Leaders apply the 80/20 rule to communication.

Communication is 80% listening & inquiring and 20% speaking.  The former must guide the latter.  ~Gary Burnison

In my experience, when the topic of leadership and communication comes up, it’s very frequently assumed that by communicating we mean speaking.  Actually, speaking is speaking, not necessarily communicating, and according to Gary Burnison, author of The 12 Absolutes of Leadership, speaking comprises only 20% of actual communication.

I recently viewed a speech given by Charles Handy (British management guru) in honor of Peter Drucker and Charles said that he wanted to give the speech so he could learn what he really thought about some of Peter’s theories.  Charles said that we learn the most by talking and listening to ourselves.  He said that the audience will remember very little of what he said; but he would not only remember what he said, he would learn what he really thinks.  So again, why do we think that as leaders, people will learn so much more from us if we talk a lot?

I’ll add one last example from another well-known leadership expert, Jim Collins, author of Good to Great and several other books on leadership.  I heard Jim speak a couple of years ago and he provided the audience with Ten To-Do’s to increase our leadership effectiveness.  One of the ten was to double our ratio of questions to statements.  He said we should “invest more in being interested and less in trying to be interesting.”  In other words, ask more and talk less.

Another consultant, Lainie Heneghan, Europe Managing Director for JMW Worldwide (UK) Ltd., provides an example of the impact of listening more and talking less.

Consider this example from the leadership team of a worldwide pharmaceutical company.  As they were about to roll out a controversial initiative, they sought help in dealing with the expected employee backlash. They knew from experience that in the face of unpopular change, employees tended to leave their concerns or objections unspoken at first – only to surface later in the form of dissension.

The guidance they were given was simple: to present the plan to a group of key managers and influencers, and to listen to what they had to say until those managers and influencers had nothing further to say.  The leadership team members were advised to look at each objection as if it were a ball being thrown at them.  Listening was like catching the ball.  Throwing it back, or responding, represented not listening. 

They held the meeting and stayed true to this listening approach – and emerged with the support of all but one participant.  In addition, they gained a better understanding of how they could work with their teams to improve the plan and make it work for everyone.  The meeting took a little longer than the typical initiative launch – but it ultimately saved far more time and created much greater possibilities for the initiative’s success.

Imagine if as leaders, we were able to harness our felt need to talk and replaced it with listening and inquiring.  For every hour, we listened and inquired for 48 minutes and talked for 12 minutes.

Are you winning too much?

If the need to win is the dominant gene in your “success DNA”—the main reason you’re successful—then winning too much is a genetic mutation that can limit your success.  ~Marshall Goldsmith

For all of you competitive types out there, this quote may have both gotten your attention and either confused you or made you a little angry.  After all, how could winning too much possibly limit success?

Marshall Goldsmith is someone I’ve admired for a number of years.  Marshall is an executive coach and best-selling author whose focus is leadership behavior.  He has helped successful leaders achieve positive lasting change in behavior for themselves and their teams.

Here’s how Marshall explains this idea of winning too much.

One big issue of successful leaders is winning too much. If it’s important, we want to win. If it’s meaningful, we want to win. If it’s trivial, we want to win. If it’s not worth it, we still want to win. Why? We like winning.  

Winning too much underlies nearly every other behavioral problem. If we argue too much, it’s because we want our view to prevail (we want to win). If we’re guilty of putting down other people, it’s our stealthy way of positioning them beneath us (again, winning). If we ignore people, again it’s about winning—by making them fade away. If we withhold information, it’s to give ourselves an edge over others. If we play favorites, it’s to win over allies and give “our side” an advantage. So many things we do that annoy people stem from needlessly trying to be the alpha male or female in any situation….in other words, the winner.  

If you’ve achieved any success, you’re guilty of this every day. When you’re in a meeting at work, you want your opinion to prevail. When you’re arguing your point, you pull out all the stops to come out on top.

And I really appreciate Marshall’s example of how winning too much really can limit our success.

Suppose you want to go to dinner at restaurant X. Your spouse, partner, or friend wants to go to restaurant Y. You have a heated debate. You end up going to restaurant Y. The experience confirms your misgivings. Your reservation is lost, and you have to wait. The service is slow, the drinks weak, and the food bad. You have two options: A: critique the restaurant and smugly point out to your partner that you were right. B: Shut up, eat the food, and enjoy the evening.  

