Chapter 5

The Listening Leader in action

Chapter 5 The Listening Leader in action
  • How to go about changing your leadership, practically.
  • How to make use of change management techniques to advance your cause.
  • How practising communicative leadership will allow you to combine success with personal satisfaction and earn the black belt of the Listening Leader.

You are reaching the final miles of this marathon. Now you have to ask yourself whether you want to let this book serve its purpose and do something about your leadership or whether you want to go back to business as usual.

I’ve tried to explain why communicative leadership makes business sense. Why it especially does so in today’s volatile economic environment and in the presence of media-empowered citizens, customers, investors and employees.

Chapters 2 to 4 described the journey to becoming credible with your stakeholders, the establishment of a dialogue with them, the necessary efforts to discover the energies of the stakeholders and pull the best out of them and finally the deployment of the troops, empowered and responsible, ready to manage change.

The seven steps to becoming a Listening Leader

Every marathon starts with a first step. There are seven steps to be walked to enact communicative leadership. The first is about your awareness.

Step 1: Look for your triggering event

At some point you have to start to engage on the journey to becoming a Listening Leader, should you share the basic ideas of communicative leadership. When is the best moment? I could simply say: now. But that’s too simple and would not work. Think hard and try to identify the moment when you decided to change your leadership style. Or create it now.

Observe the world around you: where have you seen extraordinary customer service? Where have you seen lousy products? When were you last upset about a company and why? Make this the starting point of your own change. It will allow you to revert to this initial question, this triggering event, when things start to seem complicated. Remind yourself of what was the starting point of your change.

A wise old man kicks me off

Another visit from a consultant. I always dreaded people coming to sell my company consulting services. I loved to work under budget constraints because it sharpens the skills of those within the company. So, I had very little external budget and I very often blessed my self-constraint, since it allowed me to finally say ‘no’ to a proposal, ‘it’s just not in the budget’. But this person was different. Heinz Goldmann was his name and I owe him so very much. He left Germany as a boy before World War II because he was convinced that it was not a safe place for Jews. His father, who fought for Germany in World War I, could not understand the apprehension of young Heinz. Unfortunately, the boy, who later served in the American Army and freed Germany from the Nazis, was right. His parents were murdered in a concentration camp. Heinz came back to Germany after the war and he imported the latest trends in marketing and communication. He was terribly expensive (tongue-in-cheek he once said: ‘That’s my little revenge on the Germans’) and I finally hired him to carry out training for our whole executive board. He was stellar. He taught me the importance of EMMA, an acronym I first heard from him. He taught me the importance of good listening. That day, it was in the late 1990s and I was in the middle of a very demanding job challenge. I went to the entrance of our main building in Munich and picked him up. In the short walk to my office, this small but very fit old man (he was already 80) just walked next to me, without speaking a word. I made some small talk and hastened to my office. Then he stopped. I had to stop, too, and I turned to him with a question in my eyes. He said: ‘Emilio, you are under severe stress. You are like a candle burning from both sides. If you want to reach my age and my fitness, you better think about slowing down.’ It came out of the blue and I looked baffled. ‘How do you know?’ I stuttered. He said: ‘It’s the way you walk. I just happened not to listen to what you were saying and was just focused on your steps, your back, your shoulders. I saw a big burden.’ This man had listened, but not to my words; he had listened to my body. I asked him whether one could learn this. ‘Of course one can.’ That was my triggering event to reinvent myself as a manager, striving to become a leader, without knowing, yet, what a Listening Leader would be.

Step 2: Increase your self-awareness and assess yourself

The first thing you need to do is to become aware of where you stand. Analyse your strengths, your motivation, your talents, your calling. At the end of Chapter 3 you’ll find the most common strength analyses and tests.

To start this journey take the test you feel most comfortable with. Ideally you have someone to discuss this with and get an outside opinion on the results. Get new perspectives on you. If you have a 360-degrees tool in your company, go for it. Try to find out as much as you can about yourself. It sounds like a paradox, but you can learn surprising things about yourself.

Remember the recommendations for self-enabling listed at the beginning of Chapter 3:

  • Be aware of yourself and your context.
  • Know your strengths and weaknesses.
  • Be mindful.
  • Be focused and practise equanimity.

Become aware of yourself, of your style, of the impact you have on people, of your strengths.

This book is about communicative leadership. The term itself may scare people off. As we know there’s a big misunderstanding out there, that communication is about speaking, presenting, telling, fascinating, convincing. Or, in one verb: pushing.

But that’s not what communication is about. People can communicate with silence. Yes, as Paul Watzlawick said, there is no non-communication.1 There are many different styles of communication. What matters is to know that communication skills are not exclusive to extroverts. Not everybody communicates the same way. Introverts do it differently.

Find your own way of communicating. There is no absolute paradigm, but make sure you don’t avoid warm communication, communication in the trustful atmosphere of the below 13 participants and other opportunities to get a mirror and reflect on it.

Seek the feedback of peers, the boss and the team. Don’t be afraid of being assessed with a 360-degree tool.

Very important: Use the insight of Myers-Briggs and the tests mentioned in Chapter 3 on ‘Enabling’ by taking them yourself. I would make them compulsory for everyone groomed to take a management position, before they are considered for one.

Be aware of your language skills. Knowing some words in another language puts your interlocutor at ease in small talk, but don’t risk venturing into complex communication in a language you don’t master. And if you don’t master the preponderant language of your company, either achieve superior knowledge or frankly consider and discuss with your boss what this barrier may really mean for your chances to succeed. It’s better to be frank about it than to create misunderstandings that can create damage.

Beware of the ‘authenticity trap’. Everybody and their sister-in-law would agree that being authentic is a positive value in management. But very often I’ve seen that authenticity is used as an excuse to improvise and not be thoroughly prepared for communication with stakeholders. Training is of the utmost importance. The most authentic manager is trained and professional and then he is also honest and true to himself.

