Listen and Lead

Location, Location, Location; Listen, Listen, Listen

You have no doubt heard of the Jolly Green Giant, the Keebler Elf and the Pillsbury Doughboy, but you might not know that they are all related. All of them, plus Charlie Tuna, Morris the Cat, the Marlboro Man and other iconic advertising characters all come from the Leo Burnett public relations company.

One Burnett executive in Chicago was Chuck Werle, who had more than 34 years in public relations, and about 18 CEOs.

The best CEOs, Werle said, asked employees what they thought and then listened. Werle believes in listening and rephrases the famous real estate mantra from "Location, location, location." to "Listen, listen listen." He says, "The key to PR is telling management what they need to know, not what they wa\nt to hear." Management won't get that kind of honesty without encouraging it.

Werle recalls being in creative meetings in Chicago when Burnett was developing a slogan or logo to recognize its 50th anniversary. The creative team deadlocked on two ideas. They were so close that top management decided to use both.

Werle thought this went against Burnett's philosophy of presenting its clients with one, strong idea rather than two or three. So, he wrote a memo to Chairman and President John Kinsella. Werle used to call his notes "Nobody asked me, but ..." memos. Werle challenged the no-call on the two campaigns. Kinsella reconvened the group  and told them they would try again and settle on ONE idea.

They chose a Burnett classic, a round, black, soft-lead copy pencil. Old man Burnett had favored the pencils and said that "big ideas come out of big pencils." The 50th anniversary campaign featured a black pencil that bore the legend, "Celebrating 50 years of one great idea."

If you go to the Leo Burnett Web site, you'll find a big, black pencil.

The Listening Project

If you haven't already heard about it, check out The Listening Project video documentary, an interesting take on filmmaking, promotion and dialogue.

The basic premise is that Americans can benefit from hearing how we are viewed by people in other countries. The filmmakers then take their questions and cameras to 14 countries around the world to find out.

In The Listening Project, which has been raking in awards, the subjects are referred to as the film's characters and the people who you might normally think of as the actors or documentarians are called listeners. The production tries to engage social networks through MySpace, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube. On the YouTube channel in particular, viewers are encouraged to upload their video responses to the film. In that way, the filmmakers are trying to be a catalyst for more talling -- and listening.

Did She Say Something?

We must have had beef jerky in our ears. The team-building game “Blizzard” is pretty simple.

You are lost in the woods in a snowstorm. Your life is in peril and even a small misstep could be fatal. You are given a list of materials you can have with you and must list them according to importance. Your survival depends on choosing the right items.

First, you fill out your list. The other people in your team fill out lists of their own. Then, you compare lists, discuss and debate and agree on a final list for the team.

Each team member’s list is scored and, almost always, the team’s list has a better score than any individual. “Blizzard” shows the value of teamwork and collective wisdom. Except in our group.

We were three men and Sally Heinemann, an editor at Knight Ridder Financial News, whose idea of camping was a bed and breakfast. We compared our lists and immediately saw that she was not on the same page with us. We had all rated beef jerky as high on the list for providing protein and strength. She did not even know what it was and kept referring to it as “beef wacky.” The three of us fine-tuned a list for the team. She watched this and said, twice, “I have a different idea.” We ignored her.

When the lists were scored, we discovered that the non-camper had the best score of all. The list we made as a team (of three) would have gotten us killed. The financial editor somehow knew that the best plan was to hunker down, signal for help and stay hydrated. This rendered items like a compass and “beef wacky,” all but useless.

The first lesson – the intended one – was that there is wisdom in crowds, even small ones, and that it makes sense to include absolutely everyone. Twenty years later, the wisdom of crowds became a hot topic.

But there was a second, unintended lesson. Heinemann reminded us that she had tried to take us in her direction a couple of times, but that we had ignored here, so she just dropped it. I asked her why she had not fought to make herself heard. It was clear she was not shy. She said she had not fought because it just didn’t matter that much to her. It was, after all, just a game.

That is lesson two. How often do we shut people down by refusing to listen, only to lose one of the best brains in the room? Which people have we marginalized and who no longer shares our view our situation is important?

Listen, Yes, and then Act

"Listening tours" seem to be all the rage politically, and not just in the United States, Candidates for everything from national office to dog catcher seem to be employing the listening tour as a way of showing they are in touch with the electorate.

In some cases of absurn insincerity, "listening tour" seems to have become the new nomenclature for "speeches."

Andy Kerr, one of three contenders for the Scottish Labour Party leadership, says he has done his listening and is now ready to act. Hooray!

Listening without formulating and executing a policy is not leadership. It is just -- if the candidate is being sincere -- listening.

Icebergs and Growlers

The ice field near a glacier consists of several kinds of ice. The little stuff is called brash. It can be ignored. The big pieces are icebergs, the kinds of things that should have been more closely watched by the Titanic. They can sink you. We tend to go to full alert when there are icebergs all around us.

But in between brash and bergs are bergy bits and chunks of ice called growlers that are the size of boulders or small cars. They actually make little noises, hissing and popping as the air inside them escapes and when they grind up against each other. They mean no harm –- usually.

Are you paying attention to the growlers in your organization? Or do you spend all your time just looking out for the obvious icebergs?

Panning for Nuggets

How hard are you willing to work at being a better listener? In downtown Juneau, a sign tells cruise ship passengers that a former crowd of visitors, gold prospectors, would sift through 20 tons of ore just for one once of gold. Despite those odds, some of them struck it rich.

