One of the things that has always been important to me is making what I share accessible and helpful, and hopefully inspiring. My early business ownership journey was like many, filled with the desire to learn and improve my skills by surrounding myself with everyone who had something to say. What I actually learned was that to grow as a founder, owner and leader, I need to surround myself with people with something helpful to say. That’s why I focus on finding authors and speakers who don’t just talk about the philosophy and theory of leadership, but give me the nuts and bolts, and why it’s so important to me to share what I’ve learned through practical experience and ideas that you can actually use.

Today’s topic is all about listening. Listening to those around you and listening deep into to the heartbeat of your business.

“Leaders who listen attract better leaders and good ideas, while those who refuse to listen are surrounded by people with nothing helpful to say.”

As the owner, founder and leader in an organisation, no matter its age or size, it can sometimes be difficult to remember to listen – we have a tendency not to listen because we’re the leader and everybody is supposed to listen to us!

What’s the connection between listening and leadership?
Intuitively, as the leader, you are responsible for making decisions. To make good decisions, you’ve got to have good information. As I tell leaders all the time, your goal isn’t to make all the decisions, it’s just to make sure that all your decisions are good, and you can’t make consistently good decisions if you don’t have the correct, relevant and useful information to hand, and you won’t ever get that information until you decide to stop and listen to the people around you.

Not everyone has something relevant to say all the time.
Just to be clear here, I’m not talking about listening to everyone around you when decisions need to be made, I’m talking about being intentional in asking the right people and developing a pathway for the flow of information. What you should be intentional about is creating systems, even organisational charts, that allow you to have access to the people you need to listen to, and the people you need to listen to have access to you. If you’re not intentional about that, you will end up listening to the same handful of people over and over and over and as you know, and as every leader knows, information gets filtered. I’d like to think people don’t do that on purpose, but typically, people do tend towards telling you what they think you want to hear. Especially at the critical milestones in the life of an organisation, you have to have great information which means you have to listen. But which also means you have to create a mechanism to make sure you’re able to listen to the right people at the right time.

If you’re not intentional, you can become insulated.
I have people around me like many leaders do for whom part of their job is to insulate me from every single email and every single phone call. I can’t be dragged into the minutiae of every single operation as it relates to the businesses I’m involved in. Yet there are people in my organisation as there are in many organisations, who feel like they’ve just got to get to me with this information. So we typically establish a chain of command, perhaps through our org chart, to make sure we only get what we think is the right information, we believe an amount of insulation is critical in allowing us to do our jobs. At the same time, great leaders develop the skill to understand when to reach beyond the insulation they’ve built into the organisation to listen to people who are two or three or four layers into the organisation closer to where the action is. Again, especially when it comes to those critical growth milestones. There are milestones, stages and there are seasons in the life of every organisation where you not only have to listen more carefully, you have to listen deeper into the very heartbeat of your organisation.

If you’re not careful, you will only get the good news or the news people want you to get.
One of the dirty little secrets of leadership is we really only want the good news. Every leader, especially the busier we get and the more complex our organisation becomes, love’s good news. We don’t love not good news, and the people around us know we love good news and we don’t love the not good news. If we’re not intentional about creating an organisation or a system that allows us or, even in some cases, forces us to listen to the things we really don’t want to hear, then we can’t make good decisions because good decisions are made with good information. Good information comes from people who are willing to give you all the news not just the good news.

As a leader myself, the last thing I want people to do is walk around with a ‘what would Mark do’ mentality and try to guess what I would do. In the same way, I don’t want people walking around trying to guess what I want to hear because when people try to guess what I want to hear, and tell me what I want to hear, then I don’t have the information I need to make the informed decisions needed for growth. We all have some really well intentioned, talented, great people around us that try to guess what we would want done and unfortunately that sometimes morphs into guessing what we want to hear. Because that filter is dangerous, we need to learn as leaders to listen past that well-meaning filter. I think part of it is intuition and part of it is to build some things into the organisation that make sure on the one hand that we listen, and at the same time that the right information gets to us. Because this is so critical in the life of your organisational, you should if not already, think about what the right information is to have, and who are the right people to ask.

