Listen and Lead

Listening in Times of Crisis

Over lunch a few weeks ago, Dan Mulhern remarked that listening is expensive.

That observation, or goad, deserves further exploration.

Mulhern believes in listening he sees the pressures that leaders are under in Michigan, where unemployment, home foreclosures and out-migration are at or near the worst in the nation.

Layoffs, buyouts, payless furloughs and increase demand for productivity threaten to push organizations under. The danger is not so much any one of those remedies, but the changes in morale and culture. People withdraw. They blame or envy other divsions. They may become disinterested in particapting. They doubt the organizations, themselves and others. Respect and trust are damaged.

How far off is the tipping point that will push the enterprise into complete failure?

In a time of diminished resources, communication is one of the few resources that leaders have to pull their organizations back from the brink.

By explaining the decisions and being willing to listen to disagreements and suggestions, leaders can actually improve engagement and loyalty.

It does take time, as Mulhern said. And too many leaders respond to crisis by closing their doors and burying their heads in smaller and smaller meetings, working on new strategies and approaches. The leaders feel they are busier than ever as they pile more work on their own backs. To the workers, they seem more isolated and aloof than ever. The workers do not typically know very much more about what the bosses do than the bosses know about them. So a lack of contact appears to be withdrawal.

In times of crisis, leaders need to step into the center of the room, be very honest about the challenges and enlist more of the brains, not fewer.

Does listening use up that most precious resource: time? It does. But when it engages and aligns so many more people in working toward solutions, it is a great invetsment.

Who is Not Listening?

An article on listening in business environments begins, "Most CEOs complain that people in the workplace just don’t ‘listen’ . Most of us hear but don’t listen and instead we spend time thinking about what we are going to say next."

I'll buy that. I'll even admit to being one of those who might listen better or pay closer attention to the signs.

But I can't resist adding that supervisors -- at the top level and in between -- could listen better, too. In fact, I'll make the case that here are more remedies for employees who don't listen than are for non-listening CEOs. To go one step figure, there is more to be gained and more urgency to have CEOs learn what they can from workers who are closes to the actual work being done and the customers.

The article as in  India's Economic Times.

Paying Through the Ears

Some companies have become so bad at listening to their own staffs that they hire consultants to do it for them. The consultants come in, perform surveys or interviews and write reports about what the staff is thinking. Senior managers, having paid a lot of money in consulting fees, are more likely to act on these reports than on whatever information they could have gathered themselves. It’s a waste of money. Outside consultants cannot gather details that are as rich and helpful as the leaders themselves could gather – without paying for it -– if they would just develop a listening culture.

Telling is not Selling -- or Engaging

In the New Brunswick Business Journal, Russ Mallard writes that a sales person cannot really do any selling while they are talking. Selling, Mallard says, is not telling. It is engaging the customer, understanding the customer's needs and meeting them. That's impossible to do when you're basically reciting the sales brochure.

And what does this tell us about selling to our internal customers -- the ones we work with?

Talking without listening will not help us understand what workers bring to the table and what needs they have in order to do their jobs better. A balanced, give-and-take conversation helps ensure that good ideas and requests for help bubble up. Have no fear. Commands will always find their way to the workers.

When Bad Listening Feels Like Disrespect

Good leaders do not set out in the morning to disrespect people. So why do so many workers feel disrespected?

It happens because, as marketer, blogger and author Seth Godin says, disrespect is in the eye of the beholder. Let me say that another way, because this is important. The measure of whether a person has been disrespected is not mainly how they have been treated. It is how they feel about their treatment.

There.

Disrespect is not imaginary, or something in someone’s minds. Disrespect is real. And we can stop it with better communication, especially if we listen better.

A young person with a lot of promise told me she had decided to quit her job because she had been disrespected. I asked how she had been disrespected. It happened when she was transferred. I asked whether the new responsibilities were really all that bad. After all, she was new and was in for some bad hours and assignments. She understood all that. The problem was that no one in charge had told her the real reason for the transfer. They had moved her from the downtown office to a bureau office that was farther from the action. When she asked why, the bosses told her it would be better for her career to work this new job, which provided some opportunity, and to work in the smaller office, where she could get more feedback. Once she started in her new office, co-workers told her what the bosses hadn’t: that she was moved their to take the place of a more senior worked who had used her seniority to get a new assignment. The new worker felt it was disrespectful of her bosses to ignore her question by telling a lie. She got a job with a bigger, more successful company in the same industry. She moved from Ohio to Texas to take it.

