Leadership Caffeine: Listen with Intent

April 24, 2012 By 6 Comments

image of a coffee cupYesterday, a valued colleague described a fascinating professional interaction and used the phrase, “listening with intent.” While I imagine this is something on the level of “seek first to understand,” the phrasing works for me. It connotes a significant and deep personal investment in focusing on another human…something lacking from most of our interchanges in life and in the workplace.

A quick search on the topic uncovered a number of resources…mostly linking the phrase to the process of “active listening.” Listening with intent goes beyond the acts of repeating words and asking clarifying questions, techniques commonly associated with active listening.

Listening with intent isn’t a technique, it’s a personal value backed by behaviors that cause us to shift from the movie about ourselves running in our own minds to focusing on the movie or picture being created by another.

Stephen Covey describes this concept very eloquently and effectively in 7 Habits…and it is summarized wonderfully in this piece at Fast Company: “Using Empathic Listening to Collaborate.”

Instead of our usual listening “with intent to reply to control, to manipulate,” it (Empathic Listening) means getting “inside of another person’s frame of reference. You look out through it, you see the world the way they see the world, you understand their paradigm, you understand how they feel.” 

Rhetorical question: How many of us listen that hard to our colleagues? Our customers? Our loved ones? 

Frankly, the act of listening with intent…or employing Covey’s empathic listening, sounds exhausting and painstaking. I suspect that’s why we spend so much time not doing this.  Nonetheless, there are some good reasons to invest the mental sweat required to listen with intent.

  • Great negotiators understand and apply empathic listening masterfully. They strive to understand issues, goals and aspirations, which are often hiding out of sight behind positions.
  • The best salespeople I’ve been privileged to work with are masters. The worst sell on features and functions, the great ones sell by sitting down in our theaters and seeing the world and challenges and needs from our frame of reference.
  • Great strategists listen to customers and markets with intent. They look for emerging patterns and strive to make sense of those patterns and then they adapt their firms and products and services to fit the patterns and frames of groups of customers.
  • The best medical professionals employ Empathic Listening with their patients, which makes a remarkable difference in how we cope with difficult diagnoses.
  • And yes, the best leaders strive to tune-in to their employees, particularly as it relates to professional development.

Covey  ties this concept off beautifully with: “When you listen with empathy to another person, you give that person psychological air. And after that vital need is met, you can then focus on influencing or problem solving. This need for psychological air impacts communication in every area of life.”

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Help your family members, colleagues, employees, customers and even negotiating opponents breathe a little easier. Listen with intent. Listen with empathy (not sympathy) and provide a bit of psychological air. Most of us…myself included, don’t this very well or very often. It’s time to start.

–

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

Art Petty is a Chicago-based management consultant focusing on strategy and leadership development. Art regularly speaks on innovation in management and leadership, and his work is reflected in two books, including the recent, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development. (download a free excerpt at Art’s facebook page.)

Art publishes regularly at The Management Excellence blog at http://artpetty.com/blog/

Prior to his solo career, Art spent 20+ years leading marketing sales and business units in systems and software organizations around the globe. You can follow Art on twitter: @artpetty and he can be reached via e-mail at art.petty@artpetty.com

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

Leaders, Principles and the Pursuit of High Performance Teams

March 28, 2012 By 2 Comments

“In high-performance teams, the leaders managed the principles and the principles managed the teams.” –Carl Larson and Frank LaFasto via Jim Highsmith in Agile Project Management-Creating Innovative Products.

Larson and LaFasto in their assessment of high performance teams offer us a profoundly powerful and simple to comprehend answer to the question of how to support the emergence of effective teams: clear, strong, actionable, livable principles beget an environment for effective collaboration and innovation.

Every high performance team I’ve experienced as a participant, a sponsor or an outside advisor, was governed by an overarching set of principles or values that formed and framed the culture. And while good words alone don’t create success, the combination of the leaders and participants living and acting according to those words everyday made things work.

On successful teams, the team leaders…and ultimately the participants eat and drink the principles for breakfast, communicate them constantly and most importantly, they live them in how they collaborate, problem-solve and challenge themselves and their team members forward in pursuit of success.

And since as we all know, even the best of teams face dark days when nothing goes right, the guiding principles serve as bedrock for self-reflection and guidance for navigating the way forward.

There’s a cautionary tale here. As Highsmith warns us, “Grand principles that generate no action are mere vapor.”  When engaging with an organization for the first time, I make it a habit to understand a firm’s values, and all too often, what I find are nice words…unarguable in their intent, that serve only to occupy space on a wall in a conference room. It’s a wholesale failure on the part of the leadership of an organization, when the guiding principles aren’t a visible part of everyday life.