Be aware of what you can and can’t do

I was once put into a miserable situation. My cell phone rang when I was having a lovely breakfast with a journalist in a Manhattan hotel. It was the CEO’s office informing me that I had the disputable honour of being the most senior headquarters’ fat cat presently in the United States and that this qualified me to step in for my boss who could not attend a recruitment event at one of the prestigious business schools of that country. I was kindly asked to pack my bag and fly over to the place of the event and present my company and make sure I would make a bella figura. We wanted to attract these MBAs to work for us. No presentation in my hands, I boarded the flight and hoped for it to be hijacked by a reggae band and taken to the Caribbean. My time slot was the last of the day and before me the CEO of the most prestigious investment bank and the CEO of the most renowned strategy consulting firm had enthused the audience, winning over all of the young alphas in the auditorium. I had no clue what to say. My self-assessment was quick and crude: odds that I would fail in this task were very high. I had to find a way out that would not hide my lack of competence to comply with the requirement of the situation, while at the same time representing my company well and achieving the goal of the presentation – to attract the best business school students to a German insurance company. And before I let my fears overwhelm me I found courage, breathed briefly and said to myself: ‘I am a communicator, not a CEO, they know it, I know it. Let me be what I am and be professional about it.’ And I asked the students if they could share a story with me, a story that would be both personal and of societal relevance. Immediately a smartass from the first row raised his hand and said in a slightly annoyed tone, ‘This is a typical European question. What exactly do you mean?’ I told them a short story. My father (personal) had just been diagnosed with dementia (a societal phenomenon). At that time I was living in Munich, had a brother in Havana, the other brother in Leipzig and my sisters in Rome, while my father lived with his partner in Milan. Which of us siblings would be taking care of our dad and supporting his partner in the task? A girl from the back raised her hand and said that she had lost her parents in a car accident when she was four and was raised by her grandparents. They were living in a small town in the Midwest, far away from where she would have a career. She felt that the old age care and financial well-being was a challenge she would have to master; it was her time to give back. The next hand was raised by a young man whose parents had just lost their home in Florida after a hurricane. I stopped my little listening exercise here – the examples were just too good to be true. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ I said, ‘I understand if you are attracted by the huge boni of an investment bank. If you crave them, help yourself, that’s the direction for you. If you want to rule the corporate world by influencing the strategies of many large corporations, follow your instincts and join the strategy consultant. My company provides solutions to both of the problems the lady and the gentleman just mentioned: old age provision and financial protection from natural catastrophes. If you want to do something that makes sense to yourself and to society, come and join us.’ I’m not sure if I was able to recruit any of those smart young people. But I did my best, staying both authentic and sticking to my knitting – communicating.

Step 3: Become aware of your context and shape the change to the Listening Leader

If you act as a Listening Leader you will do nothing less than kicking off a change phase. It will be crucial to be fully aware of the environment in which you move. You have to tackle some relevant issues, balance between security and change, checking the cultural awareness of the organisation, pick one of four different change strategies, align the organisation:

1. Find the balance between security and change

‘For you to stay healthy, each system in your body and mind must balance two conflicting needs. On the one hand, it must remain open to inputs during ongoing transactions with its local environment; closed systems are dead systems. On the other hand, each system must also preserve a fundamental stability, staying centered around a good set-point and within certain ranges – not too hot, nor too cold.’2

The constant feedback from stakeholders is what drives organisational change to higher degrees of excellence. We have an enormous asset, mostly unexploited, as we know: our mind. Our brain is plastic; it’s able to adapt to even the most traumatic changes. It has a processing capacity just randomly exploited. Don’t be concerned about the amount of things to consider – checklists, golden rules and PowerPoint presentations, whether they are in this book or elsewhere. They are there to help you, to bounce off ideas. Not to be learnt off by heart.

What matters is that you stand firmly on two feet:

  • The stability of the values, the strategic framework of the company, the key performance indicators.
  • The senses alert to deeply listen to your stakeholders and be able to translate this into the strategy of the company, of your area of responsibility.

In order to manage change, to be agile about learning and adapting, we need a framework that stays pretty much stable. We need both change and security.

Where are the areas that should be kept stable during times of change?

  • Strategy: We know that strategy is itself partially stable (the vision and mission of the leader or leaders) and flexible (the context, the market). Rather than stable, maybe the right adjective for the security effect of strategy is the recognisability of the strategy in spite of the constant adaptations. A strategy has to be recognisable over a CEO cycle.
  • Vision, mission, purpose: This basic strategic framework has also got to remain stable. It takes years to enthuse and involve the stakeholders.
  • Values: Company values in good companies are not decided at the sketchboard. Company values are ideally the result of a complex translation exercise, bottom-up (from the staff to the CEO) and top-down (from the CEO to the employee), but also left-right, right-left, namely with, to and from the stakeholders.

Now that we’ve seen where some stability has to persist in order not to lose our stakeholders, let’s very briefly look at the areas that will never reach a state of stability, at least not from today’s economic conditions:

Products, processes, services, information technology and operations, sales, working and collaboration culture.

Don’t be bewildered. Yes, all this change is very complex. But this doesn’t mean that there is a pre-written solution that allows you to be a good leader in all of those rapidly mutating landscapes. Just keep your senses alert. This is the gist of communicative leadership: develop receptors for your staff, your internal and external customers, your investors and society at large. Smell, touch, taste, watch and listen to changes in society. Stay curious. Be open to adopting these changes because you are also on the safe ground of the vision and values of your company. Use your common sense and you will have a key that opens all doors, especially if you involve your stakeholders. The Listening Leader can tap into many resources.

2. Check the cultural change readiness of your organisation

Is your team or organisation ready for this change? Change readiness can be seen in four areas: inclination, motivation, opportunities and criticism.

Furthermore there are two areas you need to explore – one in every change situation, the other related to the particular situation you find yourself in.

