On this (delayed) episode of PIW, Patrick reinforces the value of being a strong listener at work and explores the common reasons that listening is ignored as a leadership tool.

A reading of a blog post published here.

I’ve written frequently about listening. As a leader, working closely with other people means being responsive to the preferences of others, how they work, and what motivates them. Consistently, the best way to learn these things is to listen effectively – being guided to better understanding by letting people tell you directly.

This sounds simple, but the biggest barrier to listening is that we often do the wrong kind of listening. Too many of us think that good listening simply means not talking, so we skip the learning and understanding meant to come from the best kind of listening. We foolishly use listening as a way to think of what we’re going to say, distracting ourselves away from the ability to connect with what the other person is offering. So instead of listening being a pathway of allowing someone to be heard, it often comes across as fake or ineffective.

In order to be a better listener, it’s important to understand how easy it is to fall into less effective forms of listening and what each form of listening sounds like. Through better understanding, we give ourselves the best chance to use listening effectively.

The plague of the beleaguered sitcom husband, listening to fix is the easiest to identify. This type of listening surfaces when the speaker expresses a problem or tough situation and are met with the often reflexive response from the listener of: “I know the answer here!” This form of listening is common for habitual rescuers. Since we have a sincere desire to help and offer advice, simply “listening” doesn’t feel like enough for us, we have a bias towards acting, towards doing something about the problem.

Unfortunately for us, not every problem is one that needs to be fixed. Like a good friend who shows up at your doorstep unannounced, if you’ve invited yourself to solve a situation when you haven’t been asked, you’re not likely to be welcome.

Things we say when we’re listening to fix:

• “Have you tried…”
• “If I was in your shoes I would…”
• “My advice would be…”

Listening to fix makes sense when someone explicitly asks for your help. “Hey, I’m having a hard time with something, I’d love your help/advice”. If you’re unsure, you can float a simple “I appreciate you sharing that with me, let me know if you get to a point where you want my input or advice.” Be sure you’ve been invited in before you treat the other person’s contributions as a problem to be fixed.

Anytime you challenge the perspective of the speaker (intentionally or unintentionally) you’re listening to win. Anyone who’s ever met a one-upper or someone who likes to debate facts and details has experienced this. It’s incredibly frustrating when someone skips over the substance of what you’re saying to instead focus on minute details.

Listening to win is the listening of arguments. We hear what’s being said and before the other person can finish talking, we’re already thinking of counterpoints and holes to poke in their logic. Listening to win is the listening of debaters, lawyers, and marital discord.

But, like listening to fix, this type of listening can also come from a place of good intentions. Overcoming this type of listening can be especially challenging for optimists. Optimists often find themselves telling loved ones to “look on the bright side” or trying to help them find the silver-lining. Unfortunately, even this well-intended contribution fails to meet the speaker where they are. Did they want you to try to cheer them up? Did they ask you to help them find the silver-lining?

Things we say when we’re listening to win:

• “Look on the bright side…”
• “It’s not as bad as you think…”
• “Think about it this way…”

Listening to win makes sense when someone is explicitly trying to exchange ideas with you. If the other person says that they’d like to have an open discussion or debate some ideas, then you’ll know that they’re asking for you to express your opinion/perspective. Similar to listening to fix, you need to be sure that you have the other person’s permission before contributing your perspective.

When we listen to understand, we turn off the part of our brain that seeks to respond and jump to conclusions. We allow the other person to share openly and ensure we’re hearing them correctly. Active listening is a more intense form of listening to understand.

This kind of listening allows us to connect with the other person on a deeper level and to share their perspective. When you hear a loved one say “I don’t need you to fix, I just need you to listen” they’re asking you to listen to understand.

This type of listening gives emotional support instead of technical support. You’re connecting with the other person by sharing their perspective in a non-judgmental and non-evaluative way. This allows the other person to let down their defenses and to openly vent, worry, complain, share anxieties, or whatever they’re needing to get off their chest. They can only do this openly and fully if they feel like you’re really trying to connect with them.

Things we say when we’re listening to understand:

• “I see what you mean.”
• “It sounds like you’re saying…”
• “Tell me more about that…”
• “Thank you for sharing this with me.”

Whenever you’re trying to deepen a connection with another person or ensure you have done a good job of understanding someone else’s reasoning or motivation it makes sense to listen to understand. Listening to someone on a first date, hearing a friend share a sad personal story, or confronting an employee about poor performance – all of these are appropriate venues for listening to understand.