Teams are a fact of life. We execute strategy via projects. We innovate on teams. We develop new products, improve processes and search for ways to better serve our customers via projects and teams. We darned well better figure out how to succeed at this more often than not. Right now, in too many organizations, “not” is winning.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

This intangible, sticky, squishy topic of operationalizing guiding principles or values doesn’t lend itself well to a prescriptive list of steps-to-success. The onus is on you as a team leader, project leader, functional leader, informal leader or organizational leader to ensure that your best efforts are supported by meaningful, actionable guiding principles. If you can’t articulate what those principles are and what they mean for behavior, accountability and performance, then it’s time to take a step back and tackle this issue. The effort will pay dividends going forward. Larson and LaFasto are right…leaders should manage the principles and the principles will manage the team.

–

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

Art Petty is a Chicago-based management consultant focusing on strategy and leadership development. Art regularly speaks on innovation in management and leadership, and his work is reflected in two books, including the recent, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development.  Art publishes regularly at The Management Excellence blog at http://artpetty.com

Prior to his solo career, Art spent 20+ years leading marketing sales and business units in systems and software organizations around the globe. You can follow Art on twitter: @artpetty and he can be reached via e-mail at art.petty@artpetty.com

 

 

Filed Under: Leadership, Performance, Project Management, Strategy, Values Tagged With: , , ,

7 Reasons to Be Excited About the Potential of Your Youngest Workers

March 8, 2012 By Leave a Comment

It’s easy for those of us who count our career in decades to discount how well attuned our youngest workers are to what defines good leadership and good business practices. To do so, is a mistake.

Long-time readers know that I maintain a regimen of consulting/training by day and occasional teaching by night. I’ve discovered that the best way for me to keep learning is to put myself in front of smart people with fresh perspectives as often as possible. The insights I gain from working with younger professionals are both fascinating and encouraging.

Business owners, hiring managers and senior leaders will be will served to tap into the energy, ideas and insights of this next class of employees in the workforce.

7 Reasons to Be Excited About the Potential of Your Youngest Workers:

1. Values and Character. The need for character-based, values-driven leadership is crystal clear and nicely articulated by many early career professionals. My observation is that these students/young professionals come to their studies with a well-established perspective on the importance of character and values in developing and serving is a leader. I suspect this view is in part an outcome of growing up in an era where executive misdeeds and leaders in handcuffs have been recurring themes.

2. Cultural Intelligence. Perhaps it’s the urban-setting and wonderfully diverse classroom at this particular institution, but working and communicating and engaging across cultures is already part of their everyday lives.  I’ll give this early career group a higher score on Cultural Intelligence than I would the more experienced groups I see in many corporate settings.

3. Global interconnectedness. Let’s face it, if you’re older than 50, you still remember a different world of business…one that was less global. The pace, scale, opportunities and risks are still exciting to us. For those soon to enter the workforce, this is the norm and just part of the fabric of society. It’s not change, it just is.

4. Team orientation. This newest to the workforce group has grown up participating on teams since they could walk. Coming together with strangers to pursue an objective is second nature. They are well-suited to project work in a world where projects are how we get stuff done.

5. Work ethic. Whether it’s the undergraduates working one or more jobs while completing their studies or the graduate students managing full-time work and insane schedules while balancing school, I’ve yet to be anything other than impressed with the work and dedication of these early career students/professionals.

6. Personal Accountability. While sadly few know who Peter Drucker was (until my class), they seem to naturally grasp his message of self-development and personal accountability from the classic article, “Managing Oneself.”

7. Hunger and Dreams. Perhaps the most exciting undercurrent that I catch from working with these young professionals is a fierce desire to do something that makes a different. I sense a desire to make meaning and fix and improve more than a pure focus on making money. This alone is enough to earn my vote.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Values, character, a keen sense of strategy, globally and culturally aware, a good work ethic, a team orientation and personally hungry to make a difference. Sounds like rocket fuel for business performance. What’s your strategy for tapping into the potential of your youngest workers?

–

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

Art Petty is a Chicago-based management consultant focusing on strategy and leadership development. Art regularly speaks on innovation in management and leadership, and his work is reflected in two books, including the recent, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development.  Art publishes regularly at The Management Excellence blog at http://artpetty.com

Prior to his solo career, Art spent 20+ years leading marketing sales and business units in systems and software organizations around the globe. You can follow Art on twitter: @artpetty and he can be reached via e-mail at art.petty@artpetty.com

 

Filed Under: Career, Leadership, Values Tagged With: , ,

Art’s Weekly Leadership Message-Engage With Purpose

September 19, 2011 By 2 Comments

Note from Art: Starting with this post, the Weekly Leadership Message is a new Monday feature here at Management Excellence. Use them in good health and great leadership!