  • What to explore in every change. What are the existing cultures and sub-cultures, the organisation’s history and past, how does the team communicate, what are the relationships between management and employees, leadership styles, sense of belonging to the organisation and the level of engagement, existing values (operating and desired), opinion about change and willingness to invest in the project, employee perception?
  • What is specific according to the type of change? What are the relationships between different organisational sectors (e.g. between headquarters and subsidiaries and branches, the holding company and other group firms, offices and networks etc.), perception regarding challenges (e.g. what could happen if no intervention took place?), organisations and stakeholders (e.g. role and perception of the local organisation, organisational and social relationships, etc.), local and international dimensions as well as relationships which are relevant to the specific change at hand?
3. Pick one of the four change strategies

The change strategy that is to be adopted can vary according to the context and how one wishes to carry out the change. Each of these strategies corresponds to a different interpretation and thus a different way of engaging employees:

  • ‘Explosive’ change management: An explosive approach in terms of both the quantity and visibility of the activity plan. This means an immediate refocusing of your strategy following unexpected changes.
  • ‘Evolutionary’ change management: An adaptive approach in terms of a gradual activity plan which values the adaptive capacities of people engaged.
  • ‘Viral’ change management: An approach aimed to activate the greatest number of people possible. This is only possible with the engagement of a large number of change agents.
  • ‘Metamorphic’ change management: An approach aimed to radically transform the status quo. This ends with a new beginning, the caterpillar becomes a butterfly.
4. Align the organisation at all employee touch points

Make sure everyone is on board, from your team to your peers to all the stakeholders you interact with. Consistency of behaviours is crucial and once the track has been designed, everyone needs to follow accordingly. To do so, you should cherish Step 4.

Step 4: Do your EMMA work

I already briefly explained the acronym EMMA in the introduction. EMMA should always be in your pocket. It’s a simple tool with millions of opportunities for it to be used to improve your personal and corporate communication.

Before every significant interaction you should try to analyse your audience according to EMMA.

  • E stands for empathy or expectations of the stakeholders. What do they feel? Where do they stand? What do they expect from you? Put yourself into their shoes.
  • M stands for motivation of the stakeholders. What is driving their behaviour, what are their thoughts? Do they want to learn? Are they concerned? Do they want benefits?
  • The second M stands for mentality. What do the stakeholders think? Who are they? Age, gender, ethnic background, religion, sexual orientation and many other factors are important to establish a relationship with your stakeholders.
  • The A stands for analysis. Make sure you analyse your public before you engage in a dialogue.
Do the obvious: ask

At our corporate university I did role-plays with our managers in order to train effective communication. A typical situation was a town-hall meeting where two different groups acting as C-managers had to both hold a town-hall meeting announcing a restructuring plan. A third group played the staff audience. They all had an hour to prepare and we briefed the two different groups of ‘managers’ and the remaining group of ‘employees’. The employees were briefed on how they should observe the managers in order to vote on the better of the two groups and explain their vote in the feedback session. It was clear to the managers that their performance was assessed by their colleagues in the audience. They had all listened to my previous explanation of EMMA. I don’t know how many of those role-plays I’ve made. In the hour of preparation before the town-hall meeting almost every group tried to analyse expectations, mentality and motivation of the ‘staff’ audience. In all those years, however, just once a group of ‘managers’ did the simple thing of walking out of the room, going to the room where the ‘staff’ were preparing and asking them: ‘What do you think? What are your concerns? What are you expecting from this town-hall meeting called with such a short notice?’ Needless to say, they performed exceptionally well at the town-hall meeting. One of that group, Gary Bhojwani, later became CEO of an important flagship company and finally an executive board member. Most of the times it’s that simple: ask. You can ask one or two of your team members before an important meeting. They will be happy to provide you with this information and you will run a much better meeting, or investors’ roadshow, or an event with your distribution partners.

Step 5: Your action plan, a draft

Craft an action plan of what you need to achieve, in line with your organisational objectives and your own role. Don’t go for absolutes, remain flexible. This is just a sketch. But what matters is the link to the company strategy of what you do, the connection to the company values. You will have to use this plan every day, to remind yourself and your team of the simple performance indicators that stand for success. So that they can listen and download.

Book yourself a couple of hours in your calendar every quarter. Take out your action plan and ask yourself: what did I hear in the last three months that may make me change this plan? What needs to be escalated to my boss?

Make sure that you achieve a discipline in downloading the input, the complaints and the suggestions for improvement by your stakeholders to those in the company that will benefit from this input. Make sure you regularly consolidate what you and your team have gathered from the stakeholders and share it with your boss. Listening is not an art, it’s a discipline.

The CEO’s ‘working sites’

Michael had just been appointed CEO. He walked into my office with a roll of paper under his arm. ‘Let’s discuss my strategy,’ he said. We had known each other for 10 years, already, and I knew what a structured thinker he is. But I didn’t expect him to be that structured. The roll of paper was a huge manifest of A3 pages glued together, a map of the problems of my employer. He called them ‘my working sites’. It could have been from Napoleon, except it covered the whole world, while the French dictator and then emperor only wanted to conquer Europe. A true battlefield. With a smirk he said: ‘There’s a lot from my chief of staff in this …’. It was the perfect draft, not yet a plan. To transform it into the company’s strategy, stakeholders needed to be consulted. But it was a strong starting point, opinionated and worth being discussed with those who had an influence on the fate of the company, pretty much in trouble in those days. It was time to check this plan with the stakeholders. It was time to listen.

Step 6: The stakeholder grid

When you start this journey you have a wonderful opportunity to make the right steps from the beginning. After having sketched out a draft plan (Step 5), check the expectations of your stakeholders when starting a new job. Take a sheet of paper and on the left list all the stakeholders you interact with. Your boss, the chairman should be on this list as well as investors and sell-side analysts, journalists, employees, customers, distributors, regulators and politicians, NGO representatives and the management.

On the right you write some basic questions: what has been good so far? What should change? What needs to be handled urgently and quickly? Which is the major obstacle to better performance? What do you expect from my leadership? What is the most important mistake I should avoid? (See two examples of such a grid in Figures 5.1 and 5.2.)

Arrange meetings with all these stakeholders (including your boss). You can even start before the new job commences. But by 100 days after your appointment you should have personally met all the stakeholders you had identified.

