1: Introduction to Powerful Listening

You're listening to Coaching Skills for Leaders, episode number one recorded on August 19, 2011. Produced by Innovate Learning, Maximizing Human Potential. Welcome to Coaching Skills for Leaders. My name is Dave Stahobak. This is the show for leaders who want to develop their coaching skills so they can influence the success of others. They're organization and themselves. Whether you're a seasoned leader or you're leading people for the first time, improving your coaching skills will drive your success and most importantly the success of others. Today's topic is an overview of this new show and an introduction to powerful listening. And I want to thank you so much for taking a few minutes to tune into this new show. There's probably a couple of reasons you may be tuning in. One is you may have found this on the internet. If you have, gosh, thanks so much for taking the opportunity to listen for a few minutes here. More likely you know me or you know my wife Bonnie and you are interested in what we're up to. This has been something that's been on my mind for actually about four or five months, starting off the show on how to help leaders become more effective coaches. And so before jumping in and to the first topic here today on powerful listening, which is a key skill set for leaders. I thought I'd take a moment here to talk about why start this show. What is this trying to accomplish and who's the audience for the show. Let me tell you a little bit about my story and my background for those of you who don't know me and don't know my background. I've been in the learning training development industry now for over 10 years doing facilitation training, coaching, consulting, sales interactions. And I actually went when along recently here and did some adding of how much time I've spent doing that in the last 10 years. And I came up with over well over 1100 hours of facilitation I've done tons and tons of hours of training, hundreds and hundreds of hours of coaching. I've lost count on how many different types of sales situations and interactions I've been in in the last 10, 11, 12 years. And during that time I've had some wonderful success. I've had the great privilege to privilege the great privilege to work with a number of wonderful organizations. And wonderful client organizations. I've won recognition for facilitation and training. I've been recognized with national sales awards. And so I say all that not to brag by any means, but to just give you an idea of my background and also to let you know I've been around the block a few times in this industry. And I think more importantly for you as a as the listener to this show is that there are things that I've started to see in my career now and working with people and working with leaders that really do become patterns. And part of my reason for wanting to start this show is to really share with you what I've learned, what types of things that I continue to see. And whatever I can do to give you that perspective and the guests who will be on the show of how we can help you to become a more effective leader. And this all kind of came to head for me about three or four months ago. I was finishing up writing my doctoral dissertation at Pepperdine University. My dissertation was doing research on how executive coaches use an instrument called the Myers-Briggs type instrument type indicator. And I think I couldn't get the name of the instrument correct after spending two years in my life studying it. It's the Myers-Briggs type indicator MBTI you may have heard of it called. And after studying this this instrument and the coaches who use it I came as some interesting conclusions when I finally finished the results of the study here in this past spring. And I think most of the conclusions wouldn't be of great value to this audience. So I'm not going to bore you with the details. But one thing that came out really strongly in the study is that executive coaches, people who are being paid in many cases hundreds of dollars an hour actually it's even much higher in that Harvard Business Review reported within the last two years the average rate for an executive coach someone who's coaching people at the highest levels of organizations is at $500 an hour and up. And so you think about coaches working with CEOs senior executives for you know two or three hours a month. I know coaches that build people thousands of dollars a month to do coaching and leadership development. So these are folks doing some pretty high level work. And what I found in my study one of the biggest findings was that the people who are doing this work with senior leaders are spending a tremendous amount of their time. Helping them to raise their own self awareness not the self-awareness of the coach the self awareness of the leader helping them to become more understanding and more present to their own skills their own weaknesses their personality preferences and how that shows up for them and their interactions with others. And this is something I've heard for years in studying leadership and working with our clients and seen many many examples of it the importance of of knowing ourselves first in order to be able to lead and coach well. But I'll tell you after spending all this time doing the research on it and spending two years working on the study it sort of hit me square in the middle between my two eyes just the importance for all of us as leaders to do. To do a great job of working on ourselves first so here's what I've learned in the last ten eleven twelve years leaders can make a big difference in the lives of others if they take a little bit of time