By being observant, you can pan less ore and get more gold.

The Puddle

Leaders are not on the same page with the people who work for them. That’s what makes close listening such an asset. Staff members simply see and know a lot more the bosses do – and they know different things. We’re both speaking the same language, but our frame of reference is different and this makes it hard to follow along. It happens all the time.

Even with a good-faith effort at listening, context can be so different that meanings get missed or muddled.

We are on different pages, despite all kinds of similarities, just because we roost in different places in the organization. (Cite data on how much bosses don’t know.)

It’s true. We bosses just do not know.

This hit home for me one rainy spring day.

A staff member came in a little late one day complaining. “I work the late shift, and by the time I get here, the parking lot is usually full, and when it rains we get this huge puddle out there that takes up about 20 spots.”

I did not know about this puddle. As a middle manager, I get to park in the structure across the street, not in the lot.

I wanted to know about this huge, space-stealing parking lot puddle. I walked out there and took a look at it. I walked around it and guesstimated. Sure enough, we were losing lots of spaces and some work hours because of this puddle. Staffers, who pay a reduced rate to park in this lot, must feel ripped off on rainy days. What a thing to do, making staffers feel cheated on already gloomy days.

This big puddle made me wonder what other perspectives I was missing because I get treated differently. Holidays off was of those perks, I realized. At daily newspapers, people are working every day of the work and on every holiday. For 20 years, I had held jobs that petty much assured I never had to work a holiday. What a lucky stiff I was! And how little standing I had to appreciate workers’ beefs about holidays. So, since then, I have volunteered for New Year’s Eves. It was a holiday I could easily work and it might give someone else the night off for a party or an evening with family.

I could tell the staff appreciated having one of the bosses in their working with them, and the fill-in job helped me learn more about the people who work that shift and how they try to make holidays seem special – even while they are working.

Now, if we could just do something about that puddle.

Listening Tools Help You Scale Walls

A purposeful leader listens with focused intent, just as a climber ascends a rock wall.

Neither a listener nor a climber can make any headway without the right tools.

A climber's belt is crowded with tools, known collectively as "protection."

This gear, variously called nuts, stoppers, hexes and cams, is designed to cling to a wide variety of rock features. The climber chooses which ones to use depending on the features encountered on the climb. A well-equipped climber will carry far more nuts than will be needed, but needs to have them to be prepared.

A good listener goes in with a set of stoppers, hexes and cams, too, using only those that are called for by the situation.

The listener's tools are questions, of course.

Which questions have you found to be most effective as you have directed conversations?

(Flickr photo by tpuyol, used under Creative Commons License)

Eye Contact and the Interrotron

The April 25 release of "Standard Operating Procedure" has people talking again about U.S. tactics at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and, of course, director Errol Morris.

One sidebar to the main story is his use of a two-camera invention that his wife named "The Interrotron."

The device relies on the same theory as a teleprompter but, instead of looking at a scrolling text, the person using it sees the image of a face. In this instance, it is Morris'. So, instead of staring off-camera at an interviewer, subjects feel they have some face-to-face, eyeball-to-eyeball contact. This gives Morris' films a different kind of feel and, he believes, a more revealing eye contact with the camera.

In a 1997 interview with Keith Phipps, Morris said, "The Interrotron was a way of doing a lot of different things at once. It removes me from the area around the camera. Instead, there's just a half silvered mirror, an image of me floating in front of the lens. It allows for direct eye contact with me, and out at the audience at the same time. Which I don't think has ever existed before. I don't think anyone else has ever done that. You may see it, of course, when people are reading text on a TelePrompTer, a newscaster or a politician, but it's different for someone who's talking to me extemporaneously and looking right at the audience at the same time. I think it has an arresting effect.

The Interrotron seems to exemplify the power of eye contact -- both in what it draws out and what it reveals.

Listening Tours

Have you heard about Listening Tours?

They seem to be all the rage. From the U.S. to Australia, politicians and public officials have gone on listening tours to show they are in touch with the people.

Hillary Clinton used Listening Tours in her run for the New York U.S. Senate seat in 1999 and was back on the road -- listening -- again in 2008 in her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. In 1999, CNN quoted Clinton as saying, "I think I have some real work to do, to get out and listen and learn from the people of New York and demonstrate that what I'm for is maybe as important, if not more important, than where I'm from," she said. The issue was that she had never worked or lived in New York, yet was running to be one of the state's two U.S. senators.

In the same article, New York congressman remarked, ""Well, It's an interesting thing ... that when she travels to New York, she calls it a tour. When I come back to New York from Washington, I call it coming home." He did not say whether he listens at home.

In 2008, when Clinton and Barrack Obama ripped each other with accusations about politics, positions and plagiarism, Clinton's camp made hay with a quote that Obama had taken without attribution from one of his mentors. The Web site Wonkette then accused Obama of plagiarizing Clinton's listening tour "trick" by listening to people himself. No fair!

But how much listening really goes on in a listening tour? At one San Francisco stop on a listening tour in 2007, Scott Laidlaw of the Associated Press reported that Clinton talked for more than 20 minutes -- mostly about Iraq -- before taking seven questions -- each of which she answered, of course. t seems that most of that stop was not about listening, but more talking.

Maybe listening is just a politically correct name for talking.