advantage of their lessons learned.

Claiming false success
If you believe that your organization and its issues are unique, it becomes very easy to ignore external data when determining whether you are successful. For example, suppose that on average, companies in your industry score 9.3 (our of 10) on customer satisfaction surveys. A leader who firmly believes that his or her company is different might be satisfied with an 8.5. I’ve seen this happen. The leaders justify their decisions and actions arguing that if they used those other companies’ models the scores would be even lower. But this kind of logic gets you in trouble. It allows you to believe that anything you do is right. Some leaders even take this to the next level and declare the work they do and their teams to be superior to the marketplace despite data to the contrary.

Diminishing opportunities to improve
If you believe that what you do is the best (given your unique circumstances), there is little incentive to change or improve. This is especially true of radical change. I worked with one leader who was convinced that his team’s turn around time of two weeks for a report was about the best that could be done given the complexity of the report and information. He never looked for opportunities to improve. When I suggested that the turn around could be reduced to under a day, he laughed. He couldn’t envision any way that the report could be done in less than four weeks. Of course, that’s because he only envisioned scenarios that used his current process. When we rolled out a new version of the report that had a four hour turnaround he was stunned. Of course, he pointed to the fact that our report wasn’t exactly the same as his. He was right though. Ours had more information and was be better tailored to the needs of each manager.

Go back to your HBR archives and pull a few leadership or marketing articles from the 70s or 80s. More often than not, if you changed the date (and possibly a few references to technology) those articles could have been written yesterday.

The truth is, in business and in leadership, there is a pretty large yet pretty common set of issues that people face. Generally speaking, when you pull back your company or industry’s jargon, you’ll find that your issues aren’t really that much different from someone else’s. If you don’t, perhaps you don’t really understand the issue or the nature of business as well as you should.