to make a difference in themselves. And I think someone who captures this really well is a gentleman named Bob Sutton Bob Sutton is a management professor at Stanford and he's famous for writing the book Good Boss Bad Boss. And while back he posted an article for Harvard Business Review called twelve things Good Boss's belief it's a great little article. And it's kind of the twelve things that if you're a good boss you sort of have this the central beliefs and I'm going to post a link to this article in the notes for this show which I'll direct you to later on in the episode here. But the twelve the one the last one is a good bosses belief that because I wield power over others I am at great risk of acting like an insensitive jerk and not realizing it. And boy I'll tell you I can resonate with that I know there's times that I have been insensitive to people I've worked with and people I've led because when we're put in a position of leadership we do have more power and the things that we do. The great strengths we bring are magnified throughout the organization and the people we lead and the things that are challenges for each one of us are also magnified and anyone any of you who are listening to this know that that's very true. So the reason I care about this so much and the reason I care about developing leaders and helping people to improve their coaching skills is because if you can do an effective job at leading people and coaching people and creating an environment where people can be successful. You enhance not only the quality of their work but the happiness of their lives and I just believe in this so strongly I run into people all the time and some of the organizations that we've worked with over the years. And I find people who have great bosses and love them and are just so motivated to do work and I find people who have just awful terrible bosses and it just eats at them every single day. And then a whole bunch of people kind of in between and there's a lot of mediocre leadership out there. And boy if you can become the type of leader that can coach people and use great skills to create environments where people can do wonderful work and be motivated about the work they do. Not only do you have a tremendous competitive advantage over other organizations and other groups but you create an environment where people are happy and love their work and that affects their families their their their career goals really everything about what they do. And so this show is designed to be a forum for weekly tools to help leaders coach others more effectively and there's a number of ways that I plan on doing that I'm going to be bringing in articles blogs I'm going to be taking q and a from from you the listener. And I hope to invite a whole bunch of different guests on the show of folks who I think are really effective leaders and actually have a whole list of people already in mind that I plan to bring on the show here that I think that you would really benefit from hearing their perspective in addition I'm hoping that a number of authors and can will come on the show eventually and get perspective of folks who are big and writing about leadership. And then of course my own perspective and my own experience of having done this for a while and I'd really like to hear your perspective to so as this show starts planning out in the coming weeks and we hit lots of new topics I'd really like to hear from you what you like to see on the schedule and what kind of topics you'd like me to cover and our guests to speak about and there's two great ways for you to get in touch with me if that is of interest to you you can contact me by phone and leave a message and an audio clip. At 877 Learn 45 again that's 877 Learn 45 or you can send an email to feedback. at innovatelearning.com. So that's again feedback at innovatelearning.com. And by the way, that's innovate learning, not innovative learning. It happens all the time. And I think that gives you a pretty good overview of where I'm planning the heads. So this will be a weekly show. And so watch for it each week here. And let's jump right in on the first topic, which is how to become a more powerful listener and why is that important? Boy, powerful listening is just a key, key skill for someone who wants to become an effective leader and it's a key coaching skill to really be able to help people perform in the workplace. In order to demonstrate just how challenging listening can be, in a moment, I'm going to play an audio clip where there will be a number of voices telling a story. And so listen to this audio clip and see what it is you can hear. Here we go. Listen. And if you're feeling pretty overwhelmed, you know what's positive. And when you got an email from someone, it was because it has friends. One of the closest friends I've come to is you. They wanted to reach out to you. I remember so much. I was talking about my email and my email. And I'm just trying to keep an eye on the channel. So that you can be a Ken from this link on. OK, so there's a lot there. And if you're anything like me the first time that you listen to this audio clip, you hear a lot of noise. And sort of you get to this point where maybe you started to do this already, start to filter through some of the things you're hearing. So you're starting to hear a man, you hear a woman, you hear some background noise. And you kind of start to get some pieces of what's going on. But it sounds like a lot of chaos. And boy, you know, I think when I talk to the clients that we work with, and when I just think of my own experience on a day to day basis in trying to teach others leadership tools and to do