How to get your teams to listen not just to hear

As distracted humans we’re just not listening most of the time so as leaders you must work harder to connect effectively with your teams.

It's been that time of year when many leaders are setting direction for their teams.

From my experience over 20 years working in large holding company groups and with many large corporates, I’ve formulated the following law:?

Clarity in a business is inversely proportional to the volume of leadership material produced to communicate that clarity.?

You've got a purpose that the Exec team has worked on, you’ve got a crisply designed deck and you’ve got an impressive strategy to share at your next town hall or annual roadshow.?

Why?

Because being a leader is all about setting the overall vision, the direction, the values and the strategy framework to frame how everyone in the organisation should think about their contribution to business success. This is something you do every year with regular updates each month and each quarter.?

But there’s a big problem: no one cares and no one is listening.

Distraction is the norm

When questioned, your team members might say they care. But that’s what they’re expected to say. You’re paying them after all.

They are unlikely to say:

‘I loved that presentation with multiple slogans, especially the generic jargon and the tiny print in the priorities table that you glossed over on the fourth slide. Could you take me back through the detailed paragraph that you admitted was hard to read on screen on slide 15?’

Inside their heads, they have competing demands on their time, effort and attention. This is likely to be a jumble of what’s going on at home and at work. The sick child, the pressing deadline, the unresolved argument from the night before.

It’s the audience, stupid

It's no surprise then that in the Q&A few questions are asked and you receive little or no follow up.

I’ve seen purpose and vision sessions and business briefings fail to connect with teams and individuals because the leader's focus is on the wrong place.

I’ve always appreciated the honesty of the words of the late General Colin Powell who served in the U.S. Army:

Leadership is all about people. It is not about organisations. It is not about plans. It is not about strategies. It is all about people motivating people to get the job done. You have to be people centered.?

A strategy or vision is only effective if it leads to action.?

So captured can you become by your own content, that you forget your audience.?

Prioritise key signals amidst the noise

Our interactions and communication must motivate. And to motivate it needs to connect.

As organisations scale clarity and meaning becomes weaker. The signals start to get lost in the white noise that businesses generate inside themselves. It’s no one person’s fault, it’s a by-product of people getting busy and the business growing and multiplication of messages and channels.?

But left unaddressed, it's corrosive.

Gone the direct chat between leader and team on a daily if not hourly basis. Now it’s about scheduled check-ins, weekly get togethers and monthly set pieces.?

Scale up further across geographies, and it becomes video check-ins, senior leadership team meetings, executive team updates, Town Halls and All Hands.

The presentation deck and the corporate email are substituted for conversation. If you work in a multi-national, you’ll be getting lots of emails from people you’ve never met and who don’t know you or what you do.?

You might get video messages and emails with the recordings of the meetings that were unhelpfully scheduled in the middle of the night your time.

The destruction of meaning

Language starts to change. Jargon and abstractions creep in. Terms less specific, more generic.

Critically they become less memorable as they proliferate. They destroy meaning.

In the absence of authenticity and clarity, people do what we always do: they filter out ruthlessly and they interpret for themselves. ?

How many times have you heard yourself or your colleagues saying:

‘Sorry, I didn't see that email…’ which may well be code for ‘I knew it was there but I had many other priorities and I couldn’t be bothered wading through endless paragraphs of waffle to find the meaning.’?

In this void, other leaders will then try to develop their own meaning to create the clarity that their teams need. This adds to the problem by generating alternative meanings to the original direction.

Yet more ambiguity.

Just make it three things

We may all benefit from Kmart Australia's ethos - when it comes to strategy, recommendations or actions:?‘it can only be three things’.

Admirable discipline so often lacking.

You can’t lead effectively through dense corporate emails, strategic-sounding shopping lists, and detailed presentations because you’re just not connecting with the people who will have to execute those plans.

So as you prepare for your next leadership session or you're craft your next business update, remind yourself that people:

1. only care what’s in it for them

2. they are constantly distracted

3. They don’t recall very much.

Blow-torch your content. After all, it can only be three things.

What strong examples have you seen where leaders connect powerfully in the workplace?