By doing so you achieve a couple of results:

  1. You get the EMMA of your stakeholders.
  2. You get to know your stakeholders.
  3. You position yourself as a Listening Leader, because the first contact is not barking orders but asking good questions.
  4. They get to know you very quickly.
  5. You can adapt your strategy to the input of the stakeholders and improve it. This occurs by taking out your action plan (see Step 5) and matching it with the input of the stakeholders. Does it still stand? Does it have to be changed?

There is a final advantage to using this grid: you gain time.

What happens usually?

A freshly appointed manager would wait to meet the stakeholders until he has something to say about what he intends to do. Since finding out what to do always consumes time, you normally don’t see the stakeholders for a longer period before you dare tackle them with your action plan. While you do your homework time passes and they will think that you’ve forgotten them: ‘He’s been in his new job six weeks now and he hasn’t come to see me!’

Figure 5.1 Emilio’s grid for line managers (exemplary)

Figure 5.1 Emilio’s grid for line managers (exemplary)

Figure 5.2 Emilio’s grid for CEOs (exemplary)

Figure 5.2 Emilio’s grid for CEOs (exemplary)

If you meet them soon after starting the new job you establish a quick contact (‘One day in his office and he already convened a staff meeting and met the two most important customers, what a wonderful person!’) without the need to make any commitment since you just started. Maybe it is too soon for you to say something, but it’s not too soon to listen to the other person. To be ready to step into action mode.

Step 7: Start!

If you truly communicate it will allow you to try and fail and correct very quickly. So, get started! One of the big mistakes of change is to try to be on the safe side and figure out how exactly things have to be in the new world. Before you start, you may want to be 100 per cent sure. The journey is long and you will make lots of mistakes, that’s natural. But if you truly communicate you may be able to pre-empt most mistakes, warned by your stakeholders. Since this journey will be long, you better start now.

When you have started, you will have kicked off a change process, involving yourself, your team and all the other stakeholders. Years of good practice in change management have taught us how to deal with these issues. As chairman of Methodos S.p.A., the Change Management Company, I’m sitting on numerous vaults containing the jewels of almost four decades of experience. Too much for a book.

So my company has drilled them down to ten rules – five things to do and five to avoid.

The big five of today’s change management

  1. Share a collective dream of a change vision (i.e. to become a digital company) with the top management and spread it throughout your team and the organisation.
  2. Walk the talk: involve all other leaders from the start and enable them to visibly direct the change.
  3. Engage people across the board: involve the whole organisation in working towards the vision. Change will not occur if culture and behaviours are not consistent at all levels.
  4. Consider all company stakeholders from a social media perspective: plan a stakeholder governance strategy that engages relevant stakeholders both inside and outside the company.
  5. Develop a change dashboard to monitor and lead the change; leading and lagging KPIs serve to show the value created for different stakeholders and to redirect the change process according to achieved results.

There are frequent roadblocks to change; this is natural. Not everybody embraces change and for many the trade-off between change and security can turn out to be unfavourable. They lose too much stability in the process and need to decide whether to adapt or to look for another job.

There are five very frequent mistakes that, one by one, can jeopardise a change process. So, try to avoid them.

The five most common mistakes of change management

  1. Maintaining old habits and behaviours: resistance to change can be mapped and should be managed. Identify the pockets of resistance and try to understand them but act swiftly to remove old habits and behaviours that block the transformation. Losing time on committing this mistake will lead to cynicism and the loss of support for the change programme (‘nothing really happens, there is no change’).
  2. Focusing only on digital and technological needs: it is the world that is changing and the whole team must evolve in order to lead rather than follow change. Change encompasses all of our lives and technology impacts social habits and labour relations. But demographic change, healthcare, life expectancy, diverse thought patterns between generations and diversity at large: they do influence change as well and need to be considered, not only the smartphone and social media.
  3. An ‘everybody should definitely change! … except for me’ attitude: do not allow room for exceptions in the adoption of new behaviours. It starts with you. Be consistent and always be an example. It is much easier to drive change if you can lead by example – there can be no excuses if the manager becomes a consistent leader.
  4. Neglecting the human factor: culture is a fundamental asset of change and it is key to making a change successful. Interfaces cannot replace personal relations and people engagement. Trust is the grease that makes the clockwork function and trust is not created by an algorithm. Yet.
  5. Declaring change as accomplished: change is not an event, it is a journey. Changing mindsets and behaviours both inside and outside the company is a considerable undertaking. Ongoing support activities are essential to guarantee an effective change. Therefore never promise a land of milk and honey. It might come, but the train won’t stop there, it will move on to the next station. Which may well be in the desert.

Every defeat is a victory

Andreotto, my now retired brother-in-law, had a happy-go-lucky attitude towards setbacks in his job. He always used to say ‘Every defeat is a victory.’ I never really understood what he meant and tried to make a sense of it. And to try out whether he was right or not.

Imagine you want a budget increase for your department in times of cost-cutting. You know you’ll never get it, your boss will say ‘no’, so you better not ask from the beginning. Wrong. Ask, justify why you think it would be good for the company. Listen to your boss’s explanations of why it doesn’t work. Acknowledge the ‘no’ with your supervisor, accept the defeat and get on with your life.

Next time you have something to ask, do it again, don’t self-censor. Get the next explicit ‘no’, acknowledge the next defeat.

If you are a good performer, your boss will be sitting on thorns next time you ask for something making business sense. Probably, the third time there will be a ‘yes’ and you can see that the previous defeats brought you this victory. It may be a much more important decision than just a budget increase.

Had you censored yourself not asking the first two times, you would be at square one every time you wish to achieve something.

You may encounter obstacles on your communicative leadership journey. Don’t lose patience even in case of a setback. A Listening Leader has to be resilient, that journey is long. And failing is an edge on the others. Don’t forget what Thomas Edison said, when confronted with many failures during his career as an inventor: ‘I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.’ With more than 1,000 patented inventions he is the most prolific inventor known so far.

So, actively look for scars on the battlefield. Dare. Dare to lose some battles to win the war of the enthusiasm of your stakeholders.

