Listening Like a Leader: The Truth about Trust By Garrison Wynn

Our studies of the most effective people in corporate America show that the top 2 percent are effective not because they executed best practices well. They did not make the most phone calls or have the best processes. They simply understood the truth about trust:

* People do business with people they like.
* They like people they trust.
* They trust people who have a detectable level of compassion and competence.

Does it take time to build trust? The truth is that you have known people for five years who still don’t trust you, and you’ve known some for five minutes who do. Our research shows that trust is usually created by showing a detectable level of concern. When people truly believe you are concerned for them, they tend to think you possess good judgment. After all, if you care about them, you must know what you are doing.

So what is the fastest and most effective way to show people that you care and you’re competent?

Make sure they feel heard, which is more than just listening. I call it listening like a leader.

You are not a leader unless you have followers; a leader without followers is called a failure. Regardless of your skills, if your staff doesn’t feel heard and doesn’t trust you, they will always do the minimum. They will watch the clock and be ready to leave at 4:45 every afternoon. They will do just enough each day to avoid getting fired, and they will hope the idea you came up with without their input fails. That’s right—you can spend your life delegating to people who want your projects to fail. How smart is that?

OK, you have to listen; I am sure you already know that. The issue is, how well do people really listen? Most studies show that 75 percent of the world’s population does not listen well.

Here is an insight that you won’t find in many books, keynote speeches or training programs. As a whole, we don’t listen very well and it’s not our fault! That’s right, I am sure you are used to hearing and reading that all of our communication problems are of our making. However, most experts agree that from birth to 5 years of age, we learn more than we will for the rest of our lives.

Even if you earn 15 doctorate degrees in your lifetime, you still acquired most of your knowledge in early childhood. In those formative years, if a child does not feel heard by the adults in its life, it does not possess good listening skills. The bottom line is that it’s hard to listen when no one ever listened to you.

Listening is not hereditary.
It’s an acquired skill.

Are we going to blame the parents? No! It’s difficult to listen to young children when we are trying to look out for their welfare. When my stepdaughter was five, she asked me if Dracula drives a taxi cab. I said, “Well…, I guess if it’s a night job. Uh, wait a minute! What kind of question is that?”

She also asked me if she could have a tattoo—not a fake, stick-on tattoo from an ice cream parlor vending machine, but a real one. I said, “No, because you’re in kindergarten—and I’m taking the TV out of your room just for asking that question.”

People are more likely to follow your example than to follow your advice. We create better listeners by being better listeners.
Unfortunately, we don’t have much evidence of people returning from communication-training programs as better listeners. It doesn’t take a lot of research to figure out that poor listeners get very little from seminars on listening.

So we don’t listen and it prevents us from being effective leaders. If we can’t do much to improve our listening skills, we have to focus on what we can do in the condition we are in.

The key, then, is to focus on making sure people feel heard. And the first step requires recognizing and recovering from distractions.
One day, as I listened to an employee talk about his wants and needs, my mind started to wander. There he was, sharing his core issues, and I’m thinking to myself, “Look at the size of this guy’s head!” It was hard to focus. Once I was trying to listen to a prospect on a sales call when I noticed he had red hair, blonde eyebrows and a black mustache. I remember thinking, “It’s Mr. Potato Face! Something has to be a stick-on; that’s not all him.”

After we recover from our own distractions, we have to deal with the real issues at hand. The first of these issues is what I refer to as “the pitch in your head.” It can be anything from a preconceived idea that a manager has about an employee, to a practiced presentation that you are dying to spew on your unsuspecting sales victims (prospects, I mean).

Sure, you ask a question just as you were taught to do in your sales or management training program—you know, a question like “Based on what criteria are your decisions made?” As they talk and you diligently pretend to listen, the pitch in your head starts to play; and when the prospect says something that strikes a chord in you, triggering how much you know, your pitch finds the pause it was looking for and off you go.

“I know exactly what you are talking about because I have had many people just like you with this exact same situation. As a matter of fact, it was this time last year and they even looked a lot like you.”

You then project your opinion, experience or spiel onto the person as a solution to his or her problem.
Instead of feeling heard, the person feels quickly judged, and communication does not take place. It was dead before the spew was finished.

The problem with this scenario is that you rob people of their uniqueness. When you tell them you know exactly what the problem is, they tend to want to show you how unique they are. You actually create your own resistance and prevent your skills and even your empathy from making their mark.