When I ask people: “What should you do, and what would you do?” the results are consistent: 75 percent say they would critique the restaurant. Yet they agree they should just shut up and have a good time. If we do a “cost benefit analysis,” we conclude that our relationship with our partner or friend is far more important than winning an argument about where to eat. And yet, the urge to win trumps our common sense. We do the wrong thing, even when we know what we should do.

Imagine how many times a similar scenario happens in your organization – when winning has a much greater cost than the benefit realized from winning.  So, maybe winning too much really can limit your success?

Leaders communicate their organization's purpose.

Purpose enables hundreds of employees to make thousands of decisions in unison.  ~Gary Burnison

Purpose seems so obvious, but is it?  I’ve used a TED Talk several times over the past few weeks and this quote reminded me of the point the speaker is driving home.  Simon Sinek makes a presentation entitled, “How Great Leaders Inspire Action.”  Simon has also authored a book entitled Start with Why. 

Simon says he’s codified why some organizations are far more innovative and successful than other organizations.  He describes a very simple concept that separates these organizations from all others with something he calls the Golden Circle.  The circle is divided into three rings.  The center ring is why, the middle ring is how, and the outer ring is what.  He says that when we communicate most of us begin with describing what we do, followed by how, and on the rare occasion we actually make it to the center circle and explain why we do what we do.  The really successful organizations (and leaders) communicate in the reverse order.  They begin with why, then explain how, and finally end with what. 

The core of why is being able to both identify and articulate your purpose.  Why you do what you do, many times stated as beliefs or your reason for existence.  For example, below is the description from a prominent Chicago law firm, stated in the typical order of how most leaders and organizations communicate (what, how, why).

We consistently deliver excellence in the most complex and demanding legal matters, both litigation and transactions.  No matter what legal challenge is presented, our powerful combination of experience, professionalism and teamwork will achieve the best possible outcome.  We do not consider the practice of law a job, but rather a calling to serve clients, the profession and the community. 

This is the same description with a little editing and in reverse order (why, how, what).

We believe that the practice of law is a calling to serve clients, the profession and the community.  No matter what legal challenge is presented, our powerful combination of experience, professionalism and teamwork will achieve the best possible outcome.  We consistently deliver excellence in the most complex and demanding legal matters, both litigation and transactions. 

So, honestly, which law firm would you hire, want to work for, or follow their leaders?  Most of us would likely choose the second one because, as Simon says, our behaviors are driven by the part of our brain that controls our feelings like trust and loyalty.  When we fail to include why in our communication, or if we bury it somewhere behind what and how, we greatly reduce our likelihood to inspire action.

Now, getting back to the quote, imagine an organization where every employee fully understood and embraced its purpose, or why they do what they do.  Can you see how thousands of decisions really could be made in unison?  

Leaders make decisions and then make them right.

We need to stop spending so much time trying to make the right decisions and instead start spending our time making decisions and then making them right.  ~Rory Vaden

Have you ever been stuck in a decision loop?  You keep circling back because there are too many options, or the perfect choice isn’t standing out from all of the other options?  Or maybe you’re thinking one decision will make your life easier than the other decisions so you want to identify that choice.

You might think that Rory Vaden is suggesting the “quick fix” approach to decision making.  Actually, he’s suggesting just the opposite.  This quote comes from a book authored by Rory entitled, Take the Stairs.  He argues that there is one specific value that is diminishing in modern culture: self-discipline.  We’re looking for immediate satisfaction and we live in a shortcut society.  So when faced with the option of the stairs or an elevator, 95% of us will take the easier option and forego the stairs.  Rory states:

Ask an Olympic athlete.  Read Michael Jordan’s autobiography.  Listen to what Peyton Manning says is his secret.  They all attribute their successes more to having the self-discipline to work harder and push farther in practice than to an innate talent.  Sure, people who achieve greatness in any endeavor might be blessed with some natural talent; and sure, timing and luck play a part.  But as Malcolm Gladwell demonstrated in his book Outliers, there’s no substitute for hard work—10,000 hours of it, to be exact!

Getting back to decision making, if we’re honest, how many of us make a decision and then expect the outcome to somehow mysteriously materialize, because after all, we made the decision.  Many times we spend very little time (due to lack of self-discipline) making our decisions right. 