A leader in action needs energy – where to get it from

Time to think: Companies are full of Alice in Wonderland’s White Rabbits rushing around with their watches in their hand. An often-heard remark is: ‘If I only had the time to think, I’m just so busy getting things done …’. I’ve been there. I made this mistake more often than I would like to admit.

Time invested in thinking is time saved mending a crisis. Time invested in thoroughly building the proper strategy, with clear and understandable key performance indicators, with achievable and stretched goals, time devoted to establishing the brand attributes and declining them to company values and desired behaviours is time you gain further down the process.

A sound – well thought-through – strategic framework allows all the empowered employees of a listening company to act as entrepreneurs. If they only act as entrepreneurs without a clear strategic frame chaos will ensue. If they have a sound strategic setup but are neither well informed, nor listening to stakeholders, unable to build the skillset and knowledge necessary to work well and are not empowered to shape the company’s fate, the company will lose its license to operate (to build a superior thinking environment read Time to Think by Nancy Kline).

Time to think in action

Claudia Danser, a friend, my former tutorial partner in the Meyler Campbell Business Coaching Programme and one of the rising stars of coaching saw the power of Nancy Kline’s gospel and how important it is to find time to think. She coaches Dermot.

Dermot is a brilliant, charismatic and hard-working director at The Prince’s Trust. As part of our coaching, Dermot wanted to understand how others perceived him and how he could be a better leader. The 360-degree feedback I collated for him strongly reinforced what he suspected – he really needed to listen more, give his team more space and time in order to develop and fully motivate them. It turned out that this might also be blocking his own promotion in the company. If he could manage to empower his team more, he’d also benefit from a lighter workload as he was near exhaustion from doing everything himself. Inspired, Dermot decided to do a number of things to truly empower his team. One idea was to run an event where he invited the level below his direct reports to spend an afternoon with him to think about how best to achieve the organisation’s growth plans. Up until then, he had almost always come up with the ideas himself but he appreciated that great, well-informed ideas could also come from those who worked more closely day to day with the young people the charity supports. Using the attention, listening and questions from Nancy Kline’s Time to Think, Dermot ran the event. Instead of the usual leader ‘transmit’ mode, he listened. The junior team shared, he listened, he didn’t interrupt. They shared some more. He listened. And by the end of the event, they had generated so many useful and important new ideas that their thoughts ended up being translated into the headline objectives for the region’s new business plan. The additional benefit was that the junior members of Dermot’s team felt so much more involved, motivated and engaged. Not only had Dermot seen brilliant results from empowering his team, he had also gained a wonderful insight into his stakeholders – both the up-and-coming stars in his department (so he could better succession plan) and the young people that The Prince’s Trust supports. Due to its success, Dermot repeated the event and continues to empower his team, organising a day for this junior group to discuss their ideas and engage directly with the Trust’s CEO and wider senior management team for the benefit of the whole organisation.

You need both: a listening organisation within a sound strategic frame.

The CEO is paid to advance this agenda but you as a line manager are co-responsible for the fate of the organisation and you can improve your own performance and the license to operate of your own team. Give yourself the time for it.

Be clear, to all. What matters is making the change agenda transparent – to all stakeholders. Create clarity around why listening is so important for a better performance and that this allows stakeholders to own their share of the company and help to shape it into a fitter body. A body delivering superior products that enthuse the customer and thereby initiate the virtuous circle of profitable growth: an enthusiastic customer will recommend the company. This will make the company grow profitably, attracting investors. A stronger company can hire and groom the best talents and provide them with the motivation that stems from being empowered, to make a difference, including the lady at the reception desk, our Director of First Impressions.

These stakeholders will stand up for the company and they will grant it the license to successfully operate as an accepted corporate citizen.

Have a dashboard. Every leader and every company embarking on this journey is well-advised to take a snapshot of where it stands at the beginning of the change. What is the engagement of the employees? How strong is the recommendation will of customers (NPS)? What is the financial performance of the company? How does it score in sustainability indices?

The change dashboard should be updated regularly. But don’t make it an encyclopaedic exercise. One KPI per stakeholder is enough to provide a proper framework that allows for entrepreneurial action and the adaptation of the strategy according to the changing context, market, environment. I have seen companies blocked by the abundance of KPIs, sometimes even apparently contradicting each other (two charts on the Methodos Dashboard).

Celebration times come on!

I don’t tend to cry much over spilled milk. But at this point I have to confess to one of my many mistakes, important enough to be mentioned.

It was the second year in a row that my Munich department had given me the satisfaction of a remarkably good engagement survey. There was just one disturbing detail. In our survey there was a question I actually always wondered about. ‘Did you celebrate your successes?’ For two years in a row my staff gave its leadership pretty bad marks. It referred to the whole management team in my area, but who was leading them? Me. So it was a message to me.

This question irritated me. Are we here to perform a job, reach our goals and do our duty or are we a partying organisation? What does ‘celebrate’ mean? Some hypocritical event, a Christmas party, to pat ourselves on the back, being careful not to let the champagne glass spill any of the precious bubbly on the person we pat? My God, it took me a few of just those events to understand that I was so wrong. My team didn’t want a cocktail party. They didn’t even necessarily want an event. They wanted recognition. They wanted a moment of pause to absorb the good outcome of a project, to recognise the common efforts and the individual contributions. Nothing more. But since I didn’t get it the first time, they sent me a strong message the year after in the next engagement survey. The penny dropped. How much time did I waste without fully recognising the contributions of the team and its members instead of taking the time to do so and enhance motivation and thereby performance?

Hold your breath and savour the moment

What really matters in terms of recognition is the awareness and the ability to feel that moment.

Here are two of the points neurologist Richard Hanson suggests for the individual and that fit a Listening Leader (excerpts):

1. Turn positive facts into positive experiences. Good things keep happening all around us, but much of the time we don’t notice them; even when we do, we often hardly feel them. […] Whatever positive facts you find, bring a mindful awareness to them – open up to them and let them affect you. It’s like sitting down at a banquet: don’t just look at it – dig in!