consulting and training, this kind of feels like my life is we have so much information coming at us, right? And especially now with the economy being as challenging as it is for so many organizations, so many state agencies that leaders are being asked to do more than ever before, not just leaders, but everyone in every organization. So we're being asked to do more with better, faster, hopefully, with fewer resources, with limited amounts of budget. And oh, by the way, manage your 150 emails you get every day too and stay on top of that in addition to all those other things. And so we're just being bombarded with tons of information and data that's coming at us. And so one of the things that we just have to be able to do as leaders is we have to be able to focus and sort through it. And by the way, not just in our listening skills, but in every aspect of how we're focusing on our work. But one area for sure that we do need to focus on in addition to every aspect of the business climate and organizational climate is our ability to focus on our listening. So in order to demonstrate just how effective we can be if we focus our efforts on one particular stream of information, in this case, listening to a conversation of multiple people at once, I'm going to play the audio clip again. And this time, rather than listening to everything, listen for one voice. Now I'll tell you there are three voices total. One of them's my voice, the other one's Bonnie, my wife. And then the third voice is our friend Sandy. So listen for one of the voices, doesn't matter which one you choose. And see if by listening to that one voice, you can understand more of what's happening. Here we go. Listen. And if you're feeling pretty overwhelmed, you know what's happening. And when you got an email from someone, it was because it's a crime. And they wanted to reach out to you. And I remember so much on my email. So that's why I'm going to read a time with a email. And just keep asking questions. So that you can be in front of this link. Now focusing on one voice still does not make this an easy exercise. But you probably heard more than you did the first time. If you were able to focus on my voice, you heard me talking about the good old days of email and talking about my experiences with it. And if you were able to focus on Bonnie's voice, you heard her talking about how to organize files effectively on a computer. And if you were able to zero an unsanity's voice, she was talking about the trafficking in person's report that the US State Department puts out, which is part of her research and area of expertise. But you couldn't hear at all. You had to focus on one track in order to really understand what was going on. And boy, you know, working with people is very similar to that too. Now I want to sort of hesitate playing this exercise in this audio clip. And in one way, I think sometimes that people hear this exercise. And they focus on one of the tracks and they say, oh, you know, I heard the man. That means I can listen well. And that is definitely a start in the right direction. But there's a whole lot of other things that you need to do in order to be an effective listener. But the reason I really shared this exercise with you is to show you that a real, a very simple shift in your mind and how you show up in a situation can have profound, profound results. You've made a small shift as far as listening for one specific focus thing. And you're able to get a lot more information. Well, you know, listening with people is very, very similar to that. So it's really important as leaders that we make small shifts in order to get great results. And so let's take a look at listening in more detail. You know, when we work with clients, one of the things that we try to do is to give folks some perspective on the different listening levels. And we've identified really four key listening levels. And I'm going to walk you through these four real quick here and then give you an opportunity to actually put it into practice sometime in the next week. And I think these will sound familiar. But really the first level of listening, and I would, I even hesitate to call this a listening level. But the first level is to pretend to listen to people. This is not really very effective listening at all. And this is when we pretend that we're listening or we want to be, we're in a situation where it's socially acceptable that to listen to whoever's talking, but really our mind and our mental energy are somewhere else. And you know, we all do this. We all probably do this on a weekly basis. You know, case in point, you know, if you go to a meeting of, you know, 20 or 30 people and you need to be there, and it's important for, you know, organizational politics and, you know, political reasons that you're at a meeting. But you really don't find that the meetings valuable to you and the content that's discussed in the meeting isn't something that's going to help you to do your work more effectively. You may tune out. And in fact, people do this in organizations all over the world every single day. And so that would be pretend listening. It's listening where you, you know, you may be occasionally make eye contact with whoever's speaking, maybe you even nod to kind of keep up the, keep up the, the illusion, if you will, that you are, that you're supposedly are listening. And so, you know, we all do it. Now, now that's kind of the kind of the minimal level and that's not even really listening. The next level is partial listening. Now partial, partial listening is something that I think a lot of us do a lot of. And that's because we have a lot of information coming to