Shut your mouth and make room for others
Leadership is not about taking the spotlight
For a long time, I believed that being a leader means always having a clear idea about everything, consistently having a solution for every problem, and telling others what to do and how. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you should be the one who knows the most in the room and, consequently, the one who should “lead” to the solution. Reality is that leadership is not measured by the amount of words you say.
To be completely honest, I've always found this “need to speak up“ to be a bit of a strain. As an introverted person by nature, trying to be the center of attention to prove that I’m in charge has always been very tiring for me. It required significant effort and drained my energy in no time.
Realizing that, instead, actively listening to people and intervening only when it is truly necessary is not only more in line with my nature but also a great tool for enabling others to contribute actively.
👂Active listening
Active listening is when you not only hear what someone is saying, but also attune to their thoughts and feelings. It turns a conversation into an active, non-competitive, two-way interaction.
― Amy Gallo, What is active listening?
I don’t want to talk about active listening, there are books and people far more qualified than I am to explain what it is and how to practice it. There are some books in particular I feel like recommending:
The Lost Art of Listening: How Learning to Listen Can Improve Relationships by Michael P. Nichols (Amazon)
Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life by Marshall B. Rosenberg (Amazon)
Active Listening: Improve Your Ability to Listen and Lead by Michael H. Hoppe (Amazon). It’s still in my to-read list but it looks promising
The focus of today’s issue is on wanting to share with you the outcome of a personal “retrospective” I did and some of the reasons why I found myself monopolizing discussions and decisions in the past. Of course, there are many other reasons. Sometimes it's just a matter of personality, while other times it's due to the situation or context.
Performance anxiety
Sometimes this happens because you feel like you want to speed up the process. The pressure to achieve certain goals can lead to an excessive focus on results; you want to make a fast decision as a consequence of having too many things on our plate and a packed calendar filled with meetings. This urgency often leads to the opposite effect: oversight, misunderstandings, and ultimately, outcomes that may not align with team’s goals.
The need to seek approval
Another reason could be that you feel the need to prove to your superiors that you are capable of handling things independently. You may want to demonstrate that you're on top of things and fully able to manage the situation. The fear of being judged can lead to wanting to show immediately that you have the right answers, without giving others a chance to contribute. However, over time, you realize that constantly trying to please others or seek their approval comes at the expense of achieving results and addressing the needs of the team.
🧱 Barriers to active listening
I also realized there are some obstacles which prevent me from effective listening:
Distractions: mobile phone, notifications, thoughts about different topics. I started enabling a “Work Mode” on my mobile phone to disable all the notifications but the very important ones. Same goes for for Slack, emails and other notifications on the notebook. They are not disabled all day long but al least when I’m on a meeting or I’m working on something which requires complete focus
Interruptions and Preconceptions: The urge to complete other people’s sentences or give your opinion too soon. Likewise, preconceived assumptions that influence our interpretation of messages. To be honest I’m still struggling with this step, trying to do my best to avoid it as much as possible
Judgement: Tendency to evaluate the ideas of others rather than understanding them. This is hard to evict and the Nonviolent Communication book mentioned above helped me a lot. There’s a passage in the book that I really liked:
Our attention is focused on classifying, analyzing, and determining levels of wrongness rather than on what we and others need and are not getting.
― Marshall B. Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication
More active listening 👂, less rockstar 🎤
Active listening applies to every context, not only inside the team. Being an introvert, as mentioned above, I find it much more natural to leave space for talking and sharing without adding noise unless there is something truly important to say.
By nature, solutions and/or questions often come to me afterward. Sometimes I first need to process the conversation, so monopolizing the discussion becomes detrimental in that case.
Over the past period, I have lost that anxiety of “always having the answer” and I’ve realized that it’s perfectly fine to come in and say “I don’t know”. It also empowers others to think and search for solutions together instead of having everything ready all the time. This doesn’t mean that you should always delegate to others; on the contrary, I believe that shared solutions lead to better results.
TL;DR
Leadership involves humility and the recognition that sometimes the best solutions come from those around us. Understanding that the people around us can often contribute more than we could on our own allows us to completely change our approach and benefit from better results.
Credits: Illustration 1