Let me illustrate.  I frequently spend hours upon hours with an organization’s leadership developing a strategic plan.  Making decision after decision about where the organization intends to head in the next few coming years.  Yet, far too frequently, it stops there.  The decision is made but then little to no intentional effort is made to make all those decisions right.  In other words, they look for the metaphorical elevator and skip the stairs.  Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, “Plans are nothing.  Planning is everything.”  As I see it, plans are essentially a decision but planning is the self-discipline to make it right.

Here we are in mid-March.  How many of us started the year with making decisions about what we would change, do, accomplish, achieve, etc. in 2012?  How many of us have already abandoned those decisions?  Is it because they were not the right decisions?  Or is it because we have lost our self-discipline to make them right?

As Rory suggests, imagine what our lives and organizations would look like if we shifted some of our time making right decisions to time spent making our decisions right?  What if we had the self-discipline to take the stairs?  For Rory, it’s more than a metaphor.  He, literally, really does choose to take the stairs as a visible reminder to himself and others that it’s not the quick fix, easy way, or short-cut that leads to success; it’s the self-discipline to make decisions right. 

Leaders leverage the power of habit.

Champions don’t do extraordinary things.  They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the other team to react.  They follow the habits they’ve learned.  ~Tony Dungy quoted by Charles Duhigg in The Power of Habit

Some of you might be surprised to hear that I know who Tony Dungy is; but I have to confess, my first exposure to Tony was through his book, The Mentor Leader. Then, I learned that he was the head coach of the 2007 Super Bowl champions, the Colts, who had defeated (of all teams) the Chicago Bears.  Tony’s approach to leadership extends well beyond football or athletics.  Many of his philosophies are foundational to effective leadership, regardless of the type of organization or “team” one is trying to lead.

Tony interviewed for a number of head coach jobs without success.  In each of those interviews he described one of his philosophies of coaching that focused around habits.  He would explain that he wasn’t going to try to create new habits with his players.  Instead, he would change their old habits.  This was based on a commonly held premise about habits.  A habit is the result of a cue, followed by a routine that results in a reward.  “To change a habit you must keep the old cue and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.  If you use the same cue and provide the same reward, you can shift the routine and change the habit.  Almost any behavior can be transformed if the cue and reward stay the same.”  (Duhigg,Charles, The Power of Habit, RandomHouse, February 28, 2012).  Obviously, when Tony was given the chance, his philosophy of habits worked quite well. 

Applying this concept of changing habits to leadership, I can see a number of circumstances where I tried, sometimes even desperately, to change the cue or reward for other people.  Looking back, I can now see that had I focused on gaining a genuine understanding of others’ cues and rewards and then focused on changing their routine, I could have not only potentially changed their/our habits, but with far less pain and frustration. 

For example, a friend recently told me about a practice his organization had instituted to change a habit.  The habit was staff holding a meeting after the meeting over cocktails.  Many times it was at these informal meetings that some of the best ideas were generated, but then lost due to the informal nature of the situation.  So while the leadership didn’t change the cue and the reward [cue: desire to discuss the topic further in a more causal setting, and reward: identify possible solutions], they did change the routine.  They set up a bar environment, literally, in their conference room.  Then they would take a short cocktail break during their meetings.  [I should insert here that I believe the cocktails were nonalcoholic, but that really wasn’t the core of the routine, it was the relaxed, informal setting.]  The cue and the reward didn’t change, but the routine did.  The result, the leadership was able to capture both the creativity and problem-solving that had been taking place after the meeting. 

As Duhigg states, it’s nearly impossible to completely extinguish a habit and it can be extraordinarily difficult to create a new habit, but it’s very possible to change a habit and transform behavior.  Effective leaders have mastered the art of leveraging the power of habit, both for themselves and others.

Leaders grow.

Leaders grow on purpose with a plan.  ~John C. Maxwell

John Maxwell amazes me.  As the big box bookstores have declined or even disappeared, real estate on the bookshelves in the stores that remain is privileged space.  So when I go to my local Barnes & Noble, which is not a huge store, and see that John still commands nearly an entire shelf of the limited space devoted to management and leadership, I’m impressed to say the least.  He must be doing something right.

