Chapter 3

Enabling: How to increase your own and your employees’ performance by learning and teaching to learn

The flaws of a genius

Imagine the following situation: Albert works for you and you start the yearly performance review. His haircut is not what you would expect from a corporate soldier. He cracks wildly politically incorrect jokes and in meetings he tends to ramble. He posted a picture of himself on the company’s social network where he sticks out his tongue until it almost reaches his chin. This does not fit with your company’s desired behaviour and you go through the corporate template with him and address all these weaknesses and demand a change in looks and behaviour if he wants to reach his targets. He mumbles something about some major breakthrough that he is working on that will change the world. You cut him off, you don’t have much time for his dreams and you give him a clear deadline until when he has to show he got the message. Next thing you do (is he still in the room?) you fill in the empty boxes on your computer. Name: Albert. Surname: Einstein. Date of birth and so on. Then you hear him (he’s still sitting there!) saying: ‘I quit.’ You have just lost a genius in your team, in the wake of finding the relativity theory …

Absolutely crazy, this example, isn’t it? Well, not so much. For more than a hundred years the best human resources practices – and management practices at large – have been heavily influenced by psychoanalysis, the science of trauma, or problems. This generated corporate functions focusing on the simple (actually, simplistic is the right term) assumption that humans are full of weaknesses to be corrected. Knowledge, behaviour and social skills are supposed to be described in a uniformed way throughout the organisation and every individual has to reach those standards by improving in the areas he’s weak, mercifully termed ‘areas of development’ of what in HR jargon are called the organisation’s ‘capabilities’. And most of the time devoted to training and all other forms of corporate education are invested in addressing those weaknesses focusing on the ‘untidy appearance and him poking out his tongue’ instead of leveraging on the strengths.

While it is totally legitimate that an organisation seeks a common denominator of its staff in terms of qualifications and desired attitudes and behaviours, it is simply a waste of huge potential if one stops at this and doesn’t go one step further. And I obviously don’t mean the step of our imaginary example, to let Dr Einstein attend seminars on the proper outfit, haircut or social demeanour. I mean tapping the potential of every individual to make his or her skillset contribute to the organisation’s well-being in the most effective way. This starts by listening. Understanding the strengths, talents and skills of the individuals allows us to reach out to these people, to what truly motivates them and only then one can see – together with the individual and by initiative of the staff member – how to best enable this person to grow, deploy their potential and meet the organisation’s demands. The role of the Listening Leader is to make two lines converge: the line of the individual’s skills and the line of the skills demanded by the organisation in order to thrive.

Enabled managers and employees can translate the strategy of the company into their daily working context, if they understand the strategy. Better, if they also shaped the strategy because the top management listened to their input creating it. But the biggest value of enabled people in the workplace is their constant ability to adapt to changing situations in the working environment and translate these changes into different behaviours, improving processes, or, in other words, a better company.

Enabling people doesn’t mean giving them files from A–Z that they can look up when faced with a certain situation. This reminds me of a funny situation within a pretty serious context.

In today’s volatile world you cannot foresee every crisis. There can’t be manuals with all possible scenarios from A to Z. In most cases people in distress wouldn’t even know where to look for the manual. An enabled person would know what general rules to apply to a crisis. One of them is to use common sense. And common sense suggested that the first thing to do was to consult the best possible doctors to make sure one could detach our customer from the glass wall with the least possible damage to his health, including cutting out the glass where his hands were glued on and bring him to a hospital with two glass circles around his hands for the surgeons to do the rest.

This taught me an important lesson. Never again would I do crisis training without stressing how much common sense matters. Much better to teach and train principles instead of lulling our own people into security with a manual that simply cannot answer all the questions. So we changed our crisis training from single scenarios to a broader picture addressing principles in order to be able to tackle also incredible scenarios. Alfred’s experience with our disposophobic client delivered the perfect story to be told to make this point.

The Listening Leader understands that enabling his people is a big leap towards his own freedom from being called day and night to address issues not foreseen in working manuals.

We owe the understanding of the potential of humans to the enormous progress of psychology in the last two decades. The birth of positive psychology, fathered by Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, allowed us to address peak performance and optimal human functioning.

Enabling starts at home

Knowing where your strengths are and how to build on them through proper training, coaching, mentoring and learning at large starts with yourself. Whatever is being described in this and the next chapter always applies to you and your team. You have to walk the talk. It’s in your own interest. Not only will the team follow more easily if they see that you lead by example, you allow yourself to perform better by investing into your own knowledge.

Why should I bother?

