How Listening Furthers Your Inclusive Leadership
I want to talk with you about one of the most essential elements of leadership today: the skill of active listening and adjusting behavior. This is a key component of leading inclusively.
Let's start with inclusive leadership.
What do I mean by inclusive leadership? This is two fold: the first impulse when we hear Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is to think, “bringing more diverse people to the table," but we often don’t know what to do when everyone is at said table. We look around at our team and think, “We’ve gathered this talented leadership team from different backgrounds! Hurray! We’ve done it! On to business as usual!” We squander the work of assembling this team by carrying on. Eventually this diverse talented group sees that they are not being utilized to their fullest potential and stop trying. They become unengaged. You’re at a table surrounded by brilliant minds and you might as well be talking to yourself.
I want to ask a pivotal question: How do we listen to our table of talented people?
More importantly, how do we listen and then adjust to what we hear?
I’m thinking about a particular moment with a senior leader I’ve been coaching. She inherited a team of direct reports that were her former peers. As she stepped into a more senior leadership position, she needed to set aside her assumptions about what her former peers’ needed in a leader and listen to her team.
Each direct report had their own team, which were viewed as singular units, instead of part of a greater whole. Rather than collaborating and listening to each other, the individual team members were siloed into their individual roles, cutting out any ability for inter-team collaboration. Sure the little units worked well together, but what about the whole?
She had a diverse table of talented leaders with successful teams, but those teams were not necessarily collaborating with each other.
This senior leader needed to expand her inclusive leadership skills.
She needed to listen to her leadership team. She needs to discover what her team members defined as success for their individual departments, as well as defined as success in their relationships with their peers (and her!). There is no way she would be able to define this without the support of her team.
Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply. – Stephen R. Covey
Active listening can feel daunting. Here’s a few steps:
I’m a very strong believer in listening and learning from others. – Ruth Bader Ginsburg
By insisting that we have all the answers and not listening to our team, we are cheating ourselves out of the diverse table of talented people we worked so hard to assemble.
Step One: Sit in the silence and actively listen
We need to be brave and look at our table of team members and say, “What do you think? What does success look like to you?”
And there’s going to be silence. This silence can be a potentially uncomfortable gift. You’re going to want to fill that silence with small talk and subject diversions so we don't have to listen to the harsh silence causing you to doubt yourself.
I’m going to posit right here and know that you’re a great leader for not having all the answers.
The only one judging you in that silence is you. Everyone else is thinking about what they do know and how they can share it with you.
The senior leader? She was able to uncover the siloing and collaborate with her team to reflect and consider the “bigger picture.”
Step Two: Hear what’s being said
You’ve sat in the discomfort and the information is coming at you. Write it down or let it wash over you. After they’re done, repeat back what you’re hearing. You’ve just gone from one brain doing all the problem solving to many. It is now your job to absorb that information. You’re going to want to respond, to immediately implement; to react. Don’t. Not yet.
Step Three: Self-Reflect
Potentially my favorite and least favorite step, this part feels like inaction, but it is an essential moment. You need to self-reflect and absorb this information. This may look like writing down everything you’ve heard, going for a jog on the treadmill, or sitting in front of the television with a nutella sandwich. Your mind needs time to process and organize the information. Just like that uncomfortable silence when you first admitted you don’t know and asked the team what they knew, you’re now giving your mind space to sort through all this new information.
Step Four: Adjust
Take what you’ve learned, and use it to create actionable steps. Celebrate those steps being accomplished. We often love broadened perspectives until we have to broaden our own perspectives. We like our comfortable ways of working and know it works “well enough” to get by, but the adjustment is essential to move into greatness. We know we want greatness despite our comfortable stasis because we gathered our collaborators around the table in the first place.
You may be tempted to jump to the adjustment step. I urge you to listen first. I think we do this because adjusting to our preconceived ideas saves us the discomfort of what listening actually requires as a leader. Listening requires honesty, silence, and (most importantly) a few good Nutella sandwiches.
Want to continue down the listening and Inclusive Leadership rabbithole?
Explore Sarah Stibitz’s article on How to Really Listen to Your Employees
Melissa Daimler’s article on Listening Is an Overlooked Leadership Tool is right on the money
Vineet Mayer’s article on how Listening to Your Inner Voice Makes You a Better Manager is a great in depth look at that critical Step Three of self reflection.