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Executive Leadership

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Leaders are Skilled and Intentional Listeners

Most leaders think their job is to communicate to cast vision, direct their teams, persuade, and motivate. And it is. But the half of communication that gets skipped is listening, and it’s the half that actually builds trust.

In this episode of 10 Leadership Lessons, Dr. Phillip Shero makes the case for why skilled listening is one of the most underrated leadership competencies. You can’t learn what motivates your people while you’re talking. You can’t understand what’s blocking progress. You can’t know what the situation actually looks like from where your employees are standing. Listening isn’t passive—it’s a discipline that requires forethought, intentionality, and patience, especially when you think you already know the answer.If your team doesn’t feel heard, your communication isn’t working—no matter how clear your message is.

If you’re not hearing what’s really going on with your team, let’s talk: 

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Why Leadership Communication Breaks Down

Two senior managers were on the verge of a blow-up that had the whole office walking on eggshells. What resolved it wasn’t a mediation session or a difficult conversation. It was one page from a DISC report.

In this episode of Think Like a Leader, Dr. Phillip Shero walks through what happened — and what it reveals about why communication breaks down even when people are competent and well-intentioned. The problem usually isn’t the message. It’s that different communication styles mean the same words land differently depending on who’s receiving them.

DISC gives leaders a practical way to close that gap — before conflict forces the issue. One of our most proactive clients spends 10 minutes every month on this in their team meetings. It builds the kind of trust that doesn’t erode the first time someone asks a pointed question.

If you want to see what DISC could surface about your team’s communication, reach out for a complimentary DISC strategy session.

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Leadership ROI — A Three Word Definition

John Maxwell says leadership can be summed up in one word—influence. It’s hard to argue with one of the most widely acclaimed leadership experts of our generation.

I agree that leadership is influence. But I think influence alone is not a sufficient definition.

People can be influential and still not be leaders. For example, someone could run into a crowded theater and yell, “fire,” and influence everyone to take drastic action. But that person is not acting as a leader. They have influenced others, but they have influenced badly, and with no thought for the lives of others.

In my own three-word definition of leadership, I add two other important characteristics that make the influencer a true leader. I’ll 

Leadership ROI — A Three Word Definition

R stands for Replication, O is for Ownership, and I is for Influence.

I stands for Influence

Influence is the capacity for a leader to affect the beliefs, values, and actions of other people around her or him. Influence is different from positional power. People follow a person of influence not because they have to, but because they choose to. Leaders cultivate influence, measure the health of their influence, and actively work to expand their sphere of influence. Executive leaders need to focus their time on influencing their senior team. But because they are also responsible for the culture of the whole organization, skillful leaders have learned how to extend their influence further. One of the influence strategies I teach leaders is how to create a ripple that impacts two and more levels down, by leading through their direct reports. The next level of impact hinges on a leader’s ability to influence those who are not in the room. Leaders can’t physically be with everyone in the organization, but they can dramatically expand their impact by influencing through others (read more about that here).

O stands for Ownership

The second letter in the ROI definition of leadership is Ownership. You are not a leader until you take ownership of the outcomes of your influence. In the theater example, the person yelling fire takes no ownership of (and does not accept accountable for) the actions that other people took based on their influence. A true leader takes ownership of everything that happens from their influence—good or bad.

Who owns the failure of performance when employees don’t do what is asked or don’t do it correctly? The leader. True leaders understand that they are 100% responsible for everything that happens in their organization. They take ownership for the actions of their direct reports. Even if those actions were wrong, misguided, or not done to quality, the leader must own the outcomes.

What if you have no positional authority in a relationship—are you still responsible to own the outcomes of that relationship? If you want to be a leader, then the answer is yes. Leaders will continue working on their influence until they are getting the results that they need.

Part of our work is to teach middle leaders how to influence laterally, to lead others who are not directly under their supervision. Even if they aren’t getting the cooperation, collaboration, or information they need from lateral peers, they take ownership of the outcomes of their influence instead of blaming others.

“Ownership is critical—without it you only have an influencer and not a leader.”

R stands for Replication

The third letter in the ROI definition of leadership is Replication. It’s my conviction that you can’t call yourself a leader until you have helped to develop another leader.

