What About The Matches: How Good Leaders Listen Today
“What about the matches?”
It’s a question I believe leaders should ask themselves when making decisions. The loudest or most forceful voices in the room are not always the correct ones. It’s a tale as old as time. The newbie often gets edged out by the tenured, boisterous team member while the quiet, different or younger one is forced to the sidelines. But, in my experience working with leaders for over 40 years, ignoring new or different voices and opinions can lead to failure, especially now with multiple generations in our workforces. So, I want to share a lesson on listening.
I’ll Start With A Story
When I began my career in leadership development, paper and pencil “survival” exercises were all the rage. In these exercises, leaders would be divided into teams and given a written scenario typically involving a crash landing on the moon in the subarctic or desert. In their possession would be 13 items like compasses, string, matches, and a few red herrings. The goal of the timed exercise for each team was to rank the supplies in order of importance to their survival. Then, the “right” answers were determined by comparing their list against that of survival experts. The goal was to highlight the positive and detrimental team behaviors that emerged.
The Group Alphas
It was common in these groups for one or more participants to “out alpha” the others. They used louder or more confident voices to state their opinions to sway the group in their direction. Interestingly, the exercises were powerful as team “tests” because there were specifically no subject matter experts in these groups who had ever crashed on the moon. Nonetheless, loud, confident, forceful opinions were always offered for group discussion or decisions.
Other Voices
And then, in almost every group, there was a quiet voice with the correct answer that would be ignored by the group once, maybe twice, maybe even completely. It sounded like a whisper in comparison. “What about the matches?” (The correct answer, by the way). In hubris, pressure for completion or plain ignorance, they were easy to ignore at best or not even hear at worst. The teams that listened to all voices inevitably scored better and did so by having all members feel more confident about their results. The teams that tried to force their way through with one or two members driving to a result didn’t fare as well in either measure.
Today, with the many workforce changes we see that move us inevitably toward a greater sense of humanity in our workplaces, we’ve got lots of examples of both—the loud voices and hubris combined with other information readily available if we are willing to listen—that is, the matches.
Listening To Today’s Workforce
I’ve experienced many moments with people of my generation complaining loudly about today’s workforce: having a lesser work ethic, thinking of themselves first, needing more life balance, and wanting everything to have a purpose or meaning. Those complaints are part of the hubris, especially given that GenZ workers have entered a world in which trust in nearly every institution, from government to schools to churches, is at an all-time low—and, somehow, they are surviving and helping drive critical and needed transformations. If we put the complaints aside for a minute, what would it make possible for our organizations if we had better mechanisms for hearing the ideas and opinions of all?
The recent Gartner Report, titled "9 Future of Work Trends for 2024,” offers such insight with their conclusion: "Managers who manage, rather than silence, interpersonal conflict among employees will have an outsized positive impact on their organizations.” To be clear, the word “conflict” is intended to include differences of all sorts of perspectives, ideas, styles and the like.
Hearing Others Involves Effort
As the old adage goes, “What’s more important—speaking or being heard?” Similarly, I contend it’s not enough to listen, which most of us could learn to do better, but rather, truly hearing others.
As executives, team leaders, and evolving entrepreneurs, it is important to listen not only to the reports and colleagues that come your way but also to discern what is really going on in their worlds. Problems that come to your attention may completely derail your organization's progress. The willingness to listen and learn and know when to act or to enable someone on your team to move toward resolution is a skill that the better leaders know how to hone. But, as Tim Brown stated in the HBR:
“You don’t know where the best ideas are going to come from in the organization. So you’d better do a good job of promoting them when they come and spotting them when they emerge and not let people’s positions dictate how influential their ideas are.”
Positions and, I’ll add, dispositions. Creating a workplace where everyone—from every generation—feels heard, supported and valued is essential to getting information to you, how and when you need it. Good leaders listen…and hear.
How Are Leaders Doing?
It may seem easy. “Yes, Foster,” you may be thinking, “listening is a basic skill I learned way back when, and I use my listening skills at work every day.” However, our internal biases, along with the different personalities, styles and backgrounds of our teams, can make listening way more difficult than it sounds. A LinkedIn survey of 14,000 people from 2020 showed that only 8% of leaders practiced this skill “very well,” according to their teams. That means we’ve got work to do.
So, what about the matches? As stewards for our organizations and the people within them, we need to listen to voices that may be different from ours and who offer new and novel insights as we move forward.
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