THE MOST OVERLOOKED LEADERSHIP SKILL

image:amherst.org
culled from:www.ceoonline.com

Even before I released the disc, I knew it was a long shot. And, unfortunately, it was a clumsy one too.

We were playing Ultimate Frisbee, a game similar to U.S. football, and we were tied 14-14 with a time cap. The next point would win the game.

I watched the disc fly over the heads of both teams. Everyone but me ran down the field. I cringed, helplessly, as the disc wobbled and listed left. Still, I had hope it could go our way.

Sam was on my team.

Sam broke free from the other runners and bolted to the end zone. But the disc was too far ahead of him. He would never make it.

At the very last moment, he leapt. Completely horizontal, Sam moved through the air, his arms outstretched. Time slowed as he closed in on the disc.

The field was silent as he slid across the end zone, shrouded in a cloud of dust. A second later he rose, Frisbee in hand. Our team erupted in cheer.

Sam's catch won us the tournament.

It also taught me a great lesson: Never underestimate the value of a talented receiver.

I was reminded of Sam's catch recently after broaching a sensitive topic with Alba*, a client. The conversation was about some concerns I had about an upcoming meeting she was leading as well as my own insecurity about how I could help.

Before I spoke with her, I was hesitant and worried. Was I overstepping my bounds? Was I exposing myself? Would she reject my thoughts? Would she reject me?

I entered the conversation awkwardly, apologizing, and offering too much context. Even once I broached the issue, I felt tentative, unclear. I cringed as I felt my words hang in the air.

Thankfully, though, Alba turned out to be a Sam-level receiver.

Alba listened without a trace of annoyance. She asked questions — not to defend herself or refute my thoughts — but to understand my perspective more clearly. She was gracious, skilled, and accepting.

Her ability to receive me, and my opinions, led to a deep and valuable conversation about her performance, my role, and the needs of her team. A few weeks later, she showed up powerfully and led a remarkable meeting.

Typically, we choose our leaders for their skill at conveying messages clearly and powerfully. But, in my experience, it's their ability to receive messages that distinguishes the best leaders from the rest.

That's because the better you are at receiving, the more likely people will talk to you. And that's precisely what every one of us needs: to be surrounded by people who are willing to speak the unspoken.

So how do you become a great receiver?

1. Be courageous. We often attribute courage to the speaker, but what about the receiver?
I may have been scared broaching topics with Alba, but I had the advantage of time and preparation. I could control what I said and how I said it. I was able to think about it beforehand, write down a few notes, and test my thoughts with someone else.
The receiver has no such advantage. Like Sam, he has to receive my throw, however, whenever, and wherever it lands. He has to be willing to listen to something that might make him feel afraid or insecure or defensive. And if he is a great receiver, he will take in the information or message thoughtfully, even if the delivery is awkward or the message jarring. That takes tremendous courage.


2. Don't judge. Receiving is as much about what you don't do as it is about what you do.

Resist the temptation — blatantly or subtly — to be critical of the speaker or what the speaker is saying. Don't argue with her, poke fun at her, shame her, act aggressively, turn on her, become defensive, or act cold toward her.


3. Be open. In order to receive a pass in any sport — and at work and in life — you need to be free, open, and unguarded.
Yet we often guard ourselves. Powerful feelings like fear, anger, sadness, and insecurity do their best to block our ability to receive a pass. If you want to be a talented receiver, your task is to feel your feelings without letting them block or control you or your response. Breathe. Acknowledge what you're feeling to yourself — maybe even to the other person — without dwelling on it.

Reiterate what you're hearing, ask questions, be curious. Not curious in an "I-will-find-out-enough-information-so-I-can-prove-you-wrong" way. Curious to understand what the person is saying and to understand what's underneath what they're saying.

If you can be courageous, avoid judging, and stay open — even if the toss is awkward and the message unsettling — then, like Sam, like Alba, you'll be able to catch pretty much anything.

And when you're skilled at that, you'll be a most valuable player of any team you're on.

*Names and some details changed
More blog posts by Peter Bregman
More on: Communication, Managing yourself

Good Leadership vs. Bad Leadership

Are you a good leader? Are you leading in the right direction? Or are you doing some things that might be turning people off and inhibiting peak performance?

Most people are actually somewhere between being a good leader and a bad leader, with the majority uncertain of the connection between their leadership and performance. A deeper knowledge of what good (or great) leadership is will then enable you to break-through and affect change in the performance of your team, organization or company like never before.

Considering that break-through superstar performance is what most bosses hope for in their careers, let's review what represents good leadership and bad leadership in a concrete and actionable way — actions that drive positive sustainable results from an understanding of which managerial actions push negative results and which drive positive results.

