Why Genuine Strategic Listening is Essential for Success
David Shindler
Writer. Mainly. Coach. Often. Volunteer. Sometimes. Learning to Leap. Always.
You know the ubiquitous phrase 'our people are our greatest asset'? Some organisations hide behind that sentiment as a defence mechanism for demonstrating the opposite. In practice, they develop business strategies that put shareholder value or profits before people. Strategic thinking gets based solely on an internal debate about what's needed and genuine listening to stakeholders gets neglected.
Recently, I've come across a couple of examples that show why strategic listening is an essential step to inform and build engagement with strategy.
From monologue to dialogue to multilogue
One of my coaching clients wants to coach and mentor young people from ethnic minorities to become community volunteers for tackling climate change in his region in Asia. The accepted wisdom is that leadership involves creating a vision and tapping into hearts and minds so that people get it, invest in it, and follow willingly. In this situation, it wasn't working. He was struggling to engage the local young people on his laudable ambitions.
He decided to find out the reasons why through dialogue and testing his assumptions with these young people. It soon became clear that they had a more pressing problem of identity before they were prepared to tackle climate change. A classic example of the hierarchy of needs in action! My coaching client realised that he had to listen and respond to their primary concerns before they would give attention to his priorities.
Listening and empathy are helping him to build trust. They are an essential element of the change process. In this case, they are a precursor to creating an empowered generation of change-makers contributing to climate change issues. He is creating space for engagement by moving from monologue to dialogue to multilogue.
Trust and empowerment
In a completely different context, I was at a meeting involving partners supporting the hardest-to-reach young people in UK society into work. Each organisation practices what they preach about putting young people at the heart of everything they do. Young people shape the design of projects, programmes, workshops etc. and get involved in implementing them. Just like my coaching client, listening to the needs of young people informs and delivers their strategies. Trust and empowerment are both drivers and consequences.
Leaning into the unknown
These examples align with Otto Scharmer's Theory U in which he believes leaders should lean into the unknown and move out of their own bubble.
Theory U works very well with people who can only be successful if they make other people behave differently without relying on hierarchy. You have to make them aware of their leadership challenges and the leverage points they have. This implies their relations with all stakeholders. In order to be relevant for those leaders, you have to start with their exact leadership challenge at this very moment. You cannot start with your saving-the-world agenda.
What's new, you might say? Hasn't the customer always been king or queen? Except culture, politics, competing stakeholder interests and more can result in leaders losing sight of what is critical and important.
Genuine strategic listening is a dynamic process rather than a static event that sets you off on the right track or gets you back on track.
How would genuine strategic listening help you to shape your strategy and deliver your goals?
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David (@David_Shindler) is an independent career coach, apprentice mentoring trainer, author, blogger, speaker, and associate with several consultancies. He is the author of Learning to Leap: a guide to being more employable, and co-author with Mark Babbitt of 21st Century Internships (250,000 downloads worldwide). His commitment and energy are in promoting lifelong personal and professional development and in tackling youth unemployment. He works with young people and professionals in education and business. www.learningtoleap.co.uk
Visit the Learning to Leap blog to read more of his work and check out his other published articles on LinkedIn:
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Culture: The Quantified Self And The Qualitative Self
Purposeful Leadership To Create The Life Of Meaning
The Uber Effect: Opportunities For Job Seekers And Employers
Hierarchies are tumbling as Social soars
The Emergence of the Holistic Student
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