2. Savour the experience. […] You could strengthen your feelings of satisfaction after completing a demanding project by thinking about some of the challenges you had to overcome.3

So, it’s not about having parties in the office, all the time. Simply be aware of the efforts and achievements of yourself and your team. Acknowledge them, stand still with your team and savour the moment. It can be at a normal staff meeting or you may even hold one especially for the occasion.

Yes, they’re all being paid to work, but the salary doesn’t include the energy, enthusiasm, self-motivation and team spirit that are needed to succeed. Honour this and you will be honoured.

On stress and work–life integration

‘Difficult states of mind, including stress, low mood, distractibility, relationship issues, anxiety, sorrow, and anger.’4 These are all consequences of stress.

All of this may also be what lies between a willing person wanting to become a Listening Leader and actually being one.

The consequences of stress are lack of concentration, bad sleep, the constant feeling of running behind time: the symptoms of a modern manager under strain. At the beginning of this book I promised communicative leadership would put you ahead of events, allowing you to shape the agenda of your working life instead of being moulded by it.

This is especially needed in times of continuous alarm mode, 24/7/365, with stakeholders armed with a smartphone that can turn into a global medium in a second.

Paradoxically, it’s not by accelerating your life that you get in front of events, it’s by pausing, regularly.

Please, don’t say, ‘Oh, it’s about the work–life balance!’ It’s not. Actually this expression is misleading as such. Why should there be an antagonism between work and life? Isn’t work part of our life?

I believe that to lead a balanced life you need to earn your living by loving what you do. Otherwise, prepare for change: read Herminia Ibarra’s highly inspiring Working Identity5 and reinvent your career.

And maybe take a minute to ponder the views of a millennial on work–life integration. We may learn from it.

Work–life integration – what’s the fuss about? A millennial’s view

Work-related stress is now recognised as one of the biggest health issues of our century. It can have devastating effects on the individual. Heightened blood pressure and levels of adrenaline, when occurring over a long period of time, can lead to heart problems and other related maladies. Psychologically, stress can cause emotional exhaustion and even burnout. Besides, productivity is lowered as a result, too.

In an effort to avoid these outcomes, it is important to take time out from work. Breaks at work, sufficient sleep, physical activity, weekends and holidays are all great contributors to the physical and mental recovery from work.

This is why I am highly sceptical of the now so popular ‘work is your home’ model of many companies of Silicon Valley (but not only). While it sounds fantastic to be able to play games, have your hair done or even nap at work, a little nagging feeling I have is that employees are being lured into a 24-hour commitment to their work and companies. This sounds oddly familiar: friends tell me that some offices in big law firms or financial institutions are equipped with beds for those who might have to stay the night to work through a project. The reward for this is usually a big pay cheque, career progression and the prestige of these companies plays a big role in the lure. But is it worth it? Definitely not on the same scale but still of relevance is the reminder that, a century ago, when women weren’t allowed to vote and slaves existed in our society, the slaves would be housed and fed in order to allow the master control over working times and other conditions of their working life. With a critical eye towards inappropriate comparisons and an acknowledgment of the historical and cultural context, is there still a justifiable opinion that we voluntarily hand over the reins of our lives to these companies? I believe we should think a little bit about what we are actually giving up when blinded by the shiny goodies they dangle in front of our eyes.

Apart from switching off away from work, one of the most highly determining factors in one’s well-being in this context is how well one’s work fits in with one’s personal beliefs, needs, passions and talents.

The biggest misunderstanding around the term work–life balance (and the reason for its replacement with new term work–life integration) is that work and life should be so separated and removed that people work in a job they hate in order to fund what their real passion is. This will make the employee unhappy, both at work and not (just consider that the time spent working constitutes the biggest chunk of the waking day). It will also hinder productivity, creativity and career development, all of which have an impact on both the employee, the team, the work climate and the company.

In order for employees to thrive, they must align their career choices with their interests, goals and strengths.

Ever more so than before, the Y generation is looking for work to be in sync with the personal value system. With the wide array of choices available to us, we are reluctant to settle for a job or a company we don’t trust or don’t approve of. This generation cares about equality, the environment, civil and human rights, among other things. Since we are the employees and customers of the future and already of significant importance now, smart companies better start thinking where they stand on such issues and what type of individual they are attracting as a result.

Furthermore, our generation, in comparison to previous ones, where being junior meant accepting non-recognised extra work, feel entitled to challenge this order and leave the office at 5pm. Of course, this is too extreme and especially we, who ask for flexibility, should be ready to put in extra effort and time where necessary. And I believe that many of us do when the work we do means something to us. While previously people might have reluctantly stayed in the office for a job they hated, because of their perception of work as a chore, young people today want more out of a job, and when that need is fulfilled, they, too, give their jobs a big chunk of themselves, their time and their effort.

Legal drug: Why not try mindfulness and meditation?

There are natural steroids that can help you boost your performance, deal with stress having no headache the next morning or any other dangerous addiction. Actually, more than steroids it’s directly about hormones, endorphins, dopamines. It’s about the conscious ability to stimulate your brain.

If you already love your work but want to improve the fun, reduce the stress, increase your performance and thereby find more time for the other things in life, you might want to consider meditation.

I’ve come across some impressive personalities in management. Most of them had their own recipe: many of them fitness, some of them yoga, tai-chi, other chess-playing or playing an instrument. A very busy CEO I know plays the violin every day he’s at home.

For the masters of alibis (‘I just can’t do this, because …’), pretending not to have time for daily fitness, to have ligament problems that don’t allow them to practise yoga, that their neighbours would laugh at them if they practised tai-chi (‘So, what?’ I would say) and that learning an instrument is just too time consuming, I have a suggestion that doesn’t allow for excuses. Or tell me you wouldn’t have 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the evening to meditate?

