Leadership Caffeine-Listen Harder, Please!

February 11, 2013 by 3 Comments

image of a coffee cupI doubt that anyone reading this would disagree with the theme of, it’s important to be a good listener to be a good leader.  However, in working with leaders at all levels striving to strengthen their performance, listening skills aren’t an issue some of the time, they are an issue nearly 100% of the time. 

For too many in leadership roles, either the Symphony of Brilliance (as in, “I know the answer” or, “I’m right”), or, the Symphony of Busyness (“I’ve got so much to do, don’t distract me”) playing in their minds, drowns out attempts at communication emanating from those around them.

We create our own barriers to active listening, and our performance suffers accordingly.

A Warm-Up Exercise for Your Listening Skills:

Find a friend and try the following activity:

Conduct a conversation where the only rule is that you and your communication partner must begin each sentence with the last word of your partner’s sentence. Let this run for about three minutes or, until one of you bursts into laughter with some of the resultant silly sentences.

The payoff from this simple “active listening” activity courtesy of Val and Sarah Gee writing in Business Improv (check out my Leadership Caffeine podcast with the authors) is to remind you how difficult it is to stay in the moment and remain focused on the words of your colleague. It takes deliberate effort to silence the symphony (or cacophony) in your mind.

While you might drive everyone nuts if you practice this technique without them knowing the rules, let the activity serve as a reminder of your obligation to listen harder and seek to understand.

3 Ideas to Help You Start Listening Harder Today:

1. Pause Your Internal Symphony and Get in the Moment. When someone approaches you, exert effort to hit the mute button and shut down the background noise and focus exclusively on the individual in front of you. Use the simple ice-breaker example and listen like you are waiting to hear the last word of every sentence.

2. Suspend Your Rush to Judgment. Many leaders suffer from the malady of reaching a conclusion on the topic while it is being presented. Once we’ve reached that point, we relax our attention allowing the symphony in our minds to restart. We lose our presence in the communication moment when we conclude before we move to Idea #3.

3. Seek to Understand Interests, Not Just Positions. What we often perceive or hear is the position of the individual communicating with us. We hear their approach or their ideas, but we don’t connect it to what they are trying to achieve. We compare their idea to our own view and we immediately violate #2 as we rush to judgment.

Great leaders take the time to ask questions that help them uncover the true interests of the individual in front of them. While she might be asking to spend money on a contractor, her real interest is in gaining precious bandwidth to accomplish something extraordinary to better support customers. What you hear is the cost and contractor, but what you need to understand is the interest.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

The failure to truly listen is a big barrier to high performance and performance improvement for most leaders and their teams. It takes deliberate effort to focus, get in the moment and strive to understand before moving to judgment. Starting today, use every encounter as an opportunity to strengthen your focus and understanding. Get this right and you’ll transform your own effectiveness and the effectiveness of those looking to you for leadership.

–

More Professional Development Reads from Art Petty:

Don’t miss the next Leadership Caffeine-Newsletter! Register herebook cover: shows title Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development by Art Petty. Includes image of a coffee cup.

For more ideas on professional development-one sound bite at a time, check out Art’s latest book: Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development. 

Download a free excerpt of Leadership Caffeine (the book) at Art’s facebook page.

New to leading or responsible for first time leader’s on your team? Subscribe to Art’s New Leader’s e-News.

An ideal book for anyone starting out in leadership: Practical Lessons in Leadership by Art Petty and Rich Petro.

Need help with Feedback? Art’s new online program: Learning to Master Feedback

 Note: for volume orders of one or both books, drop Art a note for pricing information.

Filed Under: Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Professional Growth Tagged With: , ,

New Leader Tuesday-3 Key Skill Sets for New Leaders

November 6, 2012 by 1 Comment
Image of a sign that reads: Under New Management

New Leader Tuesday at Management Excellence

The New Leader’s Series here at Management Excellence, is dedicated to the proposition that one of the most valuable things we can do is support the development of the next generation of leaders on our teams and in our organizations.

Contrary to what you might believe, the promotion to a role responsible for others is the starting point of your professional education, not the end point reached because of a job well done. 