Oh my god, training again … I see the CEO skipping that chapter once the word ‘training’ is mentioned. ‘So much money is spent on training and the staff is still not up to my intelligence …’. You may be right that lots of money is spent on training. But first check how much is invested in training to teach Albert Einstein what ‘look’ he should have and how to mend his ‘weaknesses’. That’s a great budget item where you can save money. Not all of it is really necessary.

Then you might want to ask yourself whether attracting talents is something you want or whether you prefer to get the scum of the labour market. It may be a smart choice if you run a mob in your neighbourhood, but not if you want to turn a legitimate business into success.

For the talents of the Y generation constant learning and training is a make or break question: you offer it and they might join, you don’t and they won’t. If you neglect this aspect, if enabling is not part of your philosophy and of your practical toolbox, you can forget about being able to attract young talents. So, addressing enabling properly is a must. Since you hold this book in your hand anyway, you might consider continuing the reading. Well, not if you want to hire only those who adore being squeezed like lemons, working late hours, having no private life, the health of a young lion and adore living from the knowledge they got in business school ages ago. It still might become quite a costly exercise to only go for the masochists. If they are high performers, you already have to compete for them with investment banks and corporate law firms, excellent biotopes for these work-horses who happen to be rather expensive.

How to identify strengths and build on them

In recent years positive psychology and legions of academic researchers have provided us with excellent tools to assess one’s strength. At the beginning of the enabling journey stands the awareness of one’s strengths. For a person totally happy with her job, it might be interesting to see how one can improve her performance by leveraging her strengths. For someone thinking about a new career, rather than asking whether we have the right strengths for our present job we should check what the right jobs are for our talents. In all cases it is useful to become better aware of who we are as professionals. What positive psychology tells us is that happiness and fulfilment can be influenced by leveraging our own strengths. The role of the Listening Leader is to unleash this potential. To do this, knowing about our staff’s and our own strengths is tantamount.

Should you think that’s a nice-to-have, beware (unless you don’t care about increasing your own performance and that of your team). This book is about increasing performance in a natural way, using conventional wisdom. Common sense tells us that we should be mindful of solid evidence. If the emphasis of the performance reviews with your staff is on your team members’ performance strengths this will drive performance by 36 per cent, almost 60 per cent higher than focusing on performance weaknesses, which can cause almost 27 per cent decline in employee performance. What about gaining more than 50 per cent better performance compared to peers that don’t get it? Maybe this competitive angle does the trick to tip you in the right direction.

You can find the most common and useful ones in the ‘Tools’ box at the end of this chapter.

Before that I’ll explain that enabling starts by understanding strengths and motivations of the individuals, leveraging the potentials of teams, learning and teaching to learn, increasing empathy and tapping into academic research.

On motivation

Why is motivation actually so important? The Neapolitan in me says: it allows the deployment of energies I don’t have to come up with. It allows me to lead a better life as a leader, because motivation holds all the ingredients to allow people in your team to be much more self-directed, autonomous and engaged than when there is no motivation. There will be a lot fewer monkeys in your professional life (read more on monkey management in Chapter 4 on ‘Empowerment’). But it’s not only lessening your burdens. It drives performance, it reduces attrition, it thereby saves you costs of recruiting, onboarding and training those new hires you would need to replace your best people who leave your team, because of lack of motivation.

Motivation is a powerful driver of performance; it’s the glue that keeps your team together in difficult times and creates an environment of creativity and energy. Plus, it is more fun working with motivated people.

An array of different theories and subsequent research has attempted to find answers to the question of what motivates people. As Daniel Pink brilliantly summarises in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us,¹ beyond the basic monetary compensation allowing us to live our lives, three things motivate us: autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Autonomy, having control over one’s own actions, is the key to engagement in the workplace. At a basic level, the sense of freedom carries a different, more internalised sense of responsibility, which fuels one’s drive to achievement more than when control is exerted from an external source. On top of that, it opens the door to creativity and innovation, which are stifled by constricted and dictated working conditions.

Second, the goal of learning and finally mastering something, be it playing an instrument or coding, is powerful in directing energy towards a task. During Clementina’s organisational psychology studies, a professor introduced her to the findings that a mastery orientation in students consistently produced better grades than a performance orientation, generating a nice and nerdy little ‘inception’ effect. In a work context, approaching work with the goal of successfully completing a project is not as powerful a predictor of success as wanting to learn all about it and being able to be an expert in this particular topic.

Finally, purpose rounds up the elements making up intrinsic motivation. It seems intuitive that any work to be done needs to serve a purpose. Why else would it need to be done? However, in the reality of day-to-day life, the purpose is often removed from the work we do, as we go about our tasks without thinking of what purpose they serve. But how much verve are we putting into those tasks compared to those we clearly see and support the meaning of? The answer is obvious.