Believe me, it pays off. I have practised meditation since 2011. Mindfulness, or, if you want more traditional terms, focus and concentration highly benefit from regular meditation. If you don’t take my word for it, if you decide to ignore hundreds of years of contemplative practices in Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Judaism – all of which have their version of ascetism – then you may want to lend your ear to a neurologist and a neuropsychologist and read Buddha’s Brain. You will find an impressive amount of information on how our brain helps to shape the mind and how meditation helps to reach happiness and wisdom, analysing how exactly our brain with its different parts can be trained and stimulated to improve performance.

You are at the end of the journey to communicative leadership. You have now earned the black belt of the Listening Leader.

And now let’s do the ‘millennial’ check on their expectations towards the black-belt-wearing Listening Leader.

Reverse mentoring – the babyboomer asks the millennial about their Expectations Motivations Mentality Analysis (EMMA)

Mentoring is shifting towards being a two-way street. The following debate is an illustration of such reverse mentoring. In the name of the old world, companies and leaders at his level, Emilio asks Clementina for her and her peers’ perspective on leadership and companies today and in the future. Clementina has communicated with and challenged communities of millennials in Europe, but takes full responsibility for her choice of answers.

What do you expect from us as leaders and the team?

From the Listening Leader we expect:

  1. An ethical vision of the world and where the company fits into the social and environmental well-being of the communities at stake. We want to have clear messages on where the company stands in respect to:
    • integrity
    • respect of work–life integration
    • equal treatment and opportunities independent of age, gender and so forth.
  2. Inspiration: The leader should be able to organise the idea-gathering by the team, foster the ability to connect different networks of relationships and stakeholders from science to virtual communities, to connect and cross-fertilise the team, in other words accompany what we now know as being one of the premier products of our brain and its neuronal network and the synaptic connections.
  3. Guidance: The leader should master the basic managerial skills and be able to set the frame for the work, creative and less so. A leader has to have the proper project management skills, be able to manage by objectives and set the stage for the staff to work as independently as the structures allow. We are an annoyingly indecisive bunch, so we will look for reassurance and guidance from you where needed.
  4. Role model: The leader should be consistent with the vision and the strategy and be a role model for the values of the company. Walk the talk.
  5. Fearless developer: The leader should not be scared of developing people and letting them grow.
  6. Driver of change: The ability to also push against the past will earn a leader the support of the millennials.
  7. Become digital: The leaders should be open to new technology and media and become able to use them autonomously and flexibly and to interact with the staff. What should not happen is to have a leader resisting technological change and delegating it to the younger workforce staying in his old-world trench.
  8. StrengthsFinder: Able to create and manage a team leveraging the strengths of each team member.
  9. Curious people person: Ask us and listen to us and to all other team members irrespective of their age or any other criterion about how we can contribute to the company’s success with innovative and fresh ideas.
  10. Proactive empathy: Understand that there may be barriers, such as shyness or social clumsiness, and make it easier for us to open up to the personal circumstances that may negatively affect our performance. Create an atmosphere of trust and proactively seek an open exchange.

Expected impact of the Listening Leader on teams:

  1. Informal (almost friendly) relationships: Allow people to feel at ease with each other.
  2. Respect: Create a positive climate of collaboration and mutual respect; don’t stir artificial internal competition within a team: listening and support of each other is the way to boost the team’s performance.
  3. Diversity: Build a heterogeneous team, with different competences, professions, life experiences and with a multicultured mindset. Leverage on those differences in order to gain more holistic views or to discover new angles.
  4. Open: The team should be able to be transparent and honest in the relationships and open about discussing its dynamics.

Where are we on the way to meeting millennials’ expectations by employers? A very personal assessment from 1–10.

  1. UK – big firms: 5; small and medium sized: 6
  2. Italy – big firms: 4; small and medium sized: 3
  3. Germany – 5
  4. France – 4
  5. Benelux – 6
  6. USA – 3 (on work–life integration); 7 (enabling and empowerment)

What should leaders and companies do to reach 10?

To gain our unconditional buy-in, companies should have a clear purpose and everything and everybody in the company should be aligned towards pursuing this purpose. The development money should be put where the strategy mouth is. For example, don’t claim to be a company with a global scope if you don’t have real international career opportunities.

One of the most important vectors of this pursuit is the enablement of dynamic exchange through breaking down hierarchical and physical barriers (e.g. open door policy, connection and integration with the academic world). It should be the norm for leaders to involve people, to tap into their ideas and skills in order to let them co-own the company, the results, the project. They should listen, but also actively ask their employees about their strengths, weaknesses, frustrations, improvements, dreams, needs, circumstances. Long-term challenges in HR practice should also be addressed. An example is the enablement of flexibly portable old-age provision across borders and employers.

Different cultures, backgrounds, mindsets, personalities should be accommodated. This effort should be reflected first and foremost in recruitment selection criteria, to allow for non-standard job profiles. Anglo-Saxon countries are leading this development, while countries like Italy, Germany and France are still very formal on the ‘optimal’ education and career paths of candidates.

Companies and leaders should honour the commitment to improving work–life integration. Finally, in order to be trustworthy and credible in their pursuit of meritocracy, there should be more transparency on pay slots and clear career paths.

What are the most important established business practices that we should keep?

One of the attitudes of millennials, which, in a different form, has always been present, is a respectful attitude towards leaders. There should be no fear of the leader, a reaction more traditionally linked with respect of seniority. However, millennials believe that Listening Leaders have earned the right to be fully respected. At the same time, leaders should keep taking responsibility for their actions, something that should be extended to everybody within the company through further empowerment.

Millennials are also still interested in certain elements of the incentive system. They welcome options of co-ownership, equity participation, management buy-out options. They are also seduced by fringe benefits, albeit a reloaded version. Rather than money and luxury, fringe benefits by employers should look at welfare (e.g. old age provision) and ease of life (e.g. nursery and child-care, home office, transport facilitations). Additionally, in line with current trends, they would like the evaluation of more than just financial aspects to be reinforced.

One final fundamental business practice to keep and aspire to is stakeholder engagement and the striving for win-win solutions.

What should companies change now to be attractive to millennials?

