Why Leaders
Who Listen Achieve Breakthroughs
As a leader, communicating can sometimes feel
like Groundhog Day. No matter how hard you try to get your message across, it
is all too easy to find the next day that you face the same blank stares,
predictable objections, and questions that indicate that you failed to make it
stick — that people just aren’t getting it. One reason leaders find themselves
in this cycle is that their approach to communication is based on an outdated
mental model. It’s a model best described as a “post office.” They view
themselves as the sender of a message and others as the receivers. If problems
arise, leaders look for disruption somewhere along the route.
The
post office model focuses most leaders’ attention on the sending process,
rather than the give-and-take of effective conversations. Even if they invite
people to ask questions and truly value their buy-in, these leaders are still
preoccupied with their message. This leaves them ignorant
about the larger context and reality on the ground, including emerging issues
and game-changing opportunities. In the extreme, thinking in terms of the post
office model causes leaders to make decisions in isolation or miss the early
warning signs of dysfunctional
momentum.
By
contrast, true
two-way conversations reflect a more open, balanced, and
reciprocal sharing of perspectives. Here, communication is approached as a
puzzle or a collage, with each person holding a critical piece. The purpose is
not to deliver the perfect message or to win people over, but to explore an
issue or opportunity together — pooling observations and data, raising and
testing assumptions, and creating new ideas out of the mix. Picture a top
technical team diagnosing a malfunctioning server. No one lectures. Instead
they tell stories, triangulating what they know to form a more complete and
coherent picture of the problem, enabling them to fix the machine.
Two-way
dialogue is so powerful for creating breakthroughs that the deliberative democracy movement relies on it for helping citizens in polarized
communities break out of gridlock. High-reliability organizing expert Karl Weick discovered that sharing perspectives and experience
are important vehicles for the organizational “sensemaking” that reduces the
risk of catastrophe. Although many leaders have personally experienced the
power of this type of dialogue, few have mastered the art of initiating it. The
following strategies can help.
Slow
down. If others find you stressed,
overloaded, or distracted, they will avoid disrupting your fragile focus. By
slowing down and being truly present, you create the opportunity for people to
come to you with new information, questions, or ideas.
Create
a safe space. Harvard Business School professor Amy
Edmondson’s work shows how important it is to create psychological
safety, if you want to explore diverse views and
foster ideas. Try setting a comfortable, informal tone and modeling openness —
by honestly
sharing some of your own questions, doubts, or
uncertainties, and inviting others to speak early on. Watch out for triggers
and reactions. Instead, adopt an attitude of curiosity, noticing and exploring
your assumptions.
Ask
inviting questions. Questions help you focus a conversation
without limiting creativity. One 2004 study, by Boston University assistant
professor Emily Heaphy (then at the University of Michigan) and consultant
Marcial Losada, found that high-performing teams asked 22 times more questions
than low-performing teams. Try asking questions that pose a puzzle for which
you do not have an answer, such as, “How might we accelerate innovation, so we
are ready for X?” If people do not engage immediately, allow the silence to
linger a bit or try broadening your question by asking, for example, “What do I
need to understand about our innovation process?”
Listen
with a willingness to be influenced. The
best way to improve communication is to focus on the listening part. How much
time do you (really) allow for listening to others and what they want to
discuss? When you create time and listen with an open mind, you bring out
others’ confidence and encourage them to share their questions, needs and
ideas. And as you learn more about their mental models, you can frame your ideas more effectively.
Use
reflection to deepen the learning. You
can build the skills for dialogue by periodically pausing to reflect on your
conversation. Simply ask people to call out what is working and ways the group
might engage more effectively. To reduce barriers to trust, you might gently
ask, “Is there anything that would make it easier for people to contribute on
this topic?”
Summarize
and ask for commitment. Because two-way
conversations are usually wide-ranging, it is very important to recap what was
discovered, where you are now, and what is needed next. Where relevant, this is
an excellent time to ask for commitments that move the ball forward.
In the end, the real magic of two-way
conversations is that they break the cycle of predictable, ineffective
communication, replacing it with fresh thinking and actionable solutions. When
leaders engage with a willingness to be influenced, others are more open to
being influenced as well. When leaders are genuinely interested in what others
are seeing, thinking, and feeling — not as a way to get buy-in, but because the
group has information and insights they need — they make better decisions. And
such leaders are more likely to earn the buy-in of those involved, because
everyone sees the merits of the plan.
One leader I worked with, frustrated after
multiple attempts to get her team aligned on a new direction, finally asked her
team members over dinner, “Do you think we should just give up on getting this
right?” She wasn’t suspending her responsibility; she honestly wanted their
views. At that moment, her team stepped up to a new level of ownership,
outlining what made sense, and where they wanted to modify the plan to get to
the goal. A year later, her highly successful team pointed to this conversation
as the moment when their mission caught fire.
Elizabeth Doty
http://www.strategy-business.com/blog/Why-Leaders-Who-Listen-Achieve-Breakthroughs?gko=7282c
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