LACK OF LISTENING…

Sound familiar?  Yeah!  These comments actually had a couple of different twists.  Most of them were about listening to employees, and that connects to the last post about “taking employees for granted”.  Others talked about listening to customers, and I was happy to see that constituency spoken for.

…when people take the time to talk to you, it is important to them that you hear what they are saying.

Regarding the employees, there were a couple of distinctions even within that group of comments.  The first dealt with what I would call passive listening in which a leader is the recipient of unrequested information.  The leader has not asked a question, has not sought input, and has not solicited feedback at all, but information is being provided and not heard.  These types of situations exist all the time.  You end up in casual discussions, employees make comments, ask questions, or act in a way that sends a message.  The feedback from this survey is that leaders often do not hear those messages.  I suspect that in these types of cases they are not even conscious that messages are out there.  While I don’t know this for a fact, I suspect that if they are not asking for information, they are probably not in a receiving mode for information either, and so they are not hearing it.  Still, a missed opportunity for any leader!

As a leader, how do you get conscious of that?  You have to train yourself.  You have to recognize that when people take the time to talk to you, it is important to them that you hear what they are saying.  You have to train yourself to stop what is going on inside your head and listen.  I have found, though, that there are times when I simply cannot do that.  That’s okay.  A leader’s life is busy and there are urgent issues to which you must attend.  At those times I try to think to tell the person that I have other pressing issues on my mind and simply cannot take the time to listen that I should.  Then I ask if we can talk at a later date.  This is quite an acceptable approach.  People feel that you value their opinion enough to say that you cannot devote the attention right now as you would like, but that you are willing to speak at another time.  They feel heard, but, more importantly, they feel valued.  Unfortunately, I have to admit that there are many times that I do not think to do this, but I am trying to get better at it.

I had an interesting experience last year which might shed some light on this.  I was at the annual reunion for the Doolittle Raiders…the “boys” who flew a suicide mission to bomb Tokyo in April of 1942 in retaliation for the attack on Pearl Harbor.  They knew at the start of the mission that would not have enough fuel to return to the aircraft carriers from which they had taken off, and that they would have to crash land in China and hope that they would be rescued by the Chinese army and not captured by the Japanese army.  

Nine of the original eighty pilots are still alive (in their late 80’s and early 90’s) and four attended the reunion.  They all spoke about what a great leader Jimmy Doolittle was.  I got the chance to speak with each of them, and some of the widows that were there as well.  I asked them what made him such a good leader.  The most frequent answer they gave was that he was a good listener.  They said that “when you spoke with him it was as if you were the only person on the planet.  You could be in the middle of a party and his attention would be totally on you and what you were saying.  He didn’t look at his watch, he didn’t glance around the room, he didn’t nod and walk away.  It was you and him.  What you were saying was all that mattered to him at that moment.  Generally, it was only for a moment…but for that moment he was yours.”

Personally, I think there is an element in this that also speaks to caring about what other people are saying.  That is an element of one of the other subjects people brought up in this survey which will be included in the last post on the question of leadership mistakes…post #4…to come.

As an aside, I think that listening is an element of what people are referring to when they say that a person has charisma.  I wrote a post on charisma a while back…one of my favorites.  Here is the link http://www.scottneilson.com/?p=39

This post is getting a little long and is a lot to think about, so I will stop here and add the rest on another post.

First, I want to thank everyone for their responses to my question about the most common mistakes leaders make.  I cannot say that I got enough responses to make the conclusions statistically significant, however, there were some consistent messages and some interesting points to think about.  There were several themes, so I am going to take them one at a time and do one post on each.

Here is one subject that I found particularly interesting.  There were numerous responses all along the same line.  Leaders tend to take employees opinions for granted.  They do not seem to pay enough attention to how employees interpret and react to their decisions and actions.  Leaders do not seem to realize that employees are watching them all the time and forming opinions about them based on their decisions, actions and attitudes.  And, those opinions have a direct effect on their motivation and performance.

Wow!  How true.  Think about that.  Everything you do, as a leader, is being watched and analyzed far more than you would imagine.  The interpretations people make of what they see has a direct impact on what they think of you and, more importantly, on their motivation.  To make matters worse, many employees will be drawing those conclusions without having complete knowledge of all the issues you are dealing with and the complexities of them.  Their conclusions are likely to be founded on some inaccurate assumptions.  It puts a lot of pressure on you to be aware at all times of how your actions are being perceived and interpreted…and managing that.

The areas identified as those in which employees tend to be most critical are ethics and accountability…and these are fundamental to trust.  If they do not see you taking responsibility for the performance of the organization, they will not trust you.  If they see anything that causes them to question your ethics, they will not trust you.  If they interpret your actions as being motivated by a personal agenda or self-interest, they will not trust you.  Without their trust you will not gain their commitment to you as the leader and to the goals and objectives of the business.  You will not get the best that they have to offer in terms of their performance – not just in the conduct of their daily tasks, but in terms of their creativity, innovation, and initiative.  What a loss!

My conclusion is that this group of comments focuses on trust, and that among the most common mistakes leaders make are: (1) failing to recognize the importance of trust, the fragility of it, and the tenuous nature of it, and (2) failing to take the appropriate steps to build it and maintain it. 

Lots to learn from that.  Put yourself in the shoes of your employees and recall how your commitment, motivation and performance wane when you lose trust.

As an aside…I have spoken to a former professor of mine who spent many years teaching Ethics.  I am going to try to interview him for a more complete perspective on the whole subject.  Another post…