The skills that made you invaluable and appreciated as an individual contributor are effectively obsolete the day you step into your new role.

It’s no longer about what you know and what you did. Rather, it’s all about what your team members know and what they can do. It’s now up to you to draw the good stuff out of others, and given the complexity of people, you’ll soon learn this is darned hard work.

While it might be tempting to revert to the comfort of individual problem-solving or showcasing your technical agility or subject matter expertise, the right thing to do is to create the opportunities for those around you to grab the spotlight while you observe from backstage.

Sadly, given the questionable state of leadership preparation in most organizations, your first foray into this new and very different and difficult world is likely to be filled with misfires and missteps.

While experience is indeed the best and only teacher for this challenging role, there are (at least) 3 key skill sets you will be well-served to study, apply and continue to strengthen:

3 Critical Skill Sets New Leaders Must Cultivate:

1. Feedback, feedback, feedback. Most new leaders stink at this particularly challenging activity. Run, don’t walk to get help with this critical skill. The ability to deal with feedback…is about as close as you’ll get to finding a silver bullet. The sooner you cultivate some good feedback habits, the better you and everyone around you will be.  A bit of training… and a ton of practice will help build your confidence with this critical skill.

2. Active listening skills. While many in positions of authority assume that their title provides them a license to talk, the best leaders understand that listening is significantly more important than speaking…and that any speaking you do better follow one heck of a lot of listening.  And remember, paying attention to others is a strong way to show your respect for them. You can’t lead without earning trust…and it starts by showing respect.

3. The Art of Asking Questions. No, your goal isn’t to be the inquisitor from hell, but rather to develop an inventory of good questions that encourage your team members to think through and around problems and opportunities. Questions are powerful teachers and they are equally powerful tools for assessing talent, performance and developmental needs.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

You can’t start cultivating your critical new leadership skills fast enough. Study leaders in the workplace that you admire and attempt to discern what makes them effective. Do the same with leaders you don’t admire. (Lousy leaders are great examples of what not to do!) Read voraciously and practice your feedback, listening and questioning skills constantly. Keep a journal of what works and what doesn’t, and most of all, keep refining your approaches and keep asking for feedback on your own performance. It’s hard work being in charge.

–

Don’t miss the next Leadership Caffeine-Newsletter! Register here

For more ideas on professional development-one sound bite at a time, check our Art’s latest book: Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Enebook cover: shows title Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development by Art Petty. Includes image of a coffee cup.rgize Your Professional Development. 

Download a free excerpt of Leadership Caffeine (the book) at Art’s facebook page.

New to leading or responsible for first time leader’s on your team? Subscribe to Art’s New Leader’s e-News.

An ideal book for anyone starting our in leadership: Practical Lessons in Leadership by Art Petty and Rich Petro.

Need help with Feedback? Art’s new online program: Learning to Master Feedback

 

Filed Under: Leadership, New Leader Tuesday, Professional Growth Tagged With: , , ,

Art’s Weekly Leadership Message-Hey Boss: Less Talking, More Listening

September 26, 2011 by 3 Comments

Road sign indicating Success or FailureIt’s amazing what you hear if you exert a little self-control, clamp your jaw shut and focus on trying to understand what your employees and team members are trying to tell you. 

You learn about what’s working, what’s not, where you need to step up and offer help, where you need to step in and deliver feedback and so much more.

For some, the elevation to the lofty role of boss, team leader, supervisor or manager of some sort, seems to carry with it an implied obligation to talk more than anyone else in the room.  One person expressed it to me as follows: “It’s my job to make sure things get done, so meetings are my opportunity to tell people what to do.” Yeesh.

Being the boss does not carry with it the requirement that you occupy all available airtime during group and one-on-one meetings. To the contrary, success in this role is more a function of how well you listen and then act on or apply what you heard.

For those still in their formative stage of learning to lead or in a need of a tune-up of your boss skills, know that your willingness to pay attention…to actively listen and engage with someone or some group is one of your best ways to show respect to employees and team members.

Your active listening is best broken by the artful use of asking questions to ensure that you understand the messages of your team members.