Gather the right people, those that’ll tell you what you need to hear not just what you want to hear and then listen to them. The greatest leaders know that they’re not the smartest people in the business, they’re just the leader. I think every leader has to recognise the implications of not being the smartest person in the room by gathering the right people around them, those people with something helpful to say, and then being truly vulnerable enough to listen. I certainly need to listen to the smartest people in my businesses and that brings us back around to the importance of listening. Read more about Organisational Health

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that who we listen to will influence what we do as leaders. And I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that what we listen to or the information we get, influences what we do as leaders. So again, it’s critical that we create pathways to information and then that we’re intentional about taking advantage of those pathways.

Great leaders are attracted to environments where their ideas and opinions are valued and heard.
When a leader becomes a good listener, they attract people who have good things to say, and they attract better leaders. That doesn’t mean everybody who’s attracted to a leader is a good leader, but great leaders, second and third layer leaders, thrive in organisations where they feel like their opinions are heard. The better skilled you become at this, the better you are as a listener. The more sincerely you lean into the ideas and the opinions of other people, even when they bump up against some of your most deeply held values, the more attractive you and your organisation become to future leaders. Building a culture of listening in your organisation where you are doing great things in the world that your whole team believe in means that you and your team at every level, remain attractive and your future leaders are more inclined to stay.

I can almost guarantee that some of you reading this right now have left positions in an organisation simply because they realised nobody was listening to them. You’re thinking I have helpful information and ideas, but the people I report to are so caught up in their own ego and in the way they’ve always done things, my ideas are never going to get to the place where they’re going to be implemented. So consequently, I’m going to go somewhere else, not because I have to be in charge of everything, but where at least somebody is going to listen to me. So again, listening creates a culture that attracts and keeps better leaders. Or, leaders who refuse to listen will eventually be surrounded by people who have nothing helpful to say because the people with something helpful to say will eventually drift into organisations where people will listen to what they have to say.

Building a system that allows a leader to get the brightest and the most strategically minded people around the decision-making table.

Now you’re beginning to understand the importance of creating a culture of intentional listening throughout your organisation at every level, what’s next?

When decisions have to be made, getting the right people with the right information around you is key. That doesn’t mean those people become your permanent information sources, it just means there has to be flexibility and this flexibility really is a cultural thing within an organisation.

Build a pathway or system that allows a leader, wherever they are in the organisation to, when they need to, pull in the brightest people as it relates to a particular decision or project. Get them at the decision-making table and ask them relevant questions in order to get the information the leader needs. This means that, at times, the original and static org chart may not be your friend because the information resources you need require that you may jump over people who have previously insulated you from relevant information, unconsciously or not. When you do this the right way and you do it consistently enough, you will create a culture where everybody in the organisation realises that the goal isn’t to work through the org chart, the goal is to make better decisions which means we have the flexibility to pull people into a room, to jump over the fixed lines of communication in order to get the right people with the right information to make the right decisions as it relates to a specific issue or project.

Now you can listen deep into your organisation without worrying whether or not the information is being filtered on its way up or on its way through. I believe adopting this philosophy is critical if you are going to grow and scale your organisation, and more importantly, build a culture of nurturing future leaders to succeed beyond your tenure.

Understandably this can be very threatening in organisations where there hasn’t been that flexibility in the past. Organisations where everything works through lines of authority and the company org chart, important as it is of course, and I’m not saying we discount or do away with those things. In every organisation, growth will be delayed, even halted, if you’re not continually seeking better practice in everything you do, including developing better listening practices throughout your organisation at every leadership and management level.

When I look back on my own leadership development journey and when I unlocked this idea, it was a struggle because superficially it’s not intuitive. Once I realised how much better my decisions would be and how much more empowering it would be for my team, it didn’t take too much to turn this concept into habit throughout my businesses.

See my blog Delegation as a Leadership Strategy

Now it’s just part of the way people think and behave but I’ve had to learn to be intentional about empowering my leaders and managers to meet anytime they want to without me. They don’t have to worry about me opening the door and getting involved and they know they can pull in the right people when needed. Remember, you are also demonstrating best practice to their future leaders too by empowering them to make independent decisions, not on their own with the same people but with the right people, from the right positions who have the right information so the organisation as a whole makes better informed and therefor more profitable discission.

This is another step in the journey for owners and founders as they begin to let go. See my blog on The Second Goal For Business Owners

How do you decide who needs to be in the room?

I think the best way to show you this is to run through an example. Let’s say you’re thinking about launching a new product or service. The first thing you’ll do is research, competitor analysis, market saturation, cost analysis, design, budgeting, finance, manufacturing implications, product or service delivery, target market, routes to market, recruitment. The list goes on but I think you get the idea. The question to now ask is, who are the best placed people to get the right information from to make informed decisions about a way forward. Thinking about competitor analysis, should you ask your sales director or the salesperson who speaks with customers every day, to join you at the decision-making table. Either could be correct for your organisation, the key point being that you have intentionally thought about who is the right person to join the discussion.