One of John’s many books is entitled, Make Today Count: The Secret of Your Success is Determined by Your Daily Agenda, and this week’s quote was borrowed from the final chapter.  While John outlined his own plan for growth, what I find most interesting about it is the number of times I’ve heard this same plan practiced by other leaders.  So I’m thinking this recipe for growth is worthy of some serious consideration.

Listen to audio tapes.  John listens to as many audio tapes as possible.  He says that out of every seven he listens to, about four are average, two are good to excellent and one is outstanding.  For each tape he listens to he tries to determine at least one “take away” that he can apply immediately.  I would add that in addition to audio tapes there is an endless supply of presentations, interviews, speeches, TED Talks, etc. available online.  The trick is doing enough searches to learn what criteria narrows the massive number of options to what you’re really looking for.

Read two books every month.  John has an interesting approach to his reading.  He has two stacks of books.  One stack he identifies as the read thoroughly stack and the other is the speed reading stack.  He reads one book from each stack every month.  For those less voracious readers this could make reading two books per month sound less daunting.

Set an appointment every month.  Of course we all have more than one appointment per month, but John deliberately schedules one appointment with someone with the intent to learn from them—someone who will help him grow.  If they are an author, he reads their books; he does research on them and then prepares a list of specific questions to guide their discussion.  I would think most people would be flattered to hear that you’d like to meet with them because of what you believe you could learn.  And coming armed with a list of questions is typically impressive and viewed as a compliment.

File what you learn.  In John’s case, I believe he means file, literally, as in hard copy files.  While I absolutely agree with the practice of file what you learn, I’d encourage us to think a little more environmentally and be diligent about organizing our electronic files for easy reference.

Apply what you learn.  I wholeheartedly agree with John; the final test of any learning is always application.  If you apply it, then you’ve learned it.  I have found that the sooner I apply it, the more likely I’m going to repeat that application and it will become embedded in my thinking.  And thus, I’ve grown, on purpose.

Leaders are disciplined.

The discipline of market leaders: choose your customer, narrow your focus, and dominate your market.  ~Michael Treacy & Fred Wiersema

This quote is actually the title of a book by Treacy and Wiersema first published back in 1995.  The authors themselves will admit that this is not a highly profound concept, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy for leaders to accomplish.  Here we are in 2012, 17 years later, and I still run across leaders who are struggling to embrace this concept of discipline.  And by embrace I mean behave in a way that demonstrates they believe this statement to be true.

After thinking about this and trying to better understand some of my own clients, I got an idea.  I zeroed in on four key words in this book title: discipline, choose, focus and dominate.  While each of these words is certainly very deliberate and intentional, which is something most leaders aspire to, each of these words also requires identifying what you will freely leave behind.  I think it may be the idea of freely leave behind—which for some leaders could feel like a loss, missed opportunity, or even failure— that could actually be preventing some organizations from thriving.

Synonyms of the word discipline are control, restraint and order.  For example, when we think of being disciplined about doing something (exercise, reading, spending less money, etc.) we frequently equate that with what we are “giving up” in exchange for being disciplined.  We are exhibiting control or restraining ourselves from doing one thing so that we can do another.  While the idea of discipline is nearly always viewed as a positive attribute, it is also perceived to nearly always come at a cost—the cost of freely leaving something behind.

The word choose clearly implies that we made a choice between at least two options, which in turn means we “freely left something behind.”  My favorite definition of the word focus is “a state of maximum distinctness.”  In order to be distinct, we must communicate not only what we are but also what we are not.  Again, to focus, we’ve “freely left something behind.”  Dominate means that we rule, control, or dictate something.  But we never (with a few exceptions) rule or dictate over everything, so again, something is freely left behind.

This idea to “freely leave behind” is my own notion.  My first inclination was to use the word willingly leave behind because it is something we’ve agreed to do; we are willing participants.  But when I looked up synonyms for willingly, I discovered words like eagerly, readily, gladly, cheerfully, enthusiastically and freely.  My own personal definition of willingly was a bit more subdued than Webster’s. Then I realized that Webster had it right.

As leaders, if we want to be disciplined and choose and focus and dominate then we need to embrace the liberation that comes with freely leaving behind.  We need to “leave behind” and do it eagerly, readily, gladly and even enthusiastically, and as a consequence, we will become market leaders.