us. We have a lot of people coming to us. And just like when you heard that audio clip the first time, you were probably doing some partial listening. I know I was when I first heard it is I was trying to kind of get all the different pieces, but I wasn't really present to anything that's going on. So in partial listening, you get pieces of what's happening, but you don't really get the full picture. And, you know, great example of that is for those of us who spend any amount of time on conference calls or webinars or online learning classes, those are like the classic venues for partial listening. So you hear something that's pertinent to you. Maybe it's a 50 minute webinar and you hear the five minutes that are really pertinent to you. But then maybe the other 20 minutes aren't, but you kind of want to keep tabs on it to know where people are. And in case someone calls on you, you need to kind of have a good feel for where the conversation is. So those are just venues that tend to really have a lot of partial listening that starts to happen. And also, you know, we all do partial listening with people that we work with, with people that we lead. And it happens. It's human nature. We're not always going to be 100% focused on what it is that we're hearing, but it tends to be a good way for us to manage a lot of different things going on. Now, if we really want to be more effective with our listening, we want to move up to the next level, which is what we call present listening. Now, present listening is different than partial listening because when you're a present listener, you've done some work to try and minimize distractions around you. You've done what we just did a few minutes ago when we listened to that exercise and we focused on the particular speaker, where we focused on just the background noise. So we start to get tuned into exactly what the person saying, we try to minimize outside distractions, and we hear what was said, and we can recall it later. So that's a pretty good point in listening to get to. It's certainly a lot more effective than pretending to listen to someone and it's substantially more effective than just partial listening. So we really get a good feel for what the person said, but that isn't even the high quality. level of listening. That is good. That's that's getting in the ballpark. But where we want to spend some time as leaders is really the fourth and final level of listening, which is powerful listening. Now, how is powerful listening different than just that present listening? Well, here's what's different. You hear more depth. You hear more about what's going on. You start to ask questions of the other party as they're speaking so that you can more fully understand some of the things they're saying and maybe even some of the things that they're not saying. You start to hear what motivates them. You start to hear their values. You become even more naturally curious about what's going on, almost like that curious George book that many of us read when we were kids. You just want to know more and more and you're also listening for what's not being said. And when you get to the point where you can do powerful listening, you can hear so much about what people are trying to communicate to you and even things that they need to communicate to you that they may not even be doing a good job of communicating. Now, here's the thing. You can't listen powerfully all the time. And that's not the message of this show today at all. In fact, sometimes I've done this exercise with folks and they think that, oh, I really need to in order to be good list, it's a good leader. I need to really be a powerful listener all the time. I need to really get in depth with people. I need to ask good questions. I need to understand their motivations, their values. I need to be curious in every interaction. And I'll tell you if you do that and you start your days at 8 a.m. in the morning at work, you're going to be dead tired by 9.30. Because if you really do that well, it takes a lot of energy out of you. It listening is hard work to really get to that level. And so you can't do it all the time. But here's the shift that I would suggest for you as a leader. If you are leading people and you want to really be present with what's going on with the people around you, is to really make the time to take some time to become a more powerful listener. So that means blocking out some time to make it happen. That might be on a one-on-one meeting each week. That might be five minutes in a brief interaction. It might be taking the time to make a connection with someone that you wouldn't have otherwise made. Whatever that is is really looking for the opportunity and taking that time to focus on the other person so that you really can get more the in depth, the concerns, the motivations, the things that are really there, and the things that they may not be telling you right off the bat. And if you do that, you make the shift from being an employee and a member of an organization to really being an effective leader. And one of the biggest challenges that I see with leaders and some of the people that we work with who've become leaders is there's a belief that in order to be valuable to an organization, in order to be valuable to people you lead, that you have to keep working hard and keep doing all the work that you were doing before you became a leader. And that taking the time to listen while a nice thing to do when you have the opportunity isn't really quote unquote working. And if there's one thing I'd challenge you to remember from the show here today is that to make a shift in your mindset that listening is working. If