Leadership: The Importance of Listening

What obstacles to good listening have you repeatedly encountered in leading organizations?

Part of it comes around to confusion of what communication is all about as a leader. Back to my original point, the feeling that somehow, you’re always in the spotlight, that you’re supposed to be center stage at all times as a leader. You are to some extent because you’re always on display, people are always looking for the visible cues, non-verbal cues of what’s important, what’s not. What you buy into, what you don’t. To some extent, that’s true.

Being in the spotlight doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t listen. I think that this is sometimes the fatal flaw of feeling, well, if I’m on the Broadway stage and the spotlight is on me, then everyone is quiet and they’re just listening to me. Of course, the challenge with that is, if that gets repeated over time, is you stop having a feedback loop. You’re not hearing anything from anybody. People are not willingly sharing it. They don’t feel like there’s a context or an opportunity to share. What happens is, if we go back to my first comment about leaders can’t afford to pretend to have all the answers. The risk in that environment is, you have to have all of the answers because no one else is bringing you a perspective anymore. Actually, you become isolated as a leader. That’s a serious risk. I think this comes back to partly the mentality of do you make yourself available and open? My regular routine in all of the organizations I’ve run is to have monthly meetings where I insist as a scheduled set for people I may have never met before from any level in the organization and all they want to do is have a cup of coffee and lunch with them with no agenda. Usually, they turn up and first thing they ask is, what do we have to talk about? My answer is whatever you want to talk about. I’m not setting an agenda; I’ve just come to hear from you.

I haven’t come to tell you anything, but you can ask me if there’s something you want to know. I’ll happily share it. I haven’t come to tell you anything. I’ve just come to hear what you want to tell me. That was a feature that I carried all the way through, and I found it was incredibly valuable. You learn some amazing things, first of all, about what people were doing and what they were capable of doing. You learned that it didn’t matter what level of the organization people were in, they had a sense of ownership and they wanted to see things done better, done differently. They wanted to see things improve. They just didn’t know how to have the opportunity to tell someone. Creating these moments also force my team members to follow suit because they realize this was a way of learning. Often, I would know something about their organization that maybe they didn’t know, because they hadn’t spoken to their own people. Obviously, when you create that environment, very quickly people learn that maybe they should go and talk to their folks, as well. I think it’s a very powerful tool and it’s very simple. The message that goes with it of course is very strong that leadership is listening, and leadership is willing to hear the good and the bad. It’s not just about hearing good news.