Basically we are motivated by fulfilling our expectations and the meaning we find in our job, by recognition of our skills as well as what we master and by freedom of choice in our working life.

You won’t find this information about your staff on their CVs. Not only because bios are still mainly compiled according to standard templates that focus on education and working experience, but also because very often people actually aren’t necessarily aware of what truly motivates them unless they experience it. Motivational drive can also change during one’s life.

Another good reason to listen.

When you recruit you can ask people what truly motivates them. When you are being recruited and meet people from the prospective employer you can ask them about their motivation. Generally speaking, if you are aware of the people around you, you are already starting on the right foot. Every performance review is a wonderful opportunity to discuss motivation.

Recognition and appreciation are very powerful drivers of motivation. So, when you discuss, make sure you identify the kind of appreciation your colleagues are seeking. Not everyone loves to be praised in front of others. And most hate general words of gratitude, people want specific appreciation. Gary Chapman and Paul White have identified five languages of appreciation: words of affirmation, quality time with your people, acts of service to support them, tangible gifts and physical touch. They also have a test to figure out your own and other people’s language of appreciation and its different dialects. This is a tool to boost the encouragement of people. Make use of it. It doesn’t cost a dime and it pays off in retaining your best people.²

But why would you bother about what motivates your people? They get a salary to do their job, they normally have performance indicators to measure their impact on the company and their team … ‘You, as a manager, have more power and influence over the engagement and retention of your people than anyone else’, as Beverly Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans put it, the authors of the brilliant guide to retaining good people, Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em.³

The simpler answer on why you should bother is that you will lose one out of every two of your staff members if you are a bad boss. And guess who will be leaving? Those who are qualified and good enough to get a job somewhere else. ‘A Gallup study of 7,272 US adults revealed that one in two had left their job to get away from their manager and improve their overall life at some point in their career.’⁴

Let me close this section with a small piece of advice that may open a door to superior performance: why don’t you ask your single team members how they perform best? What does it take to increase your performance? Listen to their answer – you might be given the key to this person’s performance potential.

Building teams and creating a high-performance organisation

Most of what you have read so far deals with individuals in an organisation, the leader and the single employee. We all know, however, that most of the performance is delivered by the sum of individuals, if they work as a team. Intuitively we assume that more brains together deliver more output than one single brain, as developed as it might be. But this is not always the case. To be able to tap into this potential, the interaction between these brains has to be effective. We all know that groups of people can take wrong decisions just because they act as groups, maybe following the leader on a wrong track without the ability or will or permission to voice objections in time. Managing teams isn’t as trivial as putting many intelligent people in one room and ordering ‘Now, perform!’

There is not much good literature on how to create high-performance teams. But sometimes you don’t need much literature; just the right one. This is what Jon Katzenbach, a McKinsey director, and Douglas Smith, a consultant, achieved with their book Wisdom of Teams.⁵ They advise addressing six basic issues to make teams perform:

1. Don’t create big teams, keep small numbers. As a rule of thumb, teams should consist of less than 20 people. My own experience is: 12 is the magic maximum number for a team to build trust and perform (see Chapter 2).
2. Gather complementary skills. The component of the good teams should contribute with a mix of technical or functional expertise in the matter of teamwork. In other words, they should be competent. Then, they should be good at analysing issues, problem solving and decision making. Lastly, the team members should have interpersonal skills from listening to risk taking, helpful criticism support and objectivity, among others.
3. The team must have a clear and meaningful purpose. This should be discussed, refined and shared by all team members. And it should matter to the whole organisation, well beyond the team per se.
4. Have specific performance goals. The objectives of the teamwork should be measurable, the product of the team should be defined clearly and it should deliver things to the organisation that single individuals do not already contribute.
5. Committed to a common approach. Katzenbach and Smith found out that the ‘how’ of the teamwork matters for performance more than normally assumed. Before engaging in the task of the teamwork the team should spend some time in crafting a common working approach addressing the economic challenge, the administrative aspect and, last but not least, the social aspect of interaction.
6. The team has to have a sense of mutual accountability. This point addresses the sense of responsibility of the individuals working in a team. If the team manages to build trust between the members and a strong commitment to the common purpose they will succeed in building a mutual sense of accountability for the product of the team work.⁶

Teamwork is becoming more and more important. Tapping the potentials of the skills and minds in an organisation and putting them at the service of the strategy involves more and more tasks being addressed in teamwork, across organisational siloes, including diverse skills and personalities.

Teamwork doesn’t stop in front of the C-suite, actually that’s where good team work starts.