Another time, I was the guilty party. A reporter, one of my recruits, had been struggling with his editors.  He wanted to talk. Before we met, I asked his editors what the problem was. They described him as being needlessly confrontational with the sources he was interviewing. They wanted him to develop more ways of getting information so that he would no as frequently wind up at an impasse. When we met, rather than listen to what was on his mind, I gave him the message I had heard and proceeded to lecture him on source-building and ways he could better cover his reporting beat.

He seemed to be unusual quiet.

A couple weeks later, he quit for another job.

I asked him where we had gone wrong and how we could have saved him. He told me I had been a last straw. When he had asked for the meeting, he was asking for help, but not a lecture. He, too, had been moved in transfer that was never explained – until he met his new co-workers, who laid it all out for him. If he had wanted a lecture from me, it would have been one on managing his bosses, not managing his beat. Because I had used the meeting he asked for to lecture and not listen, he felt I had betrayed him. He knew that I might not have been able to change things, but he wanted to talk them out. His bosses had not been hearing his side of the story, his ideas for his career and we had not given him the real reason for the transfer, which had been that we felt he would handle assignments in that area better than someone else. Now, he found that I wasn’t listening, either. We lost a good reporter and writer, one that had taken several years to get and one whom would be very hard to replace with anyone of equal quality.

There may be a generational gap at work in the whole question of listening and respect. Many younger workers expect to have a bigger voice in their circumstance. They expect to at least be able to get honest answers to questions about decisions affecting their lives. Leaders who grew up in a system where you simply did as you were told without question may have a harder time understanding this need to hear people. After all, no one listened to them when they were coming up, now that they have made it, why should they have to listen?

The answer lies in these two resignations, two of millions. Workers today are demanding the right to be consulted about their careers. And consulting means someone is listening.

Everyday Differences

One of our staff members, a Muslim woman, came to tell me about some comments by her closest co-workers. In the post-9/11 time, one had said that if he were on an airplane and that if men who “looked Muslim” boarded after him, he would get off. This woman thought that her brothers might qualify as “looking Muslim” and she was hurt. Another had spoken in favor of attacking a Muslim country that just happened to be her homeland. She believed that her co-workers did not know that they were speaking around someone who was Muslim.

I was surprised and disappointed to hear that these view were circulating at my newspaper. It reminded me that we are not somehow above the kind of commentary that goes on everywhere. And how could I deny what she was telling me? She told me she did not feel comfortable confronting her co-workers, but wanted someone to speak to them. As it turned out, her real issue was not fear for her personal safety or even that she was especially offended, as she is a non-practicing Muslim. She just wanted people to know better. When she said that, a plan emerged, one to help educate us.

We decided not to approach people individually because they might not be the only people with those views and this might seem like a disciplinary step. We were, at her suggestion, looking to educate. We did not want to target just her department, as there might be people in other departments who held or expressed similar views – just not within earshot of her.

So this is what we did:

We organized a lunchtime seminar called “Everyday Muslims.” The staffer who raised the issue was to be one of the speakers. We chose the others from the community. We specifically sought Muslims who would not fit preconceived notions of what it means to “look Muslim.” In Detroit, home to North America’s heaviest concentration of Arabs, many of whom are Muslim, “looking Muslim” can mean being Arab. Instead, we invited a white coach from the suburbs who, in his twenties, converted to Islam. We invited a black lifeguard from the city who had been Muslim all his life. The white man wore a long white robe. The black man wore street clothes. We found a Muslim of Pacific Asian descent – some of the largest Muslim countries are in the Pacific -- and a man of Egyptian descent who looked like any white, buttoned down businessman.

We asked the department head for the woman who had raised the issue to encourage the woman’s co-workers to come out and show support. Although some of them had said insensitive things about Muslims, they liked this person, whom they did not think of as being Muslim. To broaden our reach, we bought pizza for everyone.

Turnout was pretty good. We attracted the people we wanted and dozens more. I saw what looked like surprise on a few faces when they saw that our panel of Muslims looked pretty much like, well, us. As the panelists talked about how they practiced their religion and how faith intersected with work and everyday life, we busted some stereotypes. The staff member who had raised the issue was able to say some things about what her  religion meant to her and how stray comments hit her. Her complaint had turned into a good session for all of us.

