Episode #408: The Listening Leader

Leaders are often poor listeners in the modern age. To listen to our team members requires the allocation of precious time. Advances in technology, especially hand held devices, was trumpeted as unfurling access to more time for contemplative pursuits and work-life balance. Is there anyone out there who feels they are now more ebullient, because of all the extra time the technology has thrown our way? Probably not. In fact, as the pace of life has sped up, we are more time poor than ever.

The mobile phone has become addictive and we are reaching for it almost every second of the day. We carry it around, we keep it close and we are plugged in 24/7. Leaders are probably the most time poor in society and so interactions with our team members becomes more and more transactional. We want something from them in exchange for salary. We want that report, that update, that meeting and then we rush to the next thing on our To Do list. If we clocked how much time we spend we each day coaching our people, the results would be preposterously bad.

Developing our people is one of the key tasks of the leader. How can you develop people if you have little clue as to what is happening in their life? Japan is especially tricky, because staff don’t share much about their private lives with their colleagues or the boss. For example, if someone is getting married, they keep it a secret until it is a done deal, so there is no possibility of the marriage plans falling over and them losing face. This means as the boss, we need to make a bigger effort to engage our staff and understand what are the key things in their lives. We need to see where we can help them advance their careers. But time poor people struggle with this.

I know myself, I have never been busier. When things are going well you are busy fulfilling client orders. When things are bad, you are busy trying to get client orders. There is no rest. Everyone working from home has made the whole communication piece more challenging as a leader. My time poor status has been elevated even more negatively by the pandemic and its impact on business. As bosses, we imagine we are listening to our staff, because we are too optimistic about our time allocations and priorities. In fact, we are giving orders, checking on details and coordinating efforts across the team. This is not listening, because the direction tends to be one way. “Aye, aye captain” as a response from our staff is not communication. It is a passive response to our barrage of demands.

There are different levels of listening and if we are not careful we can get stuck down the bottom of the hierarchy, at pretend or selective listening. With ideas, thoughts, decisions buzzing around inside our brains, like a lot of bees on speed, we can miss what is going on around us. People are telling us things, but we have not been able to break away from the thoughts occupying our minds. Instead, we make sounds that appear to indicate we are listening, but actually we are in the pretend listening phase. Or we may be filleting the white noise emanating from our staff member and seeking only the most highly relevant bits, ignoring the rest. It as if instead of speed reading, we are speed listening, skimming through the conversation, picking out the plums and discarding the rest.

We want to move up the scale to attentive listening and empathetic listening. I used to work with a younger colleague who would continue looking at his computer screen and keep typing, while you were talking to him. After suffering from that bizarre and unnerving experience, I made a commitment. Whenever people want to speak with me, I need to physically prop the keyboard up on my desk, turn my head to face them and look straight into their eyes, giving them my 100% attention. I need to be fully present for what they want to say to me and do no filtering. I need to relax and really listen to what they are saying and also think about what they are not saying.

Empathetic listening is extremely difficult, if you don’t make the time to speak with the team members. We need to know what is going on in their life. The only way to do that is to leap off the leader rat treadmill and spend time with them. We need to take a leaf from the slow food movement. We need an equivalent slow leadership movement, if we want to really hear our staff. Slow down with people to understand their perspective, their emotions and their thinking. We are listening with our hearts, eyes and ears to hear their needs.

They are not making as many Japanese as they used to, so we will all be locked in a struggle to the death to recruit and retain staff. It is a zero sum game. If you cannot keep the right people and your competitor can, then they can put you out of business. The boss ability to listen at the empathetic level is going to reflect the type of culture and environment, where people feel they can do good work. Get this wrong and no amount of tech will rescue you.