Well, where it should start. Because the reality is: the C-suite generally lags behind the learning efforts by rank and file in spite of all the big words on lifelong learning, the need to change and adapt to change and all the nice things that you might hear from the very same people who preach water and drink wine. No, the track record of top managers undergoing life-long training is not excellent. Just ask the best business schools in the world how big their population of students is in executive programmes designated to CEOs or other C-suite members.

Should you be interviewed by a C-suite member for a job you’ve applied for, just ask when their last learning, training, coaching occurred and listen carefully. If they don’t come up with good answers, you can still go for this job. But don’t complain afterwards, when your needs for development are not being addressed. You knew before, when you got the wobbly answer by the Big C-guy. That company doesn’t have a leadership that leads by example.

How to avoid bad decisions in groups by good listening and more

Sometimes, one can be baffled at how naïvely top management goes about its own procedures and how poor decision-making processes are. Ask a board member of a company along which formal and informal rules their board is organised. Is it proper to voice a concern once all the other board members have supported a certain decision you think is plainly wrong? Is it good to find unanimity on an issue within three minutes?

Why should I bother at all with these questions?

Because otherwise a wrong decision might haunt you. Because you may have missed an important detail that changes the impact of a business plan. Simply because you would be a worse performing company because of your naivety or, worse, negligence.

Excellent research has been carried out on how to avoid ‘groupthink’⁷ and thereby improve and optimise decision-making processes in groups, typically the C-suite. Here is the summary, as provided by the Meyler-Campbell Tutorial Resources for their Business Coach programme:

1. State the problem clearly, indicating its significance.
2. Break a complex problem into separate parts, and make a decision on each part.
3. Encourage each member of the group to evaluate their own and others’ ideas openly and critically.
4. Be suspicious of unanimity, especially when arrived at quickly.
5. Ask influential members to adopt an external or critical ‘devil’s advocate’ stance, or leave the group for periods.
6. Discuss plans with objective outsiders to get reactions.
7. Use expert advisers to design the decision-making process.
8. Avoid wide difference in status among members, or if present, adopt means to minimise them.
9. Develop agreed procedures in advance to deal with crises or emergency situations.
10. Consider external reactions to the decision, and explore several possible alternative scenarios for these.
11. Use sub-groups (committees) to develop alternative solutions.
12. Admit shortcomings (when ‘groupthink’ occurs, members feel very confident; admitting some flaws in argument might open them up to new ideas).
13. Ensure those entrusted with implementation understand exactly what they are to do.
14. Encourage the group to evaluate the skills within it, and find ways of improving them.
15. Have a last chance meeting, allowing people to voice any concerns before implementation.

Just think where Volkswagen would be, had they applied these principles. Had the significance of the issue (high standards for exhaust fumes in the United States) been stated clearly, had they encouraged each member of the group to voice a concern, had they used expert advisers, asked an objective outsider … but they didn’t. And note points numbered 3, 6, 7 and 10: They are all items about good listening, about understanding the reasons of the involved stakeholders and adapting your strategy to it. The Listening Leader knows where the obstacles are and if she doesn’t, she will be brave enough to ask and her team will have been encouraged to voice concerns and propose ideas to address the concerns.

Learn and teach to learn

So, give learning a chance

Our brain is a powerful organ. How powerful it is has been researched for almost three centuries but only now are we starting to grab the enormous abilities hidden in our skulls. Once you start reading books on neurology and neuroplasticity you understand what they have that makes them superior to any thriller: those books are about how we can change our lives for the better by understanding how to use our mind. The best: it’s not fiction, it’s real. The key to happiness is within our heads, each of ours.

How esoteric. Do you think I’m crazy? And what does it matter to a manager who wants to become a leader? Let’s put it in a nutshell: learning enables you and your people and makes you perform better. Does this sound more reasonable?

If the word ‘training’ smells too much of the schoolyard and classroom, try to call it learning or ‘job enrichment’, because that’s what training leads to. ‘Job enrichment means change in what your employees do (content) or how they do it (process).’⁹

The best training is that which involves the participants actively. Training not only has to enable people, it has to be done with enabling techniques themselves. The most important is participation. A colleague of mine always stressed he wanted to avoid ‘Piz Buin trainings’, referring to a wonderful mountain in the Alps, where people were lying in sun-chairs watching the peak and getting tanned. So, good training is not about sitting there and listening, but rather absorbing the knowledge by listening and responding.

Here are the three dimensions you need to cover for good training, and I’m referring to and summing up in my own words the experience of consultant Andrew Sobel.¹⁰

• Principles. Training on the principles of the organisation, the philosophy, stories that illustrate how these principles have been enacted.
• Skills and behaviours. You best train important skills and behaviours by role play, personal exercises, using case studies, videos and small group discussions. Interacting, observing and learning from the best.
• Best practices. Who’s the best in an organisation at doing specific things? Learning benefits from observation and emulation and the discussion about them, the deeper understanding of excellent examples.

