Expertly Listen: Foster feedback within and outside your team.

[Part #3 of 5 in Essential Pillars of Strong Leadership]

With integrity and empathy as our foundation, let’s delve deeper into the Essential Pillars of Strong Leadership. We’ll now explore how active listening serves as a vital conduit for understanding and connection, enabling leaders to forge meaningful progress with their teams and customers.

3 Things to Remember:

• 🔑 Cultivate the art of listening.
• 🔑 Foster feedback loops within your team.
• 🔑 Value user feedback as a guiding light.

Leadership demands excellent listening skills, which must be nurtured organization-wide. While an owner, executive or manager likely has broader organizational context, individual contributors, especially those who are directly talking to customers, likely have much deeper context into customer needs and issues. Both perspectives are essential.

Empathy within an organization and towards users is the essence of leadership.

True listening goes beyond just hearing words. It requires presence, engagement, emotional understanding, and ensuring speakers feel heard. Listening to your colleagues, especially your direct reports, is pivotal. Beyond just gathering feedback, it’s about creating an environment where vulnerability is honored and hard truths are welcomed. As Brene Brown emphasizes in “Daring Greatly”, vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation and change. You wouldn’t want a team member hesitating to share an unconventional idea with the potential to solve a seemingly intractable problem. By actively listening, we not only capture unique insights, but we strengthen a culture where such courage is celebrated. As leaders, it’s our responsibility to create a space where team members feel safe to voice their insights, concerns, and dreams. This is an actual skill that requires a blend of empathy, patience, and genuine curiosity.

Empathy is central to great leadership. It’s also a strategic advantage in product development and sustainable organizational growth. To ensure your potential solutions will resonate, you must deeply understand your users’ underlying needs, desires, and aspirations.

To truly serve your customers, start by listening to your team.

🏆 Great Organizational Listening Looks Like:

• You have a robust 360° review process. This means, you have a safe and reliable process to solicit feedback from people working above, alongside, and below.
• You create a safe space for candid feedback. You are rooted in positive intent, a growth mindset, and support over punishment. When in doubt, create mechanisms for anonymous feedback.
• You implement continuous and ongoing feedback processes. Shifting from annual reviews to twice-yearly and including feedback in every 1:1 makes a tremendous difference in how quickly you can make improvements. (Retrospectives are superchargers for effective teams.)
• You empower bottom-up decision making. You understand that those closest to the problem are likely closest to the solution.
• You actively solicit and leverage user feedback to drive your goals and work.

🔎 Case Study: Systemic Problems When Listening Breaks Down

I once consulted with an organization facing severe business problems. They were threatened by competitors on all sides. Morale was low and employees often felt belittled or bullied. They were struggling to retain or attract talent. They were routinely building things that were underperforming and underutilized. They were creating content and educational materials that got no traction.

Our initial step to support improving the organization was to assess the organization’s “listening” culture.

What we found:

• Internal feedback was limited to annual, top-down feedback from managers to their direct reports. There were no structured processes to gather feedback from individual contributors about their managers, nor about peers who worked together.
• There was a pattern of punishing and even firing those who gave contradictory opinions or disagreed with leadership decisions.
• When presenting ideas, it was typical to be interrupted, dismissed or berated.
• The only structured process to gather feedback from customers and external partners was outsourced and done only every five years. (How much have you and your business changed in the past five years??)
• Unstructured feedback was typically happening by way of the executive team listening to executives from just a couple of their largest customers. Unsurprisingly, these companies also didn’t have good processes for internal feedback, so this was truly a case of “garbage in, garbage out.”

Clearly it would be nearly impossible for this type of culture to stay innovative. The catalyst to improve all of this: listening openly. By addressing this root cause, we laid a foundation for transformative change.

“Feedback is a gift. Ideas are the currency of our next success. Let people see you value both feedback and ideas.” — Jim Trinka and Les Wallace

⚠️ Warning: Echo Chambers Spell Death

Selective listening is a subtle yet catastrophic trap. It breeds echo chambers where only agreeable feedback resonates, stifling diversity of thought, and obscuring the true voices of your team and customers. When leaders surround themselves with yes-people, even inadvertently, the culture will inevitably become homogenized and devoid of innovation. They’ll become overconfident in flawed strategies. The more they act on this biased information, the more they’ll become disconnected from the very people they aim to serve and lead.

The discomfort of confronting hard truths is a fundamental human challenge. We can be instinctively afraid without even realizing it, subconsciously avoiding things because of psychological barriers like cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, or our own insecurities. The avoidance of vulnerability will hinder your goals. Period.

To manage these fears, leaders can adopt a growth mindset, viewing challenges as opportunities to learn. Acknowledging fear and choosing to face it head-on is crucial. This means valuing tough feedback as a catalyst for positive change and innovation. Leaders must actively seek and listen to varied voices, challenge their own biases, and encourage open dialogue. When we listen, even when it’s difficult, we prevent the amplification of issues and can facilitate genuine progress.

Facing fears head-on transforms them from obstacles to stepping stones.

🌱 Baby Steps to Implement:

Cultivate Active Listening: Begin by practicing active listening in every interaction. This means fully concentrating on the speaker, understanding their message, responding thoughtfully, and remembering the conversation. Engage with the intent to understand and validate the speaker’s perspective.

Establish Regular Feedback Channels: Set up regular, structured feedback opportunities at all levels of your organization. This could be through weekly 1:1 meetings, anonymous suggestion boxes, and/or open forums. Make it clear that all feedback is welcome and will be considered seriously. This forges a culture where feedback is sought after and acted upon.

As these practices take root, they blossom into a culture where every voice is not only heard but becomes a vital thread in the tapestry of your organization’s success.

How do you ensure every voice is heard within your team? Share your strategies or reach out for a chat!

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