The Art of Listening. By Nicki Rowland

EXECUTIVE LEADERSHIP SERIES The Art of LISTENING

By Nicki Rowland

In last month’s edition, Nicki Rowland, Director of the Exceptional Leadership Academy (ELA), explored the power of collaboration within your team and business. In this article, she discusses why listening is an art that every successful business leader should embrace and encourage.

BE A YARDSTICK FOR EXCELLENCE As a leader, your role is to inspire your people to work collaboratively and move smoothly towards a common goal. The title of ‘boss’ simply implies power over others. To be a true leader, you need to be a ‘yardstick’ of excellence and motivate your team through your actions and words – or less words, as the case may be. Your people look to you for guidance and support, and when they trust that you will deliver what you say ‘on the tin’, their commitment will follow. Great leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr, could articulate a crystal-clear vision that was almost tangible. His ‘I Have a Dream’ speech is a perfect example. Through his words, actions and beliefs, he guided his people to achieve his vision. However, to truly inspire people, you need to understand their needs and wants as well as your own. This is where the art of listening comes into its own.

USE EMPATHETIC LISTENING You will have heard the phrase…’We have been gifted with two ears and one mouth and, as a leader, should use them in that proportion’. Listening is a vital leadership skill. Attentive listening should be the level that we should all aspire to achieve. Attentive listening is where the listener gives their undivided attention to the communicator and demonstrates a sound understanding as to what has been said by summarising the conversation. However, if you really want to make an impact on people around you, implement ‘empathetic’ listening. Empathetic listening is all about the ‘Feel, Felt, Found’ approach. A conversation could go something like this...

Team member: ‘I’m really anxious about coming back to work post Covid because of the new Standard Operating Procedures in dental practices. I’m unsure how this applies to what we do in our lab.’

Laboratory Principal: ‘I understand how you feel. When I was sat at home thinking about it, I felt anxious too. What I found was that when I had a full understanding and began implementing the changes that the fear factor evaporated. Thinking about it was much worse than the doing. Don’t worry, we will go over all the changes and their implications with the whole team’.

Team member: ‘That’s reassuring. I feel a bit better now. Thank you!’

Openness and transparency are key elements of great leadership. As I have said before, leaders do not necessarily have all the answers. It is so important for you to understand that you do not need to be ‘The Oracle’ and that looking to your team to support you in finding solutions is the best policy. It is even more important to recognise this as we go back into practice following the COVID-19 lockdown. The human default is for leaders to clamp down on the information shared in practice in the hope of minimising the risk of getting things wrong. However, this can backfire and create a culture of low trust and resentment. For laboratories to thrive, we need to learn how to generate trust and openness to gain commitment from our teams and drive our laboratories to the next level.

BE PASSIONATE Enthusiasm lifts your team and raises morale so is a critical element of being an inspirational leader. Work becomes a meaningless task for your people if you appear blasé about the whole thing. If you do not live and breathe your purpose and mission, your team will not either. Keep your vision in the forefront of your mind and your passion tangible. It will remind your team about the ‘why’ of their work and elevate productivity. Your passion is infectious and eventually leads to total ‘buy-in’ and commitment from your team with a long-term impact of overall success. As Sam Walton, founder of Walmart says ‘If you love your work, you’ll be out there trying to do it the best you possible can and pretty soon everybody around you will catch the passion from you - like a fever’.

BUILD TRUST As leaders, we need to avoid authoritarian expressions in the pursuit of our passion and not claim to have all the answers. We need to balance passion with openness and candour and ask our teams for their ideas and opinions. It is all about adopting a growth mind-set and demonstrating our vulnerability as a leader. Just as a coach might share their experiences and challenges during training as a young athlete with their team, we need to disclose how we have felt and feel. It allows everyone to sing from the same hymn sheet and nurtures trust in the workplace.

Let’s address vulnerability-based trust a little further. This type of trust allows you to take risks, ask for support, own up to mistakes and confront your team members without fear of payback or resentment. It allows you all to be vulnerable with one another. It is Patrick Lencioni, author and a pioneer for organisational health, who talks in depth about this concept. Patrick says, “Trust lies at the heart of a great team, and a leader must set the stage for that trust by being genuinely vulnerable with his or her team members

CREATE A ’CIRCLE OF SAFETY’ We can generate a circle of safety by first treating our people in the way in which we would like to be treated, as human beings. Give them a sense of belonging, a shared purpose, some autonomy and most of all, care for them. We are all human beings and need to feel needed, wanted and appreciated to feel safe.

A coach needs to understand how their runners are feeling physically during training but also how they are feeling psychologically about the challenge and up and coming events. In the same way, we need to open up on an emotional level to our teams so we can match our support to their physical, emotional and mental requirements. When we do, trust, commitment and loyalty grow organically.

In the fifth of Nicki’s articles, she will be discussing the need to be a ‘Futurist’ who adopts a modern leadership style. In the meantime, if you need any support from Nicki in relation to business development, leadership and the management of your laboratory, contact her at nicki@ela.team