Listen and Lead

Twitter, Halftime and Meetings

Charlie Villanueva's bosses say they are investigating an incident in which he tweeted  at work.

Villanueva is a Milwaukee Buck and his workplace was a locker room during halftime when his team was tied, 41-41, with the Boston Celtics. His Twitter message said, "In da locker room, snuck to post with my twitt. We're playing the Celtics, tie ball game at da half. Coach wants more toughness. I gotta step up."

The Bucks went on to win and Villanueva went on to tweet, "By the way, lets just get the record straight, my halftime twitt had no interference with what goes on regularly during the locker room."

His coach must have disagreed. He soon posted, "Well guys, no more halftime tweets for me -- I'll leave it at that, won't comment on it any further. But I still got love for ya. Stay tune."

But Villanueva couldn;t really resists further comment: "About to take my nap, but I'm looking for some answers here, what's the difference between halftime twitting and halftime interview?" It's a fair question.

While NBA coaches might be concerned about secrets being Tweeted out of the locker room, it is likely they are more concerned with players' heads being out of the game.

Rick Bommelje, 2009-2010 president of the International Listening Association, told me he knew of an executive who had asked his managers to refrain from texting and answering e-mails during meetings because it interfered with their listening. At the next meeting, one of those managers got busy on his crackberry, and the executive told him to leave.

Problem was solved. Managers came to the meetings with fewer distractions.

At my old newspaper, the Detroit Free Press, few editors were quick to pick up on Twitter. One was not, though, and I sometimes saw his posts go up while he was sitting in meetings. (Ironically, this was the year when the newspaper brought down Detroit's mayor with stories about his text messages, which showed he had lied in court.)

Eventually, the newspaper got Twitter fever. The editors trained, they opened Twitter accounts and they began using tags to tie their Tweets together.

As Twitter fever swept the newsroom, the early adopter Tweeted this: "Tweeting throughout a mtg, sitting next to editor, but this time it's encouraged. (I prefer guerilla tweeting tho :) )"

So, which culture listens better, the one in which basketball forwards and leaders Tweet during meetings, or the one in which they are told to put the cellphones down and listen to each other?

NASA YouTube Video

You should watch this YouTube video.

It was made by astronaut Andy Thomas, for a a special "no barriers" cross-generational team at NASA's Johnson Space Center. The idea is to build a more open environment for innovation. The effort, still underway, was started by Center Director Mike Coats, a former astronaut himself.

The idea is to meld experienced workers schooled in the old command-and-control style and youthful workers raised in more open, collaborative environments.

Thomas shot and then produced the video to show what happens when workers with ideas run up against systemic resistance.

Many organizations would be devastated to see themselves parodied this way on an in-house video.

But NASA had already been through a far more devastating experience. NASA manager Wayne Hale wrote about Thomas' video on his blog and then posted it on YouTube. He explained why.

Like many at NASA, he was profoundly affected by revelations that the 1986 explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger might have been avoided if managers had listened to dissenters who had tried to warn them. The system was so good at protecting itself and keeping everyone on task that it deflected or hid the warnings.

More recently, despite NASA's efforts to reform, Hale had seen signs that some of the old ways were intact.

So, he posted a critical, in-house video. He urged readers of his blog to watch the video more than once.

Here it is:

He concluded by writing:

"Since these behaviors are still being practiced at NASA, here is what I believe managers need to do

"1.  Break out of the sandbox.  Even if it is not your area, the agency needs the best ideas to succeed in our goals.  If you have subordinates who have ideas for improving other areas, it is important to get those ideas into the open where they can compete in the marketplace of ideas, or at least get a technical review.

"2.  If subordinate has an idea that has been tried before and didn't work, consider that times may have changed and it might work now or with improvements that you know of.  In the final extremity, your subordinate needs more than the curt dismissal that its been tried before and didn't work -- you need to explain it to them.

"3. Managers at all levels need to provide safe places and times for interaction that skips levels in the chain of command."

Watch the video and ask yourself: What would go into a video about the way things get done inside your organization?

This video did not get much coverage in the mainstream press. One wonders why.

But you can read stories in National Public Radio's Web site, MSNBC or Softpedia.

Fake Listening

A co-worker once told me, “I hate it when people fake-listen. If one more person fake-listens to me …”

Fake listening is doing all the things that make you appear to be listening – without actually listening.

It is practiced widely. A YouTube video shows a guy talking about how to fake-listen to women (look at them and smile while not listening) and a commuter posted this on Twitter: “Going to fake-listen to my white earbuds on the way home so I can eavesdrop on the bus. And because I don't own an iPod.”

Fake listening happens in the office, too.

One of our reporters was frustrated. Her job was not going well, and she knew it. She was getting beaten on stories and she was seldom getting on Page One. The communication with one of her editors was strained.

So she talked to her department head about these.

I’ll paraphrase her. “He was great,” she said. “He nodded at the right times and asked follow-up questions. He seemed concerned. He had good eye contact. He even took notes about what I was saying. I really felt he was listening to me.”

But then, she said, “He must have taken a course in active listening or something. Because, although he did all those things, nothing changed. When I spoke to him the next day, he acted as though we had never talked about any of that stuff. I poured my guts out to him and he didn’t really listen.”

She was crushed. She had gone from a high of feeling she had really been heard and that she had taken some risks, only to find her boss was doing some kind of act. How much damage did this false exchange do to their working relationship? Was she ever as frank with him again? What does this say about management training?

Is fake listening the same as lying?

What do you think?

My Bad

I was at a party recently and saw a one-time colleague whom I felt obligated to talk top.

I say obligated because the past few times we had talked, he had ranted -- repetitiously -- about the injustices in the world.

He wasn't necessarily wrong, but he was stuck, grinding over the same things over and over again with several people. He was looking for agreement or sympathy, rather than strategies and solutions.

So, I walked over to him to say hello, almost dreading that I would get the same monologue I had heard months ago. And I did.

My mistake was to let it go on that way. We are both in new jobs, now. Certainly there was more I could learn from him than his beefs with a place where he no longer worked.

I made a few stabs, but was not aggressive enough with questions that would have brought us up to the present:

What are they like at your new job?

How do they train and orient people?

What do you think you will be doing there a year from now, after you have established yourself?

Do you have goals for the year? Did they give yoy any?

I tried a few of these, and I did learn some things, but I know I could have learned a lot if I had pressed him to concentrate on his new road, rather than those things he is stuck on.

Sometimes, great listening means taking control of the direction of the conversation, even if you;re not going to do much of the talking.