To attract young talents, companies ought to leave behind fears of losing power or status and nurture a culture of autonomy and flexibility, as this is much more important to millennials than job security, which is the reason they might leave you if they don’t find the characteristics of this culture in your organisation. In order to foster such a mindset, companies should also physically create open, informal, transparent and smart work environments and spaces (e.g. open space offices rather than usual closed offices).

We are attracted to companies in which meritocratic growth processes and systems, based upon goals and results, are reported on. The commitment to diversity of all kinds must be leading the company towards a near future in which this topic does not have to be an issue anymore.

What mistakes do we need to avoid, especially when recruiting millennials?

  1. Lack of integrity: Misalignment between a company’s reputation, what the firm wants to portray itself as and what the reality is.
  2. Overly traditional structures: Old hierarchical conservative company cultures as well as bureaucratisation and slow executives, taking ages to decide and not making their decision-making process transparent are hurdles in the way of a unified workforce and company.
  3. Wrong management appointments: A bad boss creates havoc and puts a break on all the energy.
  4. Short-term focus: We want to build something, we don’t want to become your Alice in Wonderland Rabbit hastening from quarterly report to quarterly report.
  5. Blind empowering: Empowering without first making sure there is a sense of psychological safety (exuded by leader), so people can make mistakes, admit them and move on, rather than running around like loose chickens, everybody for themselves, scared of admitting insecurities of failures and therefore stunned subsequent improvement.
  6. Lack of attention towards social and environmental issues.
  7. Politics and complexity in relationships: Being respectful and gentle shouldn’t be superficial and actually hiding a culture in which our interactions within the company are managed only according to politics, power-games, unwritten rules and hidden fraternities.
  8. Idealisation of categories (e.g. stereotypes, expectations, etc.): One example is the millennial categorisation (as opposed to being senior). Ironically, one of the stereotypes of millennials is that of being individualistic. Wanting to be seen for what we are as a person is what matters. The sense of belonging to one single community only is totally strange to our way of thinking. It’s just a useless and time-consuming effort to stick us into a specific drawer: environmentalist, fitness-freak, intellectual.
  9. Brainwashing: Creating an overwhelmingly homogeneous culture with the touch and feel of a slightly value-twisting and manipulating culture. The company may well suggest values that help achieve a corporate vision but that doesn’t mean that the company tells us what’s right and what’s wrong when it comes to personal choice and value-sets within the frame of a democratic society.

How can we help you to succeed?

  1. Give us a chance and don’t fear our autonomy: Autonomy shouldn’t mean being removed from the specific project goals or wider business objectives. It should mean a culture in which everybody is free to structure their own work flow and where unnecessary structures simply fall away and the necessary ones remain. Once the aims and expectations are agreed upon, and open and frequent communication possibilities are established, leave us to it and we will do our best to deliver according to how we work best.
  2. Become able to admit and accept our mistakes: We will make mistakes, especially when new to an organisation. But let’s work together to learn from them. Is the mistake grounded in a wrong approach, lack of skills, skewed expectations or misunderstanding? Something else completely? We are hungry to learn about ourselves and improve our shortcomings. In order not to waste this opportunity for both parties, we must be honest about the mistakes and would love a little of your time and expertise to turn mistakes into learnings.
  3. Be a coaching leader.
  4. Support our development: We’ll walk the extra mile for the company. But we would love to be able to grow in the process. We mean opportunities for professional and personal growth, professional education, access to courses, conferences, lectures, staff exchanges and so forth, with personalised development plans for the long term (hereby also showing the employee the company’s long-term investment in the person).
  5. Engage us, involve us in organisational actions and decisions: We are aware that our voices may not count for much in a big organisation and are not disillusioned that we have all the answers, but we live in times in which individuals have been able to shake things up for the better through being given a platform to air their thoughts and ideas.
  6. Constantly challenge us, within the realm of the achievable: It can be great for us as we can discover our own strengths and talents, as well as our limits. New challenges are a sure-fire way to counteract the trend of high job mobility so characteristic of this generation.
  7. Reward us based on what we deliver: To millennials there are two sides of the coin here. On the one hand, many of us have gone through internships after internships without seeing a contract, monetary remuneration or reference letter (and the fact that we whine about it may entitle you to call us spoilt brats). On the other hand, today’s increasingly permissive and soft society has meant that we have been overly praised for performing averagely. Let’s find a middle ground that is fair. When we deliver effort and results, reward us – either financially or with opportunities for growth.
  8. Provide us with feedback: Being young and energised, just like previous generations, we have the ambition to learn and work hard. However, today, differently from previous times, constructive criticism is the norm and the mantra of ‘Just get on with it!’ is no longer so widely accepted socially. Targeted, immediate feedback after a task has a much more concrete feel and impact than annual reviews, as time can cloud the memories of both the person evaluating performance and the person who carried out the task. So really, it’s a win-win if feedback is concrete and timely.

What are the potentials we need to exploit (and aren’t exploiting thus far)?

The first potential of millennials that comes to mind is technological savviness. Of course, young people have the highest levels of skills in this realm, as they are digital natives, but they can also help unlock the huge potential for this area in babyboomers. We should enable older people in organisations by reverting roles: the millennial becomes the digital mentor to the digitally underdeveloped babyboomer mentee.

Secondly, millennials bring with them an entrepreneurial, innovative and creative spirit, partly nurtured through wider global exposure to topics, people and mindsets through social and digital media. It does not necessarily involve artistic creativity, but revolves around problem-solving and the inception and development of original ideas. We prefer to ask how to make ideas come true rather than explaining why an idea might never succeed. Leverage our diversity and unconventional perspective to jointly shape the future. We can also utilise our global connected network to build communities, to help organise the input by stakeholders, to discuss dilemmas in global communities.

What really resonates with you, particularly relevant for you as a millennial?

Beyond everything else, the concept that mostly resonates with us is caring. Caring for each other, for all the stakeholders, for the values and principles the company stands for. Caring about the different responsibilities towards communities and interest groups, about integrity. Profit should be a secondary goal to the objective of caring.

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