In an era of Business model innovations we find the pace of Management style innovation to be extremely slow across organizations and industries. The hierarchy perpetuates Command and Control styles and we perpetuate situations where the loudest voice, and often the only voice is that of the Senior-most leader.

Even those with years of experience in the room will allude to authority, often not sharing perspectives contrary to the leaders’, with the Leader losing the opportunity to complete his/ her own thinking with the voice of others…

Listening is easily the most wanted/ needed leadership behaviour in the new decade, especially as organizations tackle wicked problems arising in times of new complexities and disruptions, requiring fresh thinking and creative solutioning from across levels…

The whole discussion around building Psychological Safety within organizations is indeed about creating these safe spaces for speaking up..

One Senior Leader in the work we do at Capstone alluded to how one very employee-savvy leader also usually lapsed into expressing his perspectives so strongly and passionately- that he ended up converting the meetings into Q&A sessions, where the team simply sought clarifications for the Leader’s ideas, solutions..

At Capstone what we get Leaders to do instead is to –

• consciously and intentionally create divergence
• coach team members to engage with their fearfulness inside-out, by deliberately encouraging participation through new ideas, solutions, market information, customer intelligence etc.
• give the teams a chance to share perspectives from where they are located, to get incredible ideas for execution and also to understand the Gemba for meaningful problem solving
• build inclusion, encouragement and momentum to try new ideas, experiment, urge the team to lead various projects, get into the tranches
• connect and Listen to Lead…

How are you encouraging Leaders to Listen more within your organizations so they Listen Before they Assert??