The only way I let myself watch football is from the action-side of an elliptical. I love the game, but don’t love the time investment or potential for calorie consumption.

Yesterday, while working out and watching the Saints chew up the Chicago Bears, one of the announcers commented on the work of ethic of Saints team leader, star quarterback and seemingly great guy, Drew Brees. His words were something to the effect, of, I watched Drew in practice this week, and no matter what he was doing, it seemed like he did it with purpose. He brings the same intensity to practice that he does to game situations. 

Blog enough, and you’ll hear a post in just about everything. He had me at, “purpose” on this one.

No Timeouts in The Life of a Leader:

You don’t get time off from your role as a leader. There are no timeouts, no after hours hang-up-your-hat and become one of the gang situations.  I’ve attended too many company after-hours events where the boss made an ass of himself or herself to know that NO ONE really wants to see the boss take a timeout.

The most effective leaders I’ve worked for, with and now coach, understand that every encounter, from the greeting in the parking lot to the hallway conversation to lunch to participation in meetings, represents an opportunity to do something positive for someone or some group. 

Prepare Your Mind to Lead Effectively-Before You Walk in the Door:

One of my favorite examples is the senior manager who spends a few extra moments “prepping” for the day in her car in the parking lot before walking into the office.  She’s not putting on makeup or fixing her hair. She’s preparing her mind to engage, to lead, and to remember that her focus is on others and helping them solve problems in pursuit of their priorities.  This professional engages with purpose every single minute of her day.

7 Ways You Can Engage with Purpose Everyday:

  1. Your polite but focused questions help teach.
  2. Your thoughtful (never rushed or harassed) responses show respect.
  3. Your willingness to listen shows that you care.
  4. Your encouragement at a moment of failure accelerates learning and helps grow confidence.
  5. Your fair and constant reinforcement of accountability sets performance expectations.
  6. Your willingness to delegate decisions shows trust.
  7. Your interest in helping others advance and grow builds fierce loyalty and great teams.
  8. Your management of yourself models the values and behaviors of an effective leader.

The Weekly Leadership Message:

Manage yourself by focusing on others first. Make every encounter count as you engage with purpose.

–

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 published in late September of 2011.

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

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

Dispatches from Mayo: Are You Pushing Your Colleagues to Grow?

May 26, 2011 By 2 Comments

Note from Art: My next few posts will be brief insights gained as a result of my observations and experiences at The Mayo Clinic.

From Dr. William Mayo in his description of the three conditions essential to the future success of the Mayo Clinic:

“#3 Continuing interest by every member of the staff in the professional progress of every other member.”

I love that Dr. Mayo recognized the critical nature of learning and development as a part of the core values of this remarkable medical institution.  There’s no denying the importance of this action-oriented value for learning from and developing others, and there’s no deferring it to another department. It’s right there for everyone to see, ponder, think about, act upon and support.

In thinking back on the cultures I’ve been part of or those that I’ve had the occasion to support as a consultant, I truly haven’t observed more than a handful that had their own form of focus on the development of everyone, as articulated so succinctly by Dr. Mayo.  Interestingly, the organizations that did seem to get this, even if they didn’t describe it in quite the same way, were (and are) leaders in their markets.  Somehow, when people seek to learn from each other as well as take collective ownership for promoting organization-wide learning and professional development, good things happen.

While all organizations have their faults and warts and I suspect an institution that has 40,000+ people show up for work everyday has more than a handful, Mayo continues to be the brand of choice when we truly need help.  Walk the halls and talk to and share stories with people supporting their family members here, and the message is the same over and over again: We’re here because it’s the best. We’re here for answers. We’re here again because of how they helped us the last time. It’s consistent and never-ending.

While there’s no claim of causation or even correlation between the value described above and the performance and reputation of Mayo, I see and hear the values at work in every encounter.  (More on this in an upcoming post.)

Too often, we push the development of others off to a department or worse yet, to a third party training organization that has no basis in understanding the culture and no authority to support the teachings through coaching and on-going learning.  This is lousy management.  Similarly, instead of encouraging learning and knowledge sharing, much of our built-up knowledge remains cloistered in silos. Again, poor management.

If you have the privilege of leading others, consider what Dr. Mayo’s 3rd condition for sustaining success means to you, your team and your organization.

It’s time to take the important people development responsibility back from whatever department purports to own it, and work to knock down knowledge barriers and other fences that keep people from sharing and learning from each other.  You might just be building the foundation for your own high-performance culture.

Filed Under: Leadership, Professional Growth, Values Tagged With: , , , ,
Next Page »