Of course, you could ask your sales director to ask the sales team but I’ve found this can attract the information filter as discussed above. Let’s think about recruitment. In order to manufacture your new product, or deliver your new service, you are going to need one or two more people in the relevant team. Should you ask your HR director to join the information gathering meeting, or should you ask the person who will lead the new product or service team. I think we know the answer but in larger organisations common practice is to bring in HR or recruitment because they deal with recruitment. It’s a top down way of thinking and listening when in fact, better decision are made more quickly, efficiently and inclusively when we listen from the bottom up – from the people who are closest to the action. Have a think about who are the right people to ask so you can make better decisions.

I appreciate you may have a business whose size just doesn’t require such deep thinking, perhaps you don’t have that many people in your organisation. Remember, this is about getting the right information from the right people so you, or any other leader, can make better decisions. The principle still applies – don’t assume the people you always ask will be the people with the right information.

Notes of caution
I’ve already talked about making this principle habit throughout your organisation so it becomes part of your operational culture, but there can be hiccups as I’ve found out as I’ve thought about and developed this idea. Firstly communication, make sure your managers know what’s happening and who you are going to invite to an information gathering meeting particularly those who are managing someone you will invite, even more so if the manager themselves will not be invited. Perhaps you might invite a second or third layer person to the information meeting, and the manager to the decision-making meeting so you’re not excluding the manager or other leaders from decision making. I hope you can see why open communication is vital and the understanding that no one is being excluded because they are not trusted in any way, just that the goal is to make better decisions based on better and unfiltered information.

Here’s a quick example.
You’re well on the way to launching your new product or service and now the leader of the marketing team calls a meeting to begin planning a launch strategy. They need information from someone who speaks with customers everyday so they invite a salesperson to the meeting, not necessarily the sales director because better information may come from someone closer to the action. So the marketing director calls the sales director and says, I’m putting together a marketing team to launch this new product and I could really do with someone with first hand customers facing experience, who from the sales team would you recommend I invite. Same idea when thinking about product features and benefits, would someone from the design team bring better information. Again, I think you get the idea about intentional thinking.

So firstly, always inform people whose team members you’re pulling into one of these meetings and make sure the team leader is happy and comfortable not being included. Secondly, remember there are people closer to the action who may have more relevant and helpful information even if they are three or four layers aways from the actual decision-making process.

Every leader needs to build into their culture the flexibility to reach deep into their organisation, pulling people into a meeting to gather better information. It’s not a matter of not trusting what others have to say, it’s just about exploiting the depth and diversity of resources available to you or other leaders around you.

What else can you do to identify the right people.
Something every leader does, team and employee reviews. I’ve found this to be a great place to find people who have something helpful to say. I’m sure we all know the value of the three, six and twelve month evaluations that we all ask our new employees to complete, where they answer a series of questions about their experience in your organisation. They allow those of us in leadership positions to listen to our brand new employees, and they get an opportunity to tell you what they’ve experienced, what’s working, what’s not, and what they worry about. Listen a little deeper and they’ll tell you where they think you’re off purpose and where there are things done in this organisation that don’t line up with your mission, vision and values, and where things could be better. Through these reviews you can listen to those you may not regularly have around you but who truly have something helpful to say.

In every organisation there are ways to create opportunities or systems that allow leaders to listen, when leaders are willing to listen they’re going to make great decisions based on good information from the right people closest to the action. Listen to the best and brightest not just the same people all the time and listen deep into your organisation. As leaders, what you want to hear the least is generally what you need to hear the most. If you’re not intentional, if you don’t learn to listen deep into your organisation, the information does get filtered, the news generally gets better and better as it works its way up to. If you’re not careful, you won’t get the best information that allows you and your other leaders to make the best decisions. Remember this, leaders who refuse to listen will eventually be surrounded with people who have nothing helpful to say. Listening attracts good leaders because great leaders want to be in organisations where their opinions are heard.

If you would like to talk with me about any of the points raised in this blog, or anything else about improving communication, growing and scaling your business, do get in touch here: Book an appointment


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Remember, there are only three types of people – those who make things happen, those who wait for things to happen, and those who talk about why things don’t happen for them. Which one are you?