Leaders are not just about the work of accomplishing tasks, influencing people, and taking ownership of the outcomes. Leaders know that for the organization to sustain its performance over time, you have to develop leadership at every level. Leaders are constantly mentoring, coaching, and developing others around them.

There are two reasons why a leader cannot be successful until they have developed other leaders. The first is that a single, omni-competent leader is a bottleneck for the whole organization. The second is that the purpose of human organizations is not just the production of goods and services, it’s also the growth and development of people in the organization. Employees are investing years of their lives at work, and companies that do not build the capacity of their people are failing to hold up their side of the bargain.

The priority on developing human potential is one of the most basic tenets of servant leadership. Robert Greenleaf, widely recognized as the father of the modern servant leadership movement, said the best test is: “Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?” Leaders understand the expectation and responsibility to develop other leaders as central, not peripheral, to their role.

Of course, three words cannot fully define the complexity of leadership. Two of my favorite professors co-authored a scholarly definition of leadership that stretched to 14,000 words. But I do hope my three-word definition of leadership provides a window of clarity for what it means to lead as well as a way for you to measure your own leadership ROI.

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Three Levels of Awareness

Recently, I was invited to address the senior leaders of the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, NC. The 82nd is the world’s most elite light infantry unit. They jump out of airplanes behind enemy lines, and their mission is to forcibly gain entry to enemy territories to secure key targets.

When you’re jumping out of an airplane, it’s critical that you have a full 360-degree field of awareness. You need to know everything that is happening around you. Our modern military has made effective use of technology to extend battlefield awareness in ways that we could not have even imagined 50 years ago.

Hopefully, your workplace does not feel like a battlefield, but awareness is still a critical component of leadership success.

Three Levels of Awareness
 

Awareness Gives Us the Power to Choose

Awareness gives us the power to choose. You cannot change what you cannot see. If you are unaware of a threat, either internally or externally, you are defenseless and unable to do anything to address it.

Leaders know that awareness is a competitive advantage. In the external realm, business leaders are constantly seeking to increase their awareness through market data, analysis of trends, big data, analytics, and talking with peers. In the internal realm of human relationships, leaders often walk through a fog because they do not have the same resources and data for awareness.

There are three levels of awareness. Let’s take a brief look at each one and learn how you can increase your awareness at each level. 

“Leaders can increase their awareness of others through use of carefully crafted questions, psychological and style-based assessments, and purposeful observation and reflection followed by dialogue.”

 1. Awareness of Self is the Foundation of Leadership

The foundation of leadership is self-awareness. Self-awareness means clearly seeing your strengths, your weaknesses, and your capacity. Self-awareness includes the ability to become present to your habits and your style. It also includes the ability to consider your own motivations and conducting accurate self-evaluations on a regular basis. Research from The Center for Creative Leadership indicates that self-awareness is one of the top four drivers of leadership effectiveness.

Most executives that I have worked with have already developed a strong measure of self-awareness, but we all have blind spots. Some of the most effective ways to eliminate blind spots and increase self-awareness are psychological self-assessments, journaling and reflection, requesting frank feedback from trusted sources, and working with a professional executive coach.

2. Awareness of Others Extends Your Influence

The second level is awareness of others. Leaders who have accurate other-awareness gain the ability to extend their influence. Being aware of others includes emotional intelligence and empathy, as well as a clear-eyed assessment of others’ strengths, weaknesses, and styles.

Other-awareness has immediate practical applications. Ken Blanchard taught and popularized a model of situational leadership, which identifies four different leadership styles that may be required when dealing with employees who are in different stages of development or confidence. Leaders who have strong other awareness are able to adapt their leadership style to what is most effective for the employee, not just the leaders own preferred style. Being aware of others also helps leaders actively perceive and understand communication from employees and be able to make themselves clearly understood.

3. Awareness of Impact is the Differentiator

The third level is awareness of the impact the leader has on others. Leadership is not primarily a position or title, nor is it just a set of traits or behaviors. True leadership occurs in the relational dynamic between leaders and followers. A leader may have strong self-awareness and accurate other-awareness, but without the third level of understanding his or her impact, the leader will still be limited. Becoming aware of your leadership impact is the differentiator that separates good from great.

