Capture, connect, and communicate: How to lead by listening more

One of the main things that changed about my work over the past eight months is the number of meetings I am having. Before shifting to remote work, I could organize a project when running into colleagues at lunch or by quickly walking over to them and chatting. Now, meetings take centre stage, and they are often just group calls — no cameras on or a way to catch onto the visual cues that someone would like to talk or contribute to the current discussion. This has meant that listening first and then talking, and encouraging participation is key to successfully capturing the needs of each person.

As I am learning to lead a team stretched around the globe, I’ve discovered that there are key repeatable steps to ensuring that each of their insights and input is meaningfully considered, incorporated, and mobilized. When ideating together, the first step is actively listening without judgement or rigid expectations. It can feel overwhelming and almost like drinking from a firehose, but the influx of data points that can be captured by simply listening to what each member on my team has to say is the only way to understand the full picture.

Capture
I lead a marketing team, and yet I’m not a marketer, not an expert content writer, not a graphic designer, nor a digital campaigns guru — these are the people on my team. My goal is to capture their insights in a concise and meaningful way that allows us to analyze them and begin the process of making them more actionable. The way I usually go about this is by taking as many notes as I can during our conversations, opening the space up for their feedback and encouraging it, and most importantly, listening for the noise. What I mean by noise is the indirect and subtle communication that is always there but tends to get tuned out. Things like body language, behaviours, tone, and so on can sometimes be more informative than words.

More often than not, teams have a set dynamic where some members are more outspoken than others. This can lead to a disproportionate representation of the opinions and expertise of the latter, and them feeling neglected or ignored. Leading with empathy, and trying to ensure that all members of a team feel empowered to express their opinion and be heard is critical to the capture step.

Connect
Information coming in from so many different sources can often end up like soup and lose form and purpose. While it is incredibly important to try and capture as much feedback as possible, without a structured process of categorization and analysis, it remains far from actionable. With the right approach and practice, information turns into patterns and crystalizes into insights.

Think of the constellations and how they give stars more meaning. Without the lines connecting it, Orion is not a giant hunter fathered by Poseidon, and is instead a bunch of shiny dots in the sky. This is what the connect step about. Taking seemingly unrelated data points captured by listening closely and connecting them to begin discovering their meaning. While this leads to a good guess about the next steps to take, communication is the final piece of the puzzle that brings this all together.

Communicate
After crystalizing insights and beginning to discover any next step for a team, it is important to communicate them and work on a gameplan that is understood by the team and has buy-in from key stakeholders. Imagine being a point guard on a basketball team and drawing up the perfect play in your head, but never communicating it to the rest of the team — you might throw the perfect pass for an alley-oop, but if your dunker is hurt and can’t jump to catch it or if they didn’t read your pass, the play is wasted.

When trying to draw actionable insights from feedback, it is important to ask clarifying questions, consider other factors that might be influencing people’s behaviours, and communicate any plans or next steps that affect others. Communication also opens the door for information to be processed and connected in different ways, and might lead to even more insights that were previously undiscovered.

With all three skills employed together, insights become readily available and can be actioned on with more ease. In Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, the fifth habit — seeking first to understand and then to be understood — is centred around empathetic listening and trust. That is exactly the point of capturing information, connecting separate observations, and communicating them across a team.

Ultimately, leadership is not about tyrannically dragging people in the direction you want to go. It’s about helping others make meaning of what they might already know and empowering them to share their perspective so that the team can solve any problem it encounters and grow with each experience.