Individual Leadership: Listening Again

Despite decades of leadership development in active listening, I still hear complaints about leaders needing to listen better. From my experience, most leaders are at least decent listeners. But the litmus test for being an effective listener is not the ability to collect data or extract the facts. It’s the degree to which people feel heard.

If you need to create greater alignment on your team, resolve conflicts, or deal with thorny issues, you must move beyond just listening for comprehension. This requires a shift in your approach: from transactional listening (gathering information) to collaborative or trust-based listening (mutual understanding and engagement).

It can be a challenge to listen this way. Time pressures, task focus, judgements, defensiveness, a desire to be right, and other factors can get in the way. So, the next time you are working to resolve a difficult situation, get a team unstuck, or address a persistent problem, ask yourself, “How will I make them feel heard?”

Organizational Leadership: Leadership Makes Strategy Real

Tremendous effort goes into formulating an organization’s strategy and crafting execution plans. But the wind in the sails of any corporate strategy is the behaviors, actions, and decisions of the most senior executives. If you want to focus your leadership on driving your strategy through the organization, here some approaches to consider:

1. Align every meeting to the strategy. Start each meeting by defining how the topics support a specific part of your strategy. If any items on the agenda do not connect with the strategy, consider whether they deserve executive attention.

2. Ruthlessly cut or minimize non-strategic work. If a project doesn’t directly influence your ability to execute your strategy, consider cutting, pausing, or scaling it back.

4. Assign “strategy champions” for major initiatives. Make sure each of the leaders on your team has accountability for the success of your most important projects.

5. Publicly celebrate strategy wins. Every week highlight where your strategy resulted in a market win. People learn from seeing what works.

6. Do a weekly strategy audit for your calendar. Review what percentage of your time is spent on supporting the execution of the strategy. The calendar doesn’t lie.

7. Contact one prospect or customer each day. Learn where the strategy is working or not. When Bob Dutkowsky was the CEO at TD/Synnex, he started every day by calling a customer. The company grew from $20B to $37B during his tenure. Start with a couple of calls each week if you are at zero now.

Perspective: Good In the World

Last week, the daughter of a friend (and client) reached out about a philanthropic leadership program at her high school. Her personal connection to the charity was moving to me. I asked her to write a short paragraph for the newsletter so I could do something, however small, to share her message. Here it is:

My name is Francesca Lauterbach, and I am a Student Visionary for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. I’m trying to raise $5,000 by April 5th to fund the research of blood cancers. I am fundraising in honor and in memory of my grandparents, who both passed away from blood cancer. The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (LLS) is at the forefront of the fight to cure cancer and is the largest nonprofit funder of cutting-edge research to advance cures. Its mission is to cure blood cancer and improve the quality of life of all patients. Please help me in my fight to cure cancer!

In her email to me she called her grandparents Nonna and Opa, so what’s not to love about that.

If you’d like to donate any amount, you can do it on her personal fundraising page: events.lls.org/gba/svoygg25/FLauterbach 

LinkedIn Live

Even a strong corporate strategy will fall flat if leaders aren’t intentional about how they communicate and drive it through the organization. Join me for LinkedIn Live on March 25^th at 10am ET to discuss how leaders can use strategy to drive the right conversations, actions, and decisions through every level of the organization.