Not only had she been listened to, her observations led to a timely training opportunity.

Listening Holds Down Attrition

We can see how organizations benefit when their leaders are able to surface valuable information that their workers have. That is, in a nutshell, what "Listen and Lead" is all about.

But some researchers have found that listening can be still more valuable than that. It can even be a matter of life and death.

Listening can make employees stay longer. One of the great hidden costs in the business world is that of attrition. It has been estimated that the cost of replacing a professional or managerial employee can be two or three times that person's annual salary. The costs come in terms of the job search, bringing candidates in, interviewing them, house-hunting, moving, training, overtime or lost business while he position is empty -- he costs can really ple up.

Now, attrition is natural and can be a good thing, as it helps us bring in new ideas, provides opportunities for others and, let's face it, not everyone we bring aboard is someone we want to keep forever. But unbridled, runaway attrition is not a good thing. And listening can keep a lid on it.

In June, 2007, Leadership IQ, a provider of leadership traiing, reported the results from a study of  7,209 excutives, managers and employees to gauge the levels of trust in the organizations.

The survey showed that only 20 percent of people have strong trust in their organizations' top executives.

The study reported a direct correlation between how much people trust their company's management and how long they stay. The study said that about a third of worker's desire to stay or go can be laid to trust. The report identified five dimensions of trust that were the best predictors of employee loyalty. Of these, th strongest indicator of whether a person might stay with the company was having a boss who listens constructively to an employee's on-the-jobs issues. It accounted for almost all of the desire to stay. Listening was 10 times more important than honesty or helping the employee's professional growth.

Listening seems to reduce heart disease

Another study, led by Dr Mika Kivimaki of the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health in Helsinki, found that not listening to workers can lead to heart disease and even heart attack. Researchers studied 16,442 men working in 20 Civil Service departments in London. The researchers looked into whether the men they felt they were being treated justly at work. The survey, published in 2005 in the Archives of Internal Medicine, found that rates of heart disease were almost a third lower among workers who reported that their bosses listened to them and took their ideas into account compared to those who felt they were treated less fairly.

Two questionnaires were conducted in the 1980s and followed up between 1990 and 1999 with measurements of heart disease.

With more than 16,000 subjects, this is a large sample. But all the subjects were male. The study doesn't tell us whether women are more or less sensitive to being listened to at work. We might guess, though, that they do notice when they are not being heard and that it affects their health.

The study did examine demographic variables among the men. Lead researcher Kivimaki wrote that the healthy effects of having a boss who listens are not explained by age, ethnicity, marital status, education, socio-economics or medical variables such as cholesterol level, obesity, hypertension, smoking, alcohol consumption, and physical activity.

The Finish study's finding that workers of all ages, ethnicities and education levels respond well to leaders who listen suggests something else. Leaders who listen selectively, that is, who have more time for some groups than others, might unintentionally be driving up attrition rates in the groups where they have not listened successfully. This suggests that cross-cultural or cross-gender listening might be an effective retention tool. Perhaps that will be a study for someone else.

... and Another Word on Coaching

There is a bit of language, a philosophy, really, at the Poynter Institute that has some application to leadership and listening.

It comes from Roy Peter Clark and Don Fry who wrote "Coaching Writers." In brief, it encourages editors to be coaches, not fixers.

A fixer waits until the story is all done, and then "fixes" it.

Of course, this displeases the writer and it limits options for the editor, who is confined to working with whatever made it into the story.

Progress is slow. The writer might learn something by going back and seeing what he fixes were and divining something from them. But I have talked to many writers who get so dispirited by fixing that they don't like to go back and see what has happened.

A coach, however, engages the writer early -- before the physical part of writing the story, or even the reporting -- and has a conversation about what the writer sees. There is lots of back and forth and lots of talking and listening.

After this coaching session, the writer can write with the editor's ideas in mind.

The coach does a whole lot less fixing, which pleases the writer, and the coach finds that the story is closer to what he or she would like to see in there. By engaging the writer early, the coach has more influence over what will be in the story, the writer has more control over what it says and the reader gets a better story.

The writer also has a better appreciation of what the editor is looking for generally and can grow faster. There are a couple pages by the Poynter Institute's Paul Pohlman specifically about listening in that book.

Fixers, who tend to work better by themselves, will always be fixing and getting mediocre results. Coaches have time for other things because they can spend less time rewriting, they get better results and they see their writers get better faster.