Well, if this sounds too generic, you may be right. The following paragraphs will be more specific. According to the 70/20/10 rule experience beats training 7:1. If I had to choose what to put into the 10 per cent box it would be what follows now.

Here is a list of what I consider the ‘minimum package’ of what a Listening Leader has to learn and constantly practise throughout her career. You could also say that what follows is the yearly programme of a corporate university. It’s the training offered by the company to its employees in a company that practises or wants to practise communicative leadership. A company that wants to succeed sustainably needs to train all its employees in the following disciplines (see Figure 3.1).

The big seven to train repeatedly

1. Strategy. Every manager of an organisation has to update her knowledge on the company’s strategy every year. Strategy is continuously adapted to the input from stakeholders and the market at large. So, a leader needs to not only personally convey stakeholders’ input to the rest of the company and especially to the top management, she also has to be aware of the whole picture of the strategy and question it, understand it, be able to explain it to her staff and translate it into actionable items for her people and her area of responsibility. These actions have to be measurable in their effects on improving the organisation. In other words, every manager should be well aware of the key performance indicators. Every year, again.
2. Customer focus. Everybody in the organisation has to have a basic understanding of the customers of the company. How satisfied they are, what they complain about, whether they are enthusiastic about a product or service. They have to know where in the company the most customer-focused colleagues are from whom they can learn.
3. Listening. What motivates our stakeholders, the people and companies who interact with my department, whether they are colleagues or customers, investors, competitors, society at large? We can only learn that by listening. Listening can be learned and trained. How does one grab weak signals? How does one monitor the behaviour and the wishes of the stakeholders? How is big data applied within the company? Where can one find data within the organisation? How can one convey complaints, whistleblowing, suggestions most effectively to the organisation? All these questions should be answered in modules accessible and complimentary for all managers of an organisation.
4. Crisis management and crisis communication. Learning how to best manage a crisis means learning how to avoid one. That’s what listening (the previous point) can achieve. Should a crisis occur, however, it is absolutely necessary to have a crisis organisation which trains regularly and sharpens its skills with every training, paints constantly changing hypothetical crisis scenarios to be prepared to face them should they materialise. But what has to be taught to all managers and employees is not how the crisis organisation works but that there is one and how every employee should act if he thinks a crisis is about to occur, for example, whom to call, how to behave.
5. Effective communication. How does one convey information, how does one listen and respond, how does one interact with others? Effective communication is made of empathy, self-awareness, language, common sense. Every Listening Leader is a good communicator and this can be learnt. Every leader has to become a communicator and, finally, every employee has to, as well. Giving and receiving feedback is important for every learning organisation and every leadership situation. If you want to know what feedback is useful for, play a round of Chinese Whispers with your team.
6. Effective presentations. How often is a good cause spoilt by a bad presentation? Most PowerPoint presentations have little power and almost no point. Learn how to make your point and convey it with the power that leads to contagion, motivation, delegation and implementation. Don’t forget most Roman emperors in their youth underwent a thorough education in rhetoric, an important branch of philosophy.
7. Integrated reporting. How did my company perform according to the main indicators? How do our customers, investors, employees, governments, supervisors and regulators, the media and relevant NGOs value our performance? Are they enthusiastic or infuriated and what about all those in between these extremes? Not knowing the basic financials killed the careers of some managers I’ve met in my working life. But the Listening Leader needs to be fully aware not just of the financial KPIs but of all the others, too. This is also why I advocate a very simple KPI framework, limited to four KPIs, one for every main stakeholder.

Figure 3.1 Train the big seven – repeatedly!

Wow, isn’t that way too much yearly training? I need to work! No, it’s only seven modules. They may last half a working day; they could also be shorter, if they just involve updating the management on a known framework. Three-and-a-half days a year of training seems too much? Well, maybe this whole book is lost on you!

The real challenge is that leaders should not capture these principles, skills, behaviours and best practices just for their own sake. The Listening Leader will share what she has learnt with her staff, will enable them to benefit from her learning. This can be done by small town-halls, by an email including the main items that everybody needs to know, by encouraging exchange with the departments and databases able to provide more insights, by sharing their department’s knowledge with the rest of the organisation.

