Welcome to the second in my set of blog posts on leadership!  Today I examine the principles behind listening.

At first glance, this is a very simple idea.  Other people speak words and they go in the ear.  Listening, right?  Well - to be an EFFECTIVE listener requires more.  The first question the good listener asks themselves is, "Do the people I want to lead feel free to give voice to their ideas, opinions, or whatever?".  If the answer is "No", or "I don't know", then clearly work needs to be done to empower the team to communicate. 

Good communication requires that the leader build a state of trust between yourself and the team.  The other principles of leadership (e.g. effective action, etc.) can help with this.  The leader may also directly communicate his/her desire to hear what the team has to say.  This can be difficult if the leader has previously damaged the relationship with the team with prior actions.  Regardless of the current status of the relationship between leader and team, the good leader continuously looks for and creates opportunities to open lines of dialogue and build trust with, and within, the team.

The second habit that a good listener has is to record the ideas he/she hears reliably.  For a few leaders, memory is sufficient.  For the majority, however, ideas left in the brain get forgotten from time to time, so a memory aid (notepad, tape recorder, etc.) will help.  This way ideas will be retained and can be sifted through for action items at a later point.

The third, and most frequently ignored, aspect of listening is that of feedback.  A leader's actions and thinking are generally a black box to the team - they don't know what the leader is doing every moment of every day.  Thus, it is important to communicate regularly to the person who provided the idea in order to let him/her know what the status of it is.  This is not to say that every idea will generate a slew of actionable items that must be done - hopefully, the leader will have enough ideas that there will be a ton of action items which cannot be completed in a reasonable timeframe.  The leader may have to prioritize - in fact, if he/she does have to prioritize, then the team could be said to be doing well in this aspect.  If someone's idea is prioritized low, however, it is important to communicate to the ideator why it was prioritized low (remember, STAY POSITIVE!), the conditions under which it might become more valuable, and encouragement to generate more ideas.  The successful leader does not want team members to believe that their ideas are being ignored arbitrarily.  Likewise, if an idea is important enough to work on right away then the creator of the idea should be able to see the results of their idea and should have a stake in the results (Ideally, the ideator should be given responsibility for the success of their idea!)

Effective listening is a key to the success of a leader - without it, the leader has no way of knowing whether the team's actions are pushing towards the goal the leader has laid out.