If you take one thing away from this article, let it be that no type of listening is “better” or “worse” than any other type. They all have their purposes and benefits if they’re used intentionally. Our problem is that we often aren’t being conscious and thoughtful about what kind of listening makes the most sense for the situation we’re in. The reason listening to understand is so valuable is because it’s used so rarely. It’s the form of listening that takes the most practice.

When you find yourself struggling to connect with an employee, coworker, or boss, challenge yourself on whether you’ve done a good enough job of trying to listen to understand. Open the door for the other person to share their perspective. You could make a lot of headway with a simple statement like: “I feel like I haven’t been a good enough listener lately. I’d really like to better understand your feelings on [topic].” For bonus points, you could even add: “I often struggle with listening to try to fix a problem or listening to offer a silver-lining. Let me know if it seems like I’m doing that. I really want to just understand and hear your perspective before reacting.”

Remember, practice makes perfect. Try to find the simplest and easiest opportunities to use your listening skills and be patient with yourself if it doesn’t go smoothly at first.

Good luck out there.

This week, Patrick talks about why the most compassionate leaders often sacrifice their own well-being in service of others and give more to other people than they give to themselves.

A reading of a blog post published here.

When you manage others, it’s easy to get spread too thin. Our compassion and desire to be good leaders causes us to sacrifice our mental and emotional well-being in service of our employees. Employee problems become our problems and, over time, employees learn to delegate-up, leaving their struggles and questions at our feet and absolving themselves of the responsibility that comes from doing the hard, important work themselves. We normalize these unhealthy boundaries and soon find we have little to no time for our own responsibilities.

You’re no good to your employees burned out. An essential part of being a great leader is learning how to prioritize your well-being and setting appropriate boundaries for yourself. This means learning to support your employees without allowing yourself to fall into the trap of coddling them. You shouldn’t insulate them from the healthy stress that comes from figuring things out on their own.

By struggling and challenging themselves with their work, your employees grow and evolve. If you’re truly committed to their long-term success, you have to be willing to look at the big picture and give up the immediate gratification of feeding them fish to gain the larger satisfaction of teaching them to fish.

Being more intentional about your availability to your team will mean choosing not to get involved with employee concerns and struggles when you don’t need to. It will mean answering employee questions with questions of your own (you’d be amazed at what a “what do you think the answer is here?” or “if I weren’t here what would you do?” can do for you). You’ll go through the hard work of transforming yourself from a rescuer into a coach, by offering selective guidance without allowing employees to hand things off to you. The easiest way to start this transition is to develop a personal framework for deciding the kind of support your team needs when an issue comes up and socializing this new mindset and practice with your team.

Develop a framework for when you should be directly involved

What every leader should develop is a mental framework for when they feel like their help is needed versus wanted, and you’ll have a clearer picture of when to get directly involved and when your employee should be allowed to challenge themselves.

Every leader is going to have a different standard for when to offer their time and assistance. What types of projects? What level of urgency? Your goal is to find a balance between being infinitely available and infinitely unavailable. You want to be available for the right kinds of support, as determined by you, with consideration to the feelings of your team.

For example, my framework is if an employee a) can reasonably be expected to accomplish the task independently b) has the necessary skills and training and c) can’t irreparably harm a project or initiative if they get it wrong – then I’m comfortable challenging them to work without my direct involvement.

Share the framework with your employees in a way they can understand

Having boundaries is useless if no one follows or respects them. And people can’t follow them if they don’t know about them. After you develop your framework for where you’re willing to support your employees, take the time to talk with each employee about it and integrate it into your on-boarding for new employees. Frame this new approach as a way to ensure employees are growing and developing into independent contributors; by being more empowered they’ll need less oversight and gain more independence. This perspective will minimize push-back and make your new tactic more meaningful to everyone.

When you find yourself telling an employee that they need to struggle through something on their own, connect this decision back to your framework (to show consistency) and remind the employee that you’re wanting to challenge them so that they won’t need to ask you for help in the future. If you get push-back from an employee, you can always offer them the compromise of checking in with them after the task is complete to review the work with them one-on-one and offer feedback/coaching.

As an aside, beware of any employees that seem to negatively overreact to this new process. Every team has at least one person that uses “I’m helpless” as an excuse to offload work onto their supervisor or leader. Some people who are perfectly independent in their personal lives are somehow completely codependent in their professional lives. These individuals may not be a long-term fit on your team.