When people are talking, you are thinking about you or about what you can do to help them help you. It’s a natural thing for us to do, and it forces us to pitch hard and focus on convincing rather than on gaining agreement.

So what do the most effective people do differently? They make sure the people they are dealing with feel heard and can retain their uniqueness. If you make people feel important, you will be important to them!

But an even bigger realization comes from all of this.

When you focus on how people feel about what they are saying, you increase the level of true concern you have for others. You actually start to become the person you thought you were pretending to be: a true leader!
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Garrison Wynn is a nationally known keynote speaker, trainer, and consultant. He is the president and founder of Wynn Solutions, specializing in turning talent into performance. Visit him at Keynote-Speaker-Motivational.com

*brought to you by BusinessLeadershipAdvice.com

Communicating Change Management: Change Is The Same As It Always Was By Garrison Wynn

How can management motivate people to listen?
By making sure they will benefit from what is said!

A manager during change is like a sea captain, they need to get their ship together.

We all realize change is inevitable. Change itself is not an issue; it’s the resistance to change that causes such problems. The resistance is naturally strong when we explain our great reform is based on doing more with less. We tell our coworkers and even our bosses that the future is based on being more productive with fewer resources. (I don’t know about you, but I always dreamed the future would somehow involve physically doing less with much more cool stuff.)

We can attempt to cultivate buy-in by explaining how to be more productive and how to lessen the cost of that productivity, ultimately enabling us to wrap our fingers around that holy grail of business achievement: profitability. But let’s get real. All signs might point to profitability as a logical product of the changes being proposed, and yet logical humans need to see how a change in process will make them look good before they will give it their all.

Through our surveys of top professionals who serve as change agents, Wynn Solutions has noticed a critical first leg of the buy-in journey. (“Critical” and “first leg”? It sounds like change is limping already!) We found that top professionals who succeed in implementing change begin by tactfully explaining that the more people focus on making change work, the more value they have to the company.

Additionally, these professionals dealt with the good-old-days syndrome that prevents some people from creating their own future. You may have heard that to spread change through an organization, you have to prove to key players that the new way is at least as good as, if not better than, the old way. You might think you need to provide some physical evidence (data) and a couple of testimonials (people thought of as straight shooters saying positive things about the changes) as well.

However, if you want people to see it’s possible to succeed by doing more with less, you need to find or create change agents who will massively benefit from the change and who have an outstanding advocate network, great communication skills and – above all – really big mouths.

Change is not the problem; resistance to change is the problem.
The Gallup Institute study of eighty thousand managers and over a million employees’ shows how dramatically employee opinion can affect productivity. And while we can't control much of the world changing around us, we can control how we respond to how employees feel about a changing environment.

When things change, people are afraid they will no longer be experts. They will have to learn the new way, and no one wants to be a senior beginner. Our studies show that to make change work, we have to prove to our key people that the change means getting results better than (or at least equal to) those achieved the old way, assure them that their experience has value, and then get them to spread that message through the organization.

Resistance management
(Tactics for systematically managing resistance)

The eight most common beliefs and reasons that people resist change:

1. There isn't any real need for the change.
2. The change is going to make it harder for them to meet their needs.
3. The risks seem to outweigh the benefits.
4. They don't think they have the ability to make the change.
5. They believe the change will fail.
6. Change process is being handled improperly by management.
7. The change is inconsistent with their values.
8. They believe those responsible for the change can't be trusted.

Being prepared for the resistance and making sure your solutions fit the existing culture are the keys to making change work. It’s important that the new way makes sense at all levels. A solution is not viewed as valuable if it just compensates for a flaw in the system.

What do you get when you cross lassie with a pit-bull? A dog that will rip your leg off and then help you go find it. What good is that?

© Wynn Solutions 2005.
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Garrison Wynn is a nationally known keynote speaker, trainer, and consultant. He is the president and founder of Wynn Solutions, specializing in turning talent into performance. Visit him at Keynote-Speaker-Motivational.com. View cutting edge Information on change management.

*brought to you by BusinessLeadershipAdvice.com

Thoughts on Leadership: The I in Team is U By Joe Tye

You have heard that a chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and that a convoy is no faster than its slowest ship. You have also heard that there is no "I" in team. But if a chain is made up of many links, if a convoy is made up of many ships, that means that each link, each ship, is an "I."