And it all comes down to listening, asking, probing, directing.

More Thoughts on Motivation

When people talk about linking motivation and employee evaluations, they sometimes talk in terms of "alignment."

It can be used in several ways. Leaders might logically look for alignment among the members of a team working toward a shared goal. Or, we might speak of aligning goals, values, resources and actions. When we talk about motivation, we are looking for ways to align workers' individual goals with organizational objectives. We  generally expect committed workers to do what is needed, but we find that motivation is much higher when successful work can lead to the achievement of a personal goal.

A keystep in marrying personal and organization goals is, of course, to determine individual goals and how they can be achieved through good work. This takes listening and probing. The mere assignment of duties and responsibilities does not ensure that workers will be very motivated to achieve them. But, with some sharp questions and keen listening, a good leader can determine what workers hopes to get out of a job and organize the team or tailor the work so that it is aligned with individual goals. The leader who does this is not motivating the workers, but tapping into the workers' innate motivations and providing opportunities for meaningful and fulfilling achievements.

Listening is the Basis for Other Skills

Many skills comprise good leadership.

As we see whenever we visit the management how-to section of our favorite bookstore, the value of persuasive speaking is widely recognized.

Organization, hiring, hard work and critical thinking are other important leadership skills.

Listening is a skill in and of itself, but its value to leaders is as a component of other characteristics such as coaching, mentoring and motivating. Leaders who do not listen well will come up short in those important areas. Let's consider each.

COACHING

The Center for Management & Organization Effectiveness maintains, like many such groups, says elements of coaching include open communication, trust and respect. It is collaborative, not top-down or one-directional. An effective coaching relationship is one in which the coach and the coached talk about the task at hand, form plans, try them, review the results and try again. One of the critical pieces of information that the coach must have is the worker's perspective on how things went.

A failure to listen well will deprive the coach of the information that he or she needs to engage in a cycle of continuous improvement. Ultimately, a lack of listening can betray a well-intentioned desire to coach into a frustrating experience for both parties.

John Wooden knows something about coaching. His men's basketball teams at UCLA won 10 NCAA championships in 12 years. That included seven in a row from 1967 to 1973. During those years, his teams had a winning streak of 88 games. In his "pyramid of Success for leaders, Wooden charges leaders to be alert. He describes that as being constantly aware and observant, to continuously work for the improvement of one's self and the team. In most workplaces, we do that with the keen listening that leads to insightful feedback and suggestion.

MENTORING

This has emerged as an activity that can be all but essential to professional success. In classical mentoring, an experienced person passes on skills and knowledge to an up-and-comer. These qualities are passed on over a period of time through modeling and explaining. While a mentor is much like a teacher, he or she is not a lecturer.

More than anything, a mentor-mentee relationship is a partnership where the goal is the mastery of all that the mentor has to pass along.

When asked what goes into a successful graduate mentoring relationship, Duke University graduate student Stephen Granade advised, "Mentors, when you’re with the person you’re mentoring, listen to what he or she is saying. Don’t just go through the motions."

A successful leader will select and mentor several promising mentees, imbuing them with the managerial DNA that can carry the organization forward. Listening underlies each of those relationships and will be different in every case.

MOTIVATING

People debate whether one person can motivate another or whether motivation comes from within. The answer is probably somewhere in the middle. All of us have found ourselves more motivated to work with certain leaders than others. We want to win their approval with our work. Their judgment matters to us. We may be responsible for motivating ourselves, but some leaders are just better at commanding our respect and drawing out our best. They are catalysts.

How can leaders inspire motivation?

People are motivated by leaders they respect and who understand, appreciate and challenge them. Leaders cannot achieve this level of understanding -- or know just where to set the bar so that it challenges staff members to the right degree -- unless they spend time really listening to them.

As we have seen, listening takes time and hard work. A leader responsible for a relatively small number of people can, with time, get to know how to draw out the best in each individual. Leaders of large corporations cannot possible hope to do that. Instead, they must rely o the insight of subordinates who listen well, or sound out a cross-section of their staffs.

In the first case, relying on others, they have to refrain from killing the messenger when they get accurate reports of unpleasant realities. In the latter case, they listen to people who represent different constituencies throughout the organization. If they have chosen and listened well, they can extrapolate what they need to reach and lead the whole organization.

Without effective listening, we cannot have genuine coaching, mentoring or motivation.