Tag Archive for communication

5 Tips for Leaders Who Listen

December 5, 2012 Uncategorized 8 comments

There just might be something to this whole listening thing. Thanks, Captain Obvious, you might be thinking. What you don’t know is that I actually have a whole superhero get-up I don when I transform into Captain Obvious. Like any superhero outfit, there are tights involved. I’ll spare you any further details.

Listening is one of those funny skills that most people think they’re good at, while most other people think those first people aren’t really all that great at it. If you think about it, it’s a tricky one from a self-awareness perspective. I mean, you don’t actually ever experience what others do when they talk with you because, well, you’re you. You can’t possibly perfectly process how your communication is received and perceived by others.

But that doesn’t give us an excuse to throw up our hands and just continue nodding and smiling when others are talking with us. Leaders within organizations have the responsibility to work hard to listen to their teams. And because the business world needs another list of things to help people listen better, here you go:

1. Don’t assume. (I don’t need to spell out the old adage, right?) People might not be thinking what you think they’re thinking in a given situation, and they might not mean what you think they mean when they’re talking.

2. Leggo your ego. No, not Eggo. Ego. You’ve got to resist the urge to think only about how you’re going to respond to someone as they’re speaking. We all have limited processing capacity (some more limited than others), so we need to focus as much of that energy as we can on the other person or people talking. Listening is about them, not you.

3. Don’t miss the forest. When in conversation or a meeting, try to detect overarching themes in what folks are saying. Their delivery may not be flawless, but focus on the message. Don’t be distracted by every little thing they may flippantly say in the course of their speaking.

4. Know that the speaker may not even know the real message. Intense feelings and opinions can be layered under all sorts of things: verbal clutter, fidgeting, posture, tone, and so on. A great listener figures out what the speaker is trying to say, whether they do a good job saying it or not.

5. Understand the underlying perspective. People approach organizational life differently, and that approach will dictate how they communicate. Understanding those angles will help you better empathize with others.

Thanks for listening. Now I’m going to go back to paying attention to the colleague sitting across the desk talking to me.

The Grapevine

August 6, 2012 Uncategorized 6 comments

There’s a grapevine in your organization or on your team for a reason. You know the grapevine, right? It’s that informal undercurrent of what people are (or aren’t really) saying in hushed tones to others. You know your organization’s grapevine is alive and well when you regularly hear folks start their questions or comments to you or others with “I heard through the grapevine that….”

This grapevine is one well-informed vine fruit. I mean, really, the grapevine seems to have so many well-informed sources, doesn’t it? Sources in the know. Sources that must be somehow invisibly sitting in on executive team meetings and private conversations. Want to know the secret, hidden, Illuminati-fueled truth about your organization? Find the grapevine.

Not so excited about the grapevine? Well, I have good news, and I have bad news. Bad news first: there’s always going to be a grapevine. Good news: it’s as strong or as anemic as you make it.

You see, the grapevine is strongest when communication and trust are the weakest. The flip side of the coin, of course, is that when communication and trust are strongest, the grapevine is weakest. I mean, think about it–often folks who start their sentence with “I heard through the grapevine” often then say or ask about some of the most outside-the-realm-of-possibility stuff; yet since they heard it through the (not really) trustworthy grapevine, they’ll repeat it. Often with a straight face! And no matter how many times you tell someone that what they heard through the grapevine isn’t true, they’ll continue clinging to it. Why? You can be pretty sure there are communication and/or trust issues within the team.

So as you look around your team, if the grapevine is alive, well, and growing all over everything, you can know you need to be really digging into your team’s communication and trust issues.

Innovation, Humanness, & Communication

May 17, 2011 Uncategorized No comments

One thing that many organizations seem to be grappling with is the idea that building technology and developing people is somehow an either/or scenario rather than a both/and scenario. As organizations continue (and rightly so) to pursue technological innovation, one danger lies in assuming that since much of what they do is becoming automated or going online, that the human side of the business, including organizational communication and culture, is now passe. However, it’s actually the opposite that is true. As organizations innovate and evolve, it will take a much more concerted effort to cultivate organizational cultures wherein healthy communication, in all its forms, is able to thrive and become a distinct competitive advantage. 

Organizations that learn to both embrace their humanness and also drive innovation will emerge as leaders within their respective industries and markets. Those that throw their humanness to the wind and run full bore toward a wholly automated world will find themselves with woefully inadequate communication systems, while those that cling to tradition and eschew technological advances will do so at their own peril. So the key then is for organizations to build healthy cultures centered on the ability to communicate extremely well, and in such a way that they are better able to innovate and evolve. We can see this even today, as many organizations are taking great pains to utilize their innovative technological advances to enable their employees and others to become more connected, not less. The ability to do this — to cultivate healthy cultures based on exceptional formal and informal communication — will prove to be a distinct competitive advantage in the years to come.