There are companies who engage courageously on a journey reaching out to every single employee. BMW, the German car company, has trained more than 70,000 employees, among them many blue-collar workers, in what the main features of the company’s brand, strategy and values are, in order to transform them into brand ambassadors.

dm, a German retail chain of drugstores, trains all of its new staff, including interns and apprentices, before they start the job they were hired for. In a process described as ‘dialogical leadership’,¹¹ the whole organisation constantly communicates in order to enable and finally empower all of its employees. A remarkable best practice: just walk into a dm store anywhere you find one, even if it’s in a remote village on the east German countryside and you will find very authentic and helpful people, and not at all of the brainwashed kind. The dialogical leadership principles practised at dm are based on the individuals with their character, skillset, background and not on a standard model of customer-related behaviour.

Learn and teach to learn.

Can one learn and train empathy?

Research on leaders by Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis demonstrated that sustainably successful managers required one-third skill and cognitive ability to two-thirds emotional intelligence. Yes, your eyes haven’t betrayed you. More: sustainably successful senior leaders, have an increased ratio of 10 per cent level of intelligence to 90 per cent emotional intelligence.

So, don’t look for excuses on empathy, such as, ‘It’s just a gene I don’t have’. Ninety-eight per cent of people are able to empathise, our brains allow us to put ourselves into other people’s shoes. But not all of us use this ability to its full potential.

In other words: empathy and emotional intelligence are ingredients of the successful Listening Leader and they can be learnt. And should be learnt.

What is empathy, actually? ‘A person’s endeavour […] to put himself in the situation of the other, and to bring home to himself every little circumstance of distress which can possibly occur to the sufferer […] in its minutest incidents.’¹²

And yes, we can train it. According to Roman Krznaric,¹³ there are six habits of highly empathic people. If you want to enable yourself and your team to become more empathic, practise the following:

Habit 1: Switch on your empathic brain
Shifting our mental frameworks to recognise that empathy is at the core of human nature, and that it can be expanded throughout our lives.

Habit 2: Make the imaginative leap
Making a conscious effort to step into other people’s shoes – including our ‘enemies’ – to acknowledge their humanity, individuality and perspectives.

Habit 3: Seek experiential adventures
Exploring lives and cultures that contrast with our own through direct immersion, empathic journeying and social cooperation.

Habit 4: Practise the craft of conversation
Fostering curiosity about strangers and radical listening, and taking off our emotional masks.

Habit 5: Travel in your armchair
Transporting ourselves into other people’s minds with the help of art, literature, film and online social networks.

Habit 6: Inspire a revolution
Generating empathy on a mass scale to create social change, and extending our empathy skills to embrace the natural world.

If you put these six behaviours into your hand luggage you can start the journey to more empathy, a crucial ability for the Listening Leader.

Another good reason for diversity

‘Diversity, diversity, diversity, I can’t hear that word any more!’ was the desperate explosion of a former colleague who put the issue into the wrong drawer, that of soft skills and political correctness trends. He was also an expert of mansplaining, that’s when men interrupt women to tell that cute sugarbaby from the marketing department what really matters.

So, why on earth is there a diversity paragraph in the ‘Enabling’ chapter?

We have seen that 70 per cent of learning is actually experiential learning, or ‘learning by doing’. Working in diverse teams (and it’s not only about gender!) allows for many additional dimensions and perspectives on every single issue. Different perspectives allow enlightenment, transversal and lateral thinking; they enrich the conversation and therefore the ability to relate to very diverse stakeholders. If the job of the Listening Leader is to understand the stakeholders and bring their perspective into the company, they need to have many more antennae. That’s what diversity can bring to the party.

Therefore, make sure your team is both diverse and cooperative. You need both a common understanding about the general tasks of your team in a cooperative attitude and very diverse team members.

When I first joined my employer’s crisis committee we were eight members, all male, all Caucasian, seven of them middle-aged fathers of two, the eighth one a younger father with two children (it was me, then), seven out of eight were lawyers (I’m not). I immediately figured out, I was going to be the ‘diverse’ team member. Haha … In many situations I discovered how much more effective our crisis committee became when we recruited women, when we had a much wider age spread, when the first psychologist joined, when non-Europeans joined the team. We got better by the minute. Different angles of a crisis could be identified, neglected stakeholders were brought into the picture, different cultural reactions to certain decisions were underlined. We simply became better.

Why is that so important for a successful communicative leadership? Because diversity as well as empathy are two very powerful tools to be excellent at interacting with all kinds of stakeholders. The more diverse the team the more stakeholders they can relate to. The more empathetic the team, the better they can put themselves into the stakeholders’ shoes.

Learning in a diverse environment enriches the experience because there are more perspectives on one issue, because it can open your eyes on how some decisions may resonate with your stakeholders. Because you can’t be man and woman, old and young, introvert and extrovert all at the same time.