And yes, you’ve got an implicit responsibility to teach others, however, as the old saying goes, “telling ain’t teaching.”

You teach by the example you set, by the respect you show to everyone and by your willingness to support people in their effort to figure out how to do their jobs the best way possible.  Oddly for some, you have to let go of your own prior technical competence and let people flail, fail and learn. Of course, some thoughtful and timely feedback along the way is always appropriate.

The Weekly Leadership Message:

Vow this week to listen more, talk less, and use the time you do spend talking to teach and encourage.

Resist sharing your opinions and encourage others to offer theirs. Even if you know the answer you are better off having others find and form the answer on their own. And don’t be surprised when the answers they start coming up with are better than yours. That’s a sign that you are on the right track.

–

Want More: Sign up for the new, Leadership Caffeine e-Newsletter. I’ll guard your e-mail address with ferocity, while sharing ideas to energize and inspire.

About Art Petty:

Art Petty is a Leadership & Career Coach helping motivated professionals of all levels achieve their potential. In addition to working with highly motivated professionals, Art frequently works with project teams in pursuit of high performance.

Art’s second book, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development, will be announced during the last week of September, 2011. Initial copies are now available on Amazon.com and via the author for team/group orders.

Contact Art via e-mail to discuss a coaching, workshop or speaking engagement.

 

 

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

Leadership Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Watch and Learn

November 19, 2010 by 4 Comments

Most great leaders that I’ve encountered are astute observers of their environment. They are good at reading people and situations, and they apply the insights gained through observing to improving their performance as leaders and to navigating the ever-present corporate politics.

We spend a great deal of time helping individuals develop their skills as speakers, but when was the last time that you attended a workshop on improving your observation skills?

We also spend a great deal of time in our corporate lives struggling and striving to be heard and somewhere along the way, many of us forget how important it is to shut up, listen and importantly, to observe.

Watch, Listen and Learn:

  • People communicate more non-verbally than they do verbally. Study people over time in different settings and situations and you’ll gain an understanding of what’s important…what’s core and what’s context to them.  We’re remarkably expressive and amazingly open in what we show about our true feelings and opinions. Fortunately or unfortunately, most people are busy either listening to our words or ignoring us completely.
  • Everyone has a tell. Actually, we all have multiple tells that describe to careful observers when we’re stressed, when we’re out of our comfort zones and when we believe to our core in what we are expressing.  Good observers notice the dissonance between the verbal and non-verbal messages and use this insight to probe and gain clarity.
  • Good observers develop an understanding of what’s truly important to a person, and good leaders use this insight to develop authentic connections with their team members and colleagues.

5 Suggestions for Improving Your Power of Observation:

1. Spend time in meetings carefully observing people talking. Note their habits, body language, gestures, how they handle questions and objections and even where they sit and what their posture says about them.

2. Spend time in meetings watching how others react to those speaking. What’s not said, but shown by the other participants in the meeting, speaks volumes about the status of the speaker.

3. Find ways to test your observation hypotheses. I always look for the quietest people in the room during creative or brainstorming meetings and seek them out after the event to attempt to discover what great ideas might have been lost to a doodle on a note-pad due to an individual’s shyness or evaluation apprehension.

4. Find ways to test your hypotheses, part 2. Don’t assume that you’ve suddenly received Holmes-like powers that allow you to draw remarkable conclusions from momentary observations. Use your powers of observation as a means of strengthening another important ability: the art of asking questions. Observations are raw materials for questions.

5. Watch other leaders carefully. Find one that you deem particularly good and study how she conducts herself in various situations. What impact does she have on people? Why is her presence strong and positive? How does she conduct herself to convey respect, show interest and command authority without invoking authority? Do the same for those leaders that you don’t hold in high regard and compare and contrast your observations.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

The old mantra of “seek first to understand and then be understood” is priceless advice for all of us. Spend time developing as an “active observer” and you’ll gain some remarkable insights into people, their motivations, their fears and their passions. Fail to develop as an observer and you’re at risk of just being part of the noise in your workplace. “It’s elementary, my dear Watson.”

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Performance, Professional Growth Tagged With: , ,