The I in "team" is U. If you are a member of a team (and I'm sure that you are a member of more than one if you include family and community), then U are one of the I's that make up that team. And since a team is no stronger and no faster than its weakest and slowest "I," then U have an obligation to your fellow team-members to make yourself as strong and as fast as possible.

In this article , I'll share seven personal strategies that will help you be a stronger and faster member of the teams in which you participate. These strategies will also help you be more effective in your own career, and in your various family and community activities.

1. Be a Dionarap: Don't try to look up that word, because it's not in the dictionary, at least not yet. Dionarap is the word "paranoid" spelled backwards. You will be a far more effective and valuable team-member if you automatically assume that everyone is acting in good faith and in your best interest, even if it's not apparent at the time.

This does not mean to be stupid or naïve, but you will find that this change in perspective dramatically enhances your relationships and your results. You really cannot for long hide your feelings about another person, and according to the Law of Reciprocity, they will quite quickly begin to feel about you the way you feel about them.

2. Cultivate contrarian toughness: Bad things do happen to good people; bad things do happen to good teams. When they do, instead of feeling victimized, seek out the (often well-disguised) blessings in the situation. Adopt the philosophy of Brother Solanus Casey - Thank God Ahead of Time. Brand the formula - TGAoT - into your own heart and into the hearts of your colleagues (with thanks to Father Michael Crosby for writing the book).

In business and in life, the difference between winners and losers is not nearly so much how good they are at achieving success as how resilient they are in the face of (perceived) failure.

3. Practice your most important speech: The most important speech you ever give is the one you give to yourself all day, every day. Psychologists have shown that the human mind automatically tends to gravitate toward negative, frightening, and depressing thought patterns unless we consciously steer our inner dialog into more positive and constructive channels.

For most people (including me and probably including you as well), unless we're paying attention, eighty percent of the conversation we have with our inner critics is negative. You need to have a Janitor in Your Attic clean it up. It's quite simple: every time you catch yourself engaging in negative, self- sabotaging, and disempowering self-talk, visualize it for what it really is - mental graffiti. Then visualize your janitor scrubbing it off the walls of your mind and replacing it with something that is positive, nurturing, and affirming (and to be honest, probably more truthful).

4. Avoid tragi-tainment: Most of what passes for "entertainment" in the media is really tragedy repackaged in such a way as to sell advertising. From CSI to the evening news, most of what you see on television is someone else's misfortune transmogrified into a televisable spectacle. Unfortunately, the more of that tragi-tainment you absorb, the more it tends to color your perception of the world as a dangerous place, and your subconscious perception of yourself as a helpless victim of that world.

5. Change your reference group: Over time, the single-most important determinant of your beliefs, attitudes, political views, and even your income and social status, will be the people you choose to hang around with. Sociologists call this your reference group.

If you're not happy with how things are going in your life, look at the people you spend most of your time with. Chances are that they're unhappy in some of the same ways. Connecting with other happy and successful people will, of course, mean moving beyond the boundaries of your comfort zone. Adopting the attitude of a Dionarap (#1 above) will help you make the effort with greater confidence.

6. Put on rose-colored glasses: I sometimes have people tell me that I am "a Pollyanna." I always thank them, then suggest that they read the story. Pollyanna came into a community that was fractured with hate, pain, and broken relationships, and she brought love, healing, and reconciliation. I'll point that out, then ask, "What's wrong with that?" You tend to get what you expect out of life; the best thing you can do for yourself and for the members of your team is to create positive expectations of success.

7. Take The Pledge: The most effective thing you can do for yourself to become an empowered individual who makes substantive contributions to your team is to memorize, internalize, and operationalize the Seven Simple Promises of The Self-Empowerment Pledge. As you become more responsible, reliable, determined, and accountable; as you work to make a greater contribution, to be more resilient in the face of adversity, and to maintain a positive perspective in a turbulent world; and as your faith is reflected in your attitudes and your behaviors; you will find yourself doing more to bring your own strengths to the effort, and to support your colleagues in their efforts to do the same. And that is the greatest formula I know for building a successful team.
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Joe Tye is president of Paradox 21 Inc., which provides corporate training and culture change initiatives based on a proprietary curriculum of The Twelve Core Action Values of Personal Leadership Effectiveness. He is also the author of several books and audio programs on personal, career, and business success, and a popular motivational speaker. Visit www.JoeTye.com.

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