Leadership denotes the sending of value standard messages that most people then use to conduct their work.

Leadership in the workplace applies to managing people, not to managing things. And as I have previously defined leadership (watch and read here), in the workplace, leadership denotes the sending of value standard messages that most people then use to conduct their work. This means how industriously, cooperatively, openly, respectfully, caringly, honestly, neatly, cleanly, and the like to perform their work. Thus, we say that employees have been led in the direction of those standards.

How does an employee experience leadership? They experience it through the support provided by management and the quality of this support dictates the quality of their work. The support an employee uses comes in two forms: tangible and intangible.

    Tangible support consists of training, tools, material, parts, discipline, direction, procedures, rules, technical advice, documentation, information, planning, etc.

    Intangible support consists of feelings like confidence, morale, trust, respect, relatedness (or purpose), autonomy, ownership, engagement and empowerment.

Providing that support may or may not be clear to you, as the boss, but it is clear to whomever you manage, the majority of whom are followers. What this means to you, the boss, is that leadership happens inexorably every minute of every day because the vast majority of people are following the lead of the boss, some more, some less. Followers follow the leadership of the boss. This is a Natural Law. The only choice available to a boss is to set the standard employees will follow—be that good, bad, mediocre or somewhere on the spectrum. We want to be in the very good to great range!

Now we can get more specific in defining good leadership in the workplace and poor or bad leadership.
Good Leadership

In order to produce the absolute best products and services in the marketplace, all employees must treat their work and their customers with great respect and care. Everyone knows this. It follows then that good leadership requires treating employees with great respect and care — the better the respect and caring, the better the outcome.

Remember this is a Natural Law (inexorible, inescapable). Treat employees as if they are very important and valuable and you will cause them to feel and become this way. They will then treat their work, customers, peers and management this way. They will follow your lead.

What then characterizes good (or great!) leadership?

    Listening to your employees including subordinate managers/bosses — addressing their complaints, suggestions, concerns, and personal issues at work.
    Coaching people when necessary to raise them to a higher standard.
    Allowing everyone to put in their two cents.
    Trusting them to do the work.
    Not giving orders or setting visions, goals and objectives, but instead soliciting this from them so that everyone is fully involved in how the company will be successful.
    Providing direction when needed to ensure that everyone is on the same page (the one they devised). A good leader communicates the vision that was set by all. If it is a vision of little interest, then another one must be found.

Every person wants to be heard and respected. Everyone has something to contribute. Listening and responding respectfully makes it worthwhile for employees to apply 100% of their brainpower on their work thus unleashing their full potential of creativity, innovation and productivity and making them highly motivated, committed and productive. All of this gives them very high morale, enables them to take great pride in their work and then they will literally love to come to work. Good leadership multiplies whatever creativity, innovation and productivity top management has by however many employees they have.

What does that mean for bad leadership?
Bad Leadership

Bad leadership is characterized by attempting to control employees through orders, policies, rules, goals, targets, reports, visions, bureaucracy, and changes all designed to almost force employees to work and to create and deliver what management considers to be satisfactory products and services. In this mode, management on its own decides what to do, when to do it, and how to do it and listens only perfunctorily, if they listen at all, to what employees have to say.

What characterizes bad leadership?

    Dishing out orders, policies, rules, goals, targets, reports, visions and changes to force employees to work the way management believes it should be done.
    Failing to listen or only perfunctorily listening to complaints and suggestions.
    Trying to motivate employees.
    Exhibiting the “Do as I say, not as I do” mentality
    Providing inadequate support
    Withholding information
    Treating employees as if they don’t want to do a better job, don’t care about their work, don’t want to accept responsibility, or don’t really want to work.
    Treating them as if they are lucky to have a job
    Being afraid to discipline and never disciplining anyone
    Staying in your office or in meetings at your level or above
    Us versus them mentality—“Why aren’t they performing better?”— “What’s wrong with that person? Why don’t they know their job? They should know their job.”

These actions or inactions are bad because they lead employees to believe that management disrespects them and does not care a whit for them. It also puts employees in the state of having to guess what management wants and management must be right about everything because no one else is allowed to make decisions. Bad leadership shuts off the natural creativity, innovation, and productivity of each employee and slowly but surely demotivates and demoralizes them. With the “I know better than you” and the “be quiet and listen to me” mentality often projected from management, the majority will act like robots waiting for instructions, even if that is not what management intended.