I have written before about how our brains are wired up to produce meaning and interpretation even from limited data sets. Without the third level of impact awareness, a leader may have large blind spots without even knowing it. The leader’s brain fills in a story that interprets the behavior and communication from employees. Frequently, that story is not accurate because it is not based on a clear perception of how the leader is impacting those around them.

Leaders who want to grow in their impact-awareness must begin with an attitude of humility and a learner’s posture. Often a leader’s impact is significantly different from what he or she intended or thinks that it is. Uncovering leadership impact requires time, trust, and sincere mutual dialog.

You Can Grow in All 3 Levels

Whether you are new to a senior leadership role or have 15+ years of executive experience, you have the capacity to grow in all three levels of leadership awareness. Before you choose which one to focus on, do a quick self-diagnostic to see which of the three levels most needs attention. Where do you need greater clarity in your perceptions and awareness: self, others, or impact? Which one of these levels will produce the greatest results if you had more actionable intelligence?

Like America’s elite paratroopers, leaders step out into the unknown every day. The greater your situational awareness is, the more affective you’ll be at leading through challenges.

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How Your Competence is Making You Ineffective

Most executives I have worked with are what I call multi-competent. They are good at many things. For the last few decades, they have honed their skills across multiple domains.

And if they happen to be the founders of their business, then they have probably done most of the jobs in the organization at one time or another…

..and that multi-competence is what keeps them from being effective now.

Leaders are not effective because they can do a lot of things. They are effective because they can do a few things with excellence.

In my experience, there is an almost physical pain for leaders that goes along with giving up control or involvement in things they know they are good at. They take pride in their skills honed over time, and they love to execute in every area. It feels good to get things done yourself (the dopamine hit to the brain associated with task-completion is an internal drug). This is the great seduction that effective leaders learn to ignore, because they have cultivated a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction in seeing work done by others.

Imagine yourself holding a light saber. Your job as a leader is to cut away everything from yourself that other people in your organization can do. In the end, what you are left with is a core set of responsibilities that only you can accomplish. I suggest you begin with cutting away these three things and replacing them with new keys to effectiveness.

How Your Competence is Making You Ineffective

Stop Solving Problems

The first thing effective leaders cut away is their drive to be the Chief Problem Solver. It is highly inefficient to have the CEO, or senior leader, of an organization in the weeds solving problems.

I know you’re good at it, but you need to stop. Replace the urge to solve problems with a focus on clarifying who is responsible for solving the problem and making sure they have the resources they need.

Stop Setting Goals

One thing that makes leaders successful is their ability to set ambitious goals and drive hard until they have achieved them. But the CEO can no longer be the Goal-Setter-in-Chief.

Goals that are handed down from the top feel like quotas and may risk you coming across as micro-managing. I know you are good at goals, but you need to move aside and let other people step up to set them. Replace the urge to set goals by giving careful thought to the top-level strategic objectives that align with your vision. These should be long term, high-level objectives. Then ask your people to do the work

Stop Helping

Because leaders are multi-competent, they are often drawn in to helping others accomplish tasks. Their offers of help are well-intentioned, but they have the effect of making employees feel like the leader does not have confidence or trust in them.

Effective leaders learn how to stop helping everyone all the time and make room for employees to fail, learn, and grow. Effective leaders will replace the desire to help with a commitment to thinking deeply and learning from mistakes.

From the practice of deep reflection, leaders emerge with the right questions to ask that focus everyone’s attention in the right places. That’s when real learning occurs, which is far more valuable than the short-term benefit of leaders helping someone get a job done

From Competence to Effectiveness

It takes courage and commitment to wield the light saber and slice away areas of your own competence, but the old saying is true, “What got you here, won’t get you there.”

Effective leaders learn to stop solving problems, and they start creating clarity and responsibility. They commit to stop setting goals, and they start casting vision and setting inspirational objectives. They discipline themselves to stop helping, and they start thinking and asking the right questions.

The DIY movement is seductive because it appeals to our individualism and sense of personal accomplishment. But doing it yourself as an executive is a recipe for creating bottlenecks and confusion.

What do you need to stop doing this week in order to become a more effective leader?

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