By establishing healthier boundaries and a better support method you’ll allow your employees to grow and challenge themselves while also giving yourself the energy to focus on your core priorities. You’ll have shown the courage to avoid the easier, more convenient path of constantly reacting to every small request. Instead, you’ll offer your team the kind of leadership they really need: a belief that they have it in them to reach new heights if they’d only trust in their own abilities and show a willingness to push themselves.

Good luck out there.

Our lives are full of paradoxes, ideas that seemingly don’t belong together but are essential to our sense of balance and equilibrium. Leadership has it’s own paradox – that it’s far easier to manage others when you manage yourself.

A reading of a blog post published here on August 4th, 2020.

Leaders get the teams they deserve. Our teams are reflections of us – our strengths are their strengths, and so are our weaknesses. But when seeing these weaknesses reflected back at us, we often fail to understand their origins; we accuse our employees of lacking focus, of not working hard enough, or of underdeveloped skills, unaware that they inherited these flaws from us.

Recently, a professional leadership coach shared with me the immense amount of time he spent on self-improvement before starting his career, saying: “before I could seek to work on others, I felt I needed to work on myself.” It is far easier to focus on the sins of those around us than to spend the necessary time contemplating our own contributions. We’ve all had experience with people who consistently point fingers and cast blame. These are the “do as I say not as I do” managers, whose hypocritical approach breeds mistrust and resentment.

Your team is built around you, how you show up, your character, the issues you’re focused on – all of these things have an outsized impact. You set the pace. In order for your team to do their best work, you have to do your best work. In order for them to be great, you have to be great. An ounce of energy spent on personal development is worth a pound of energy spent on developing your team. And while there are many ways to focus on self-improvement, you can start out with some basic steps.

How should you be spending your time?

What’s the best way for you contribute within the team? How can you show your unique value? What’s your superpower? If you start there, you can ensure that you have the biggest impact and are spending your effort on the things that are most useful to the team. Once you’ve found this, fill in your team’s contributions around your work.

If you’re focusing on business development and recruiting, then you might need your team to be synced on operations and execution. If you’re focusing on internal culture and a new product, then you might need your team focused on financial stewardship. By starting with the work you are best suited for, you’ll make it easier to understand where the gaps are for your team to fill in.

This simple, clear vision for how work should be distributed will give everyone a sense of responsibility and purpose around what they should be doing. You’ll also have a chance to show your value and contribution to your team, motivating them to match your output.

Be the change (in behavior) that you want to see in the world

What behaviors or actions do you want to see from your team? How are you modeling these behaviors? If you believe strongly in showing up to meetings on time or using certain productivity tools, then you need to lead by example. Use tools and methods that you want others to use and show off your output. As you build aptitude and success, your team will naturally follow your example.

This can apply to your peers and executives too. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so if you’re able to connect your wins to specific behaviors – specific excel skills, quantitative methods, etc. – you’ll soon find that others around you are looking to better understand your secrets. Instead of telling people what they should be doing, you’re getting further by showing them.

Be open about your progress

Share your journey of self-growth and development with your team. When appropriate, let them know the ways that you’re trying to sharpen and improve yourself. This will have the dual impact of subtly encouraging them to start their own self-improvement journey while also demonstrating that it’s okay to struggle on the growth path. Additionally, it will add context for future development conversations you have with anyone on your team.

An example: if you’ve been working at giving more constructive feedback, and you’ve shared with your team the tactics you’re trying and the outcomes you’re seeing, you’ll have more credibility when coaching your team on their own skills at giving constructive feedback. You’re showing your work.

These are just a few ways that you can invest in being the kind of leader that people want to follow. Next time you feel tempted to blame your team for missed deadlines or poorly-executed projects, ask yourself how you could have contributed or set a better example. Should the blame be 100% on you? No. But you should always start with your contributions to an imperfect outcome. The buck needs to stop with you.

No matter how hard you try, you’ll never have perfect control of your team, but you do have perfect control over yourself and your behaviors. By starting with yourself and understanding your leadership through that filter, you’ll ensure that your actions come from a place of authenticity and honesty.

Know that this path will always be the harder path, requiring more discipline and self-awareness, but it’s through these challenges that you’ll truly level-up as a leader. You’ll have more empathy with your employees, be a better listener, and find your employees are more motivated, all because you’ve shown the humility and courage to do the hard inner-work first.

In this week’s episode, Patrick explores the reason we avoid having hard conversations.

References from this episode:

Crucial Conversations

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team