For the Listening Leader it is essential to be able to hear the signals, weak or strong as they may be, to see red flags immediately, to verify the impact of his actions, to gather feedback, to prepare decisions, to test the waters. Remember, strategy is made of two parts: the vision of the leader and the company and the context, the environment. The excellent company is able to read the internal and external environment and to adapt to the changing scene to the benefit of its stakeholders.

Without a radar screen (empathy) you can’t see the unidentified flying object. With Mr Spock, a half-alien in your team (diversity) you can identify the aircraft as coming from the planet Vulcan.

Why diversity really matters: it’s not only about fairness and meritocracy, it is about the ability to be more empathetic with a multitude of stakeholders and therefore to act accordingly and succeed.

What a company can do to best enable its stakeholders

At the German electric giant Siemens there is an old saying: ‘If only Siemens knew what Siemens knows.’ The intelligence gathered in a company is never exploited to the maximum, that’s an obvious truth. Important research has been devoted to managing the diffusion of knowledge in companies. Chief knowledge officers were established. I am not aware of a company who has solved this problem perfectly. I’m grateful for any hint.

Until I get this recipe for a Holy Grail feast, I’ll suggest some crutches to start a company’s journey with enabled staff towards communicative leadership.

1. Create a social platform within the company and let all of your employees access it.
2. Encourage knowledge sharing, through incentives, recognition.
3. Create a culture of openness, where every contribution is considered a valuable one.
4. Make knowledge sharing part of the leadership values and the objectives of the management.
5. Make sure knowledge-sharing enhancement (or lack thereof) in your team is measured in the yearly engagement survey.
6. Generate a collection of stories illustrating how the company works, what the educational and professional background of your people is, what they are working on and what successes and failures you have. Create transparency about the company’s clockwork but do so with stories that illustrate why that certain wheel turns and in which direction it goes.
7. If you have the resources, bundle the knowledge and let your experts teach it to all the others – on finance, sales, marketing, operations, IT, product development, back and front office activities. And if you have more resources bundle this into a proper corporate university or academy.

On those academics so far away from practice …

Another sin I committed during most of my time in the hamster wheel was to consider research and academia as the bucolic home of intelligent people who had no clue how hard it is to earn a living with management. In the last four years in my 24/7 job I graduated from the Meyler Campbell Business Coach programme and carried out training for non-executive directors on mentoring. During those four years I was both continuing to manage global corporate communications at Allianz and learning. Both programmes were burdened with kilograms of reading. What looked like a duty to fulfil became a source of increasing joy and ‘aha’ moments. Many of the books I had to read and discuss with my peers in my tutorials are listed in the bibliography of this book. The readings, the discussions, my working papers, challenging the research with my practical working experience strongly improved my leadership. I became a better leader in the last four years of my corporate career and many of my direct reports and team members have told me so. Let’s make a deal: I won’t bother you with two or three paragraphs on this subject and you ponder this for a moment. If you can improve your performance as a leader and gain time and money by tapping into the brains and minds of academia, wouldn’t you re-consider your opinion on what research can do to help you succeed? Try it, it’s worth the experience. It may only be necessary to ask a gifted team member with a good academic background to prepare one or two sessions a year, where relevant research affecting your business, leadership, learning is shared with the whole team. And make some time for your own reading. It will pay off. Remember the ‘discerning heart’ that Solomon received. It also brought him richness and a long life.

Enabling people: barriers to consider, according to a millennial

What are the limits and barriers to the achievement of enabling people?

