Listening

By Phil Eastman

Why is it so hard to listen? After nearly thirty years of helping people succeed in various settings, I have come to the conclusion that so many of the challenges we face as leaders center on a failure to listen. We are capable of hearing without listening, and that, more than anything, keeps organizations locked in cycles of confusion and conflict. In my thinking, hearing is the physical activity of identifying sounds, but listening is a much more complex and troublesome activity that takes both time and energy. However I can state emphatically that learning listen by using all your senses will produce a tremendous boost to your leadership ability. In thinking about how to address this broad subject, it occurred that in the space we have it would be good to address three applications of listening in leadership: listening as the new leader, listening to persuade, and listening by wandering around.

Libby Sartain discusses listening as the new leader, in her book HR from the Heart. She offers great advice about when to listen. She recommends that listening is the perfect behavior for a new member of a team, committee, or board. Even if you've studied and worked for years to acquire your new membership, stop, look and listen during your first of many meetings with the group and absorb how the team interacts, what its history is, its culture and values. Listen, and stop yourself from blurting out all the fabulous input and advice you've spent years preparing. Listening for a long time (longer than you'd really like and are comfortable with) will help prevent you from accidentally touching on a sore subject, or stepping on toes, or any of the other embarrassing, relationship-straining things one can do in an unknown environment.

You may be familiar with the old jokes about Americans speaking English to foreigners in a loud, slow voice, as if the communication barrier was volume, not the inability to understand the language. I see people repeat that funny situation at the office frequently, except the miscommunication isn't a language barrier, it's a values barrier. To engage in a conversation, you have to be speaking the same language as the other participant, and this doesn't refer simply to English, Spanish, or even Farsi, but the "language" of values or priorities.

Each time this situation occurs, the speaker turns up the volume insistency of their message, but it's not their audience that isn't listening, it's them. The leader is not listening to the clues the other person is sending about what influences their decision-making. Some people don't decide based on facts alone; the effect of an action on relationships, or a different (more or less optimistic) vision of the future, is their primary decision factor. If you have tried repeatedly to persuade someone unsuccessfully, you need to listen to where their objections come from and reframe your talking points to address their "hot buttons." Listen to their conversation. Do they discuss current financial reports, or share their vision for the future? Do they reference individual situations, or do they report on task completion? Do they use words like, "I think...." Or "I feel....."? So much of leadership is persuasion, and to lead effectively you need to be able to use persuasive listening.

Finally, leading by walking around has been a popular concept in leadership circles for many years, but the more important aspect of leading by wandering is to listen during the wandering. The idea is that a leader should interact regularly with their team members through informal encounters in order to understand what's really going on. The spontaneity and "here and now" nature of this allows a manager to get a more accurate understanding for the issues, barriers and real-life operational tactics of his team.

Most leaders will readily agree to the value of this concept, but stall out on its implementation. "What do I say to them?" they ask. And anyone who is an experienced practitioner of listening (went to the workshop, got the certificate!) will immediately identify the problem: Management by walking around doesn't require "saying" anything - it demands listening. The question managers should ask is, "How can I behave to encourage the most frank interaction possible from my team?" Management by walking around, rather than receiving formal scheduled briefings, is like the difference of listening to a live broadcast compared to a taped program.

The answer to the right question, "How can I behave to encourage the most frank interaction possible from my team?" can be answered this way: borrow from standard interviewing techniques and prepare a variety of open-ended questions to let the team members know what you'd like to learn about, and then use your best listening techniques to gather information about your employees' real work. Resist the urge to offer solutions or resolve problems right away. Doing that would require you to be talking, and you're supposed to be listening. Keep asking follow-up questions, and wait to provide your comments at a later time.

Listening does not come naturally to many leaders, but developing this skill to add to your leadership tool chest will enhance your ability to effectively lead.

A few weeks ago I was eating lunch at a Chinese restaurant, and when I was finished, I opened my fortune cookie. It read, "If you have HOPE, you have everything." I had already agreed to write this article for The Leadership Advisor and was struggling on how to begin the article. The minute I opened and read this fortune, I knew this was the opening statement for the article. The word HOPE really sums up the vision of those who work tirelessly everyday with victims of abuse, including incident response and prevention. These workers' efforts reach beyond the initial victim to secondary and tertiary victims through outreach, education and awareness.

The word Hope is present so much in the daily work of the many people working with at risk populations. Hope is what drives our commitment and work in helping people. According to Dictionary.com, the definition of Hope is: The feeling that what is wanted can be had or that events will turn out for the best. Those who come to work every day to help others in need or who have interaction in response to or prevention of abuse all have Hope. We have to. If we didn't have Hope, we couldn't gain the inner strength needed to help those in need. There are those who have no hope because of the circumstances they face, particularly harmful and/or dangerous situations that place themselves and their children at risk on a daily basis. This is what victims of domestic violence and their children face every day, Without Hope, they cannot survive, and those called to serve in many different ways cannot survive either. Survival, like Hope, looks different for different people, based on the perception and inner strength that a victim and those who care for them all define differently.

The month of October has been deemed the month of Hope by many who participate in Breast Cancer awareness activities or recognize Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Both of these very different,, very personal, often life-threatening, "diseases" are treatable and curable. With the help from family, friends, the community and the criminal justice system, this "cancer" known as family violence can be purged from society. All we need is HOPE!

As one survivor said, "Hope has rewritten my story. I no longer focus on the violence that ripped through my family like a wrecking ball, leaving shattered souls in the wake of its destruction. Instead, I invite others to join me where life is real, bittersweet real."

The struggle to emerge from the oppression of abuse is serious and quite arduous. It cannot be done alone. Every day at the Nampa Family Justice Center, I get to be part of an amazing team of people who offer hope, help, and healing. Something happens when a survivor chooses to move from darkness to light; a life is broken open to reveal unseen possibilities. Therein lies our Hope.

Rebecca Lovelace has been the Executive Director of the Family Justice Center in Nampa, Idaho for the past seven years. As Director, Rebecca oversees the daily operations, financial management, sustainability, and fundraising activities of the FJC. She uses many interpersonal relationship skills to keep the Nampa Family Justice Center operating successfully. Since the opening of the FJC in November 2005, the Center has provided over 5,500 services to clients living in the city of Nampa and its surrounding areas. Services include protection order filing, counseling (adults and children), legal aid assistance, safety planning, case management, State self-reliance benefits assistance, forensic interviews and many other much needed services regularly needed by victims of abuse. All housed under one roof at the FJC. Police, prosecutors, Legal Aid attorneys and several other community-based agencies work on-site at the FJC; coordinating their efforts with other off-site and/or part-time agencies to meet the needs of adult and child victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and child abuse.

Rebecca was awarded the Outstanding Victim Services Award by the Idaho Victim Witness Association in 2010 along with a Woman of the Year award presented by the Idaho Business Review. Rebecca is a presenter for the National Family Justice Center Alliance's International Family Justice Center Conference for the past three years and has provided technical assistance for other cities across the United States for the Alliance on FJC operations.

She is married with two boys ages 12 and 13.