Lessons In Authentic Leadership, continued
Listening from a Leadership Context:
Leading well requires work. Done well, it may appear effortless, but it isn’t. Effective listening is a fundamental part of the work of a leader.
Listening requires that you stop and accurately absorb new data, mentally sort and categorize it into useful information, and perhaps, act on it within the business context.
It is important to hear the content, understand the context and evaluate the implications of this information on a number of agendas (Ciancutti and Steding).
There are innumerable reasons and excuses that are used to explain the appearance of derailers in organizations. There are always barriers to doing anything well. Some of those barriers are legitimately difficult to navigate. So what?
If excellence were easy to attain it would be commonplace. Countless books have been written telling you to clear your desk, make eye contact, say “um-hum”, etc. Good advice, but trivial.
Most of us really do know how to listen. What is missing in dysfunctional communication is the honest engagement of one’s self in the interaction, the authenticity. When you don’t listen well, for example, you have already decided, “I have reasons not to be engaged.” Or, you’ve decided that, “I do not feel the need to be authentically present in this conversation, at this time.”
Below we will consider some of these derailers, consider the messages that they convey to the organization and suggest appropriate antidotes. An overview of some common derailers is presented in figure 1.
Common Communication Derailers:
| Behavior Category | Specific Behavior Type or Cause | Description |
| Listening With Bias | Defensive | Developing your response to what you’re hearing while the other person is still talking to you |
| Adversarial | Listening with a focus upon picking out points of difference so that you can negate the perceptions of another. |
| Listening Without Focus | Multi-tasking | “Listening” while doing or thinking about other things at the same time |
| Lack of Time | Engaging in a conversation when you do not have the physical, mental or emotional time to engage authentically |
| Listening Without Respect | Impatience | Communicating that you understand another’s message, whether you do or not, because you don’t have the time, or because you do not value what you think is being said. (Listening without focus, which comes from not having the time, is disrespectful.) |
| Jumping to Conclusions | Deciding that what others are going to say is WRONG, before you listen to everything they have to say; interrupting and telling them what they should think. |
| Too Much Ego | Failing to listen to the message of another from the context of their perspective, rather than only from your own perspective. |