Most bad leadership is the result of a top-down, command and control style of management, where the employee is rarely if ever listened to. This style is prevelant in the workplace and ignores every employee's basic need to be heard and to be respected. It also results in a knowledge barrier and top management becoming ignorant of what is really going on in the workplace and the marketplace, which in turn makes their directives misguided at best and irrelevant at worst.
FOR EXAMPLE
An employee makes a mistake, or at least the boss thinks they made a mistake, and instead of finding out if it really was a mistake the boss orders a change or grills the employee as to why they made the mistake.

    “What went wrong here?”

    Or, “So and so said you were doing this instead of that, why are you doing that?”

This actually portrays pure disrespect. Sometimes the boss says it in a casual way, trying to be non-confrontational, while other times you'll see a clenching of teeth, if the boss is not terribly comfortable with confrontation. Would you want to be likewise grilled? Have you experienced such an exchange or something similar? Firstly, the employee does not think they did anything wrong and secondly, due to such passive aggressive behavior, can’t be certain what was really wrong. “Well, don’t do it this way, do it that way,” you might hear the boss say after the grilling. The boss basically sets the employee up for failure again, making them guess what the issue is or was. This is bad leadership and it is top-down in style.

In the top-down model, nobody is really listening to employee ideas, valuing the opinions of subordinates, or giving employees any recognition. The only way that the workforce can deal with managers who treat them in this way is to disengage and ignore the behavior of managers, bosses, and executives. In the workplace this is seen as being sullen, uncommunicative, having a poor attitude, low morale or apathy. Have you seen this? Have you used those words as a manager?

Bad leadership causes a huge amount stress for employees and managers too, and this turns into poor performance, sick days, mistakes, lack of adherence to rules, turnover and a whole host of other issues you may have seen.

With management attempting to manage the work instead of the people, much damage is done as managing the work requires a huge amount of time and effort and leaves management little or no time to actually manage people.

So then let’s look at the above example with good leadership.
EXAMPLE REWIND, DO-OVER

You think you have heard that something is being done incorrectly. You walk over to observe, ask some questions and listen. You say hello to the person involved, then:

“Hey, so tell me, how are you going about this job?”

You get an answer.

“Okay, so why like this and not like this?”

If they are doing something that you really think is wrong, then you point it out by saying,“What if you did it like this? What do you think about that?”

“Well, that doesn’t really work, because XYZ group doesn’t get us what we need on time…”

Ah, there you go, a support deficiency. That’s a job for their boss, most likely you in this case. During this exchange, perhaps you find the way the person does something works better or that they get their work done faster that way. That's great! Then on the flipside, you might find this person is lacking some knowledge or training (“Oh, I didn't know I could do it that way,” they might say.) which again is support that you, as the boss, are responsible for providing. Who knows what you will find out, but most assuredly, if you go in with a confrontational demeanor or passive aggressively, the person will shut down, because you are the boss, and from your negative approach, they most likely know to not stand up; they were taught to listen and defer to you; and to wait for your decision. Also, if they do not trust you, they may be very trepidatious about revealing how or why they do something, or even that there is a deficiency from another group, because you didn't support them before, threw them under the bus, didn't deliver what you said you would, etc.

What about those followers, I mentioned above?
Let's say you heard about a lack of tools or training in the above scenario and never did anything about it. This becomes the norm, in the eyes of a follower. They conform to that norm and to the resulting lower productivity. Even if they know that better training and tools will result in higher productivity and a better product or service, it will be unlikely that they speak up, or stick their neck out. After all, they saw some top performers (the non-followers) get nowhere when they brought up the deficiencies. And those non-followers? Well they will try for a while to get the support they need — patch a solution together to get their job done as efficiently as possible — but will stop asking for fear of making waves. Rest assured they will almost immediately look for a better place to work.

So, poor leadership drove productivity down; information flow down (the boss doesn’t know of issues); the team down; and overall team performance below their potential. Powerful. Thankfully, good leadership is as powerful on the upward side.

I could have said, “Be a better communicator. Clear, motivational communication skills is what great leaders have.” But tell me, where would that get you? Not very far, because it is an innocuous statement that could end up good or bad in practice.

What every manager, boss, executive —leader— honestly needs to do for the greatest and most immediate results is to listen respectfully and to follow-up with a satisfactory response (actions) to those involved.

    Check out the Five Step Listening Process in this video.

The bottomline is that all leaders lead in either a good direction or a bad direction with a full spectrum existing from exceptionally bad to exceptionally good. And although this direction may not be understood or consciously chosen, quite fortunately, we are all human and we thus all have the power of choice. We can consciously choose to adjust our actions to always lead in the good direction to raise our performance and success in managing people.
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