1. Identifying realistic development possibilities. Let’s start with the obvious. What if Charlie Chaplin’s parents agreed with him that his best career would be one of basketball champion? As many hours he could have spent training, because of his height, he would never had reached this goal. And maybe the world would have lost an important comic actor. This shows you where the limits are, and those limits can be physical, but they can also be intellectual, psychological, characterial and so forth. When we speak about skills, both technical and ‘soft’, which are primary candidates for personal and professional development, things might not be as straightforward as you would imagine. Barriers might be intrapersonal conflicts of interest or seemingly unrelated but influential factors. Along with my peers, I believe these hindrances can only feasibly be unearthed through dialogue. However, it would be silly to think everything will come up to the surface with a simple interested question. This is why leaders must approach such discussions with emotional intelligence, persistence and approaches tailored to the individual in question. To millennials, good leaders think of how to resolve these blockades themselves, but great leaders help their employees think them up. Only this way do you discover that the reason Rachel repeatedly shies away from giving presentations despite being an avid public speaker is a jokey comment a colleague made to her about her English, or that Paul did not progress as well in some of his international projects due to cultural differences he encountered when dealing with Chinese clients.
2. Fear of losing investment in the employee. I believe this to be one of the biggest dilemmas leaders and companies face today when it comes to enabling its workforce. On the one hand the war for talent is real. Being taken into consideration by these emerging talents as an employer requires a whole lot more than it used to only a few decades ago. A good old fishing rod does not suffice anymore to lure in those rare exotic fish. Instead, dangle in front of them promises of comfort, of work–life integration (often just a cover for merging the two, rather than healthy separation), of development. Once you’ve caught your highly educated parade fish, the real fight begins. Career patterns have changed enormously. Nowadays, who hasn’t had at least three employers in the first career decade? Who doesn’t know someone who has changed career paths before the age of 40? Companies feel the pressure to keep talent interested. That’s why engagement and enablement have become buzzwords, which, when uttered, cause ears to prick up and heads to turn alertly from all corners of the room. On the other hand, I can hear the fist of a bitter manager hitting the table and his mouth pronouncing, ‘It’s all silly. They are sucking us dry of our resources and leaving us anyway. Why bother investing in them?’ While it is easy to fall into the trap of panic regarding talent leaving regardless, I believe in many cases where this has happened, there was a lack of real communication between the leader and the talent. Excluding those rare manipulative individuals, for which probably nothing in this book will ever work, people are willing to engage in honest conversations if they feel psychologically safe. If I knew I could talk to my boss about what things I would still like to do in my job in the next years, even if this meant considering leaving the company, the mere action of discussing it might open up options I had not considered. It seems to me that talking and thinking of strategies to deal with it are more likely to create opportunities, than avoiding such not strictly day-to-day-work–related topics.
3. The daunting task of organisational restructuring. Perhaps, when reading certain passages of this chapter, you might have found yourself thinking, ‘Okay, well this is all well and good, but in order for these elements to be in place, you must have a very adaptable structure, something that my big company, with its silos and established practices does not have.’ And yes, for sure, there are some solutions that are much easier to implement in a smaller, younger, flexible organisation. That might not necessarily be the case, though. One of the great opportunities companies ought to make use of in order to give employees the best possible tools to feel empowered is its network. Expertise, resources and experience often lie idle on the other side of the world or in a different department, while desperately needed in another. One easy way to create contact between the two, also called distributed intelligence, is through an enterprise social network (ESN). While many companies have an intranet or even an ESN, they often fail to fully harness its power. Maz Nadjm, a social media guru I was lucky enough to work with, opened my mind to the endless possibilities of the social network world within businesses. Ideas can range from logging all projects, with tags regarding skills, personal priorities and values, practical approaches to working according to preferences and personality types. The possibilities are endless. And you can either let your IT department set it up or, ideally, get the input of social media specialists who use knowledge about how humans think to structure a natural flow of information.
4. Inappropriate means. Even if you want to enable your employees and set up all the infrastructure to do so, it may not achieve your goals. We are moving from formal classroom and e-learning training towards informal social and collaborative learning, where development and learning becomes intrinsically linked with job. Some of the new training trends that millennials feel at ease with are cooperative in nature:
   • Team-based learning: In the hospital, medical apprentices walk together and are observed as each contributes bits of knowledge about the specific cases, therefore informing or reminding the others. Within companies, too, there is a huge knowledge base, which needs to be shared.
   • Experiential learning: The experiences of employees within the company can be of huge benefit to others and can act as teachings. No other training is more tailored to your business reality than this.
     This method of training is great for millennials and non-millennials, as it leverages on the increasing range of different profiles employees have and partly or fully blends out technology, which can often be distracting. The active nature of these learning options engages employees, adding an additional layer of thinking, interpreting, voicing to the passivity of hearing, reading or watching.
5. Gap between research and practice. During my studies in the areas of organisational psychology, I learned a lot about what research is uncovering about optimal and suboptimal business practices. In my age-appropriately limited work experience, however, I found that despite these new insights derived from both laboratory and field studies in companies, therefore not, as some of you might think, removed from the real world, were not put into practice, especially in recruitment and selection processes. In many cases, managers in companies are not aware of these research findings and base their company practices on norms found in the industry.¹⁴ An American study and a replication in the Netherlands about misconceptions about effective HR practices among HR managers and practitioners both found a significant discrepancy in knowledge.^{15, 16} The study quotes previous research finding evidence for the effectiveness of a link with academic advances for a company’s financial and other well-being. While experience does account for something, it would be stupid to dismiss the valuable insights empirical research can provide. More widely speaking, therefore, a company is advised to create a link with academia. This can start small, with leaders seeking subscriptions to leading scientific journals, or can go as far as organising monthly breakfasts with researchers and creating partnerships with universities and research institutes.