In our every busy world of work, meetings, projects, deadlines, news, social media and many other activities to attend to, it’s very easy to become overwhelmed with a lot of work that keeps calling for one’s attention. For leaders, this is particularly so.
Leadership is often described in terms of vision, courage, decisiveness and the ability to communicate. Of course, all of these qualities matter.
But there is another quality without which leaders must possess.
The discipline of listening. It’s a vital necessity in leadership. One of the most dangerous things that can happen in leadership is when a leader falls into the trap of not listening to his team especially in the midst of the cacophony of competing things calling for his attention and action. A lot of leaders fall into this trap.
In many organisations today, a leader may assume that he is paying enough attention to the reports that members of his team are giving him.
But he may not really be listening enough. He may be eager to receive sales reports that are impressive but have stopped listening to staff concerns in respect of what their competitors are doing which, in the long term, could be injurious to their own profitability, by dismissing some of their suggestions or apprehensions.
A leader may be excited to hear that a new client has been secured for the company by the marketing team and huge millions of Naira or Dollars would soon be deposited into the company’s account but may not really be paying attention to what the staff on the field are reporting concerning some of the changing dynamics and trends of the marketplace.
And his team, having observed that even if they report important matters to their boss, no concrete action would be taken to address issues they had identified, may simply choose to shut their mouths and look away until matters get out of control and the organization eventually pays a price for it.
Usually, when people stop telling a leader the truth, the leader may initially feel all is well and that there is really no cause for alarm.
After all, there are fewer objections to his directives. Instructions are followed quickly.
Nobody appears to challenge him as the boss. But beneath the apparent peace, something dangerous may be happening.And so, in the important matter of leadership, listening is not weakness at all. It is strategic intelligence.
A leader who listens may not necessarily agree with all members of his team but the leader creates an environment in which useful information can travel upward before problems become crises.
This matters enormously in a country like ours where many organisations remain heavily hierarchical.Junior employees may see a problem before the managing director does.
It’s possible for the reporter to know what is happening on his beat before the editor does, and the teacher may understand why students are struggling before the school principal gets to know it. In the same manner, the security guard may spot lurking threats around the office premises before the chief security officer identifies them while the customer-service officer may know why customers are leaving before the chief executive sees the quarterly figures even as the factory worker may know that a machine is failing before the production manager knows where the problem is coming from. Therefore, an organization must have a culture that allows vital observations to reach the people who can act on them, and act on them fast. This is where leadership becomes more complicated than giving instructions because leaders don’t need mere information, they need unfiltered information. And that is usually much harder to obtain because people naturally edit and hold back what they tell powerful individuals. Sometimes, they remove uncomfortable details or soften criticism. Some even tell the boss only what they think the boss wants to hear. They learn which subjects provoke anger and which ones produce praise. Because of this, many leaders inhabit an artificial reality, a world totally different from what is truly happening. Everything appears fine to them until it isn’t. That is one of the reasons why some organisations collapse unexpectedly. A crisis which may appear sudden to a leader would have been visible to employees long before management acknowledged it. The problem was not necessarily lack of information but lack of listening.So, the lesson for leaders is straightforward. Leadership requires both data and listening. Neither should replace the other. This is especially important when leaders become successful since success often changes relationships. What do I mean? As a leader, people who once challenged you may become careful when relating with you now. Employees may become more deferential and associates may become interested in maintaining access. That is why the higher a leader rises, the more intentional the leader must become about creating channels through which inconvenient truth can travel. In a healthy organization, employees should be able to say to their boss, “Sir, we don’t think this will work” or “Madam, the data does not support this assumption.” If staff are afraid to say the truth about the reality of the business as they see it, the organisation starts to get into vulnerable terrain.Leaders should therefore be bold to ask questions they may not really enjoy when their people give them the answers. Questions like; What are we getting wrong? What is management not doing right that you would want us to correct? What are our customers complaining about? Which policy is producing unintended consequences? Where are we losing money? Which assumption have we refused to question that we now need to confront? These are not comfortable questions. They are necessary ones. The indiscipline of not listening is particularly severe in public leadership because government decisions affect millions of people. The quality of governance depends partly on the quality of feedback systems. Citizens, civil servants, professionals, communities, businesses, journalists and civil society organisations all provide information about how policies are working, and whether they are truly working for the masses in improving their conditions of living or only making things worse for them. Any wise government would not regard criticism automatically as hostility. Criticism acts as an early warning system. And the same applies to businesses. A customer complaint may be more valuable than a compliment. A difficult employee may occasionally be more useful than a flattering one. A journalist asking uncomfortable questions may be serving the institution better than one who simply reproduces official statements. That is why leadership is not about eliminating uncomfortable information. It is about learning how to process it.There is also a personal dimension. Leaders need people who can tell them the truth without fear. Every powerful person should have at least a few people around them who are not financially dependent on pleasing them. People who can say: “You may be wrong on this, Sir” Or someone who can say, “This decision will damage your legacy. Reconsider it”. The tragedy, however, is that many leaders only discover the value of honest counsel after the consequences of poor listening have become too expensive. By then, valuable customers have been lost. Long-term employees have resigned. Investors have lost confidence. Citizens have become cynical. Opportunities have disappeared. And trust has been damaged, sometimes irreparably.When leaders stop listening, organisatins start losing reality. By the virtue of their positions, leaders at the top usually see the widest horizon but may not see what is happening at ground level. Leaders therefore need people who will be able to tell them what is at the ground level which the horizon does not reveal to them at the top. There’s no question about it; it is the leader who listens that learns. It is the one who learns that adapts. And it is the leader who adapts that survives with his organisation. So, are you a leader? Be disciplined to always listen!O’Femi Kolawole is a journalist, author, publisher and leadership documentation professional with more than 25 years’ experience. He is the founder of Posterity Media, where he documents leaders, institutions and the stories behind their impact.