you're a leader, taking the time to listen and to listen powerfully is work and not only is it work, but it's probably some of the most important work you can do because if you're a leader, you're not the one that's responsible for doing as much of the day to day work anymore. You're the person that's creating the environment for that work to happen. And if you're leading well, you're ensuring that you have a much better success of really understanding how to create those environments. Now I say that and I know so many organizations today are running so lean that leaders are being asked to do work too. And in fact, many of the leaders and managers that we know and we work with are doing a lot of the work themselves just because the organizations are so lean right now. And if that's the case, you know, go for it, jump in, do the work that you need to do to help out the organization. But don't do it at the sacrifice of not listening. Don't do it at the sacrifice of not asking questions. I really understanding what's going on with people being curious because a few minutes of doing that can really help you to get great results not only for your people, but also yourself too. And so I think that this is a good point to put this skill into practice. And we've created a listening assessment that might be helpful to you. If you're listening to this and thinking, gosh, you know, am I am I spending my time doing personal personal listening with people? Am I spending my time doing present listening? Or am I doing a pretty good job of powerful listening? The assessment that I'll direct you here to in a moment will give you a good way to get that understand whether or not you're doing a good job on either one of those. And so the you can actually download this assessment. It's just a one page listening assessment. And you can get to it at this website innovate learning.com/listen. Again, that's innovate learning.com/listen. That'll download a one page PDF. It's a listening assessment. Here's what I'd suggest you do. Sometime in the next week, take that assessment and find someone that you trust. Find someone you trust in that would maybe be willing to observe you in an interaction where you're listening to someone else. Ask them to take, you know, two or three or four minutes and just observe your interaction and then to complete that assessment and to give you some feedback on your listening skills. And hey, if you don't have someone that you trust in your organization or it's not practical to do that, then here's what I'd suggest you do as a as a possible other option is have a conversation with someone do your best to really connect and listen with them and then at the end of that conversation after that person's left pull out this assessment and complete it yourself and be honest with yourself. You know, you're the only one who's going to see it. So be honest with yourself on how good is your listening based upon what you see on that assessment and your interactions with that other person. And so again, that link you can download it directly at innovate learning.com/listen. And by the way, let us know how you did and send send me an email and love to hear how that assessment worked out and what types of insights you were able to gain from it. And so that's going to just about wrap up our time together here today. Now you may be wondering how you would keep up to date on other shows and stay connected with this show and when new episodes are going to be coming out. And so there's a couple of ways to do that. One way is to in about this is August 19th I'm recording the show. This show is going to show up on iTunes in about three or four days. So from that point forward, you'll be able to go to the iTunes store for those of you who use iTunes and just search for and when you get to the store in the upper right hand corner there, you can search for coaching skills for leaders. And once you find the show, you can subscribe for free. You will get regular episodes that will download each week. And you can also keep in touch with this show and future episodes on our website. And that is innovate learning.com. And finally, for those of you who are Facebook fans, we're also on Facebook. You can search for innovate learning on Facebook and hit the like button and you'll get episodes or you get updates rather about future episodes when they post and when they're available as well as a whole bunch of other information on great articles and tools that are effective for leaders. And then finally, I mentioned a couple of links and resources in the show here today. And so you may be interested in looking at some of those links or finding out more in detail about that or even finding more detail about me and my background. So I'll put some information online for that. The way you get to the notes for this show is go to innovate learning.com and just do a search here for the coaching skills for leaders show. You'll see there's a button on podcasts on the top of our page and just look for show number one and you'll find the notes for today's show. And so that's just about going to wrap up our time here together. And so thanks so much for really joining me for the first episode here of this new show. And just a reminder, if you have questions, comments, feedback on anything that I talked about today or if you have some results to share on how you did with the Listening Skills Assessment, I'd love to hear it. So feel free to leave a message for me at 877 Learn 45 or send an email to [email protected]. And again, if you have the ideas for future shows and episodes of things you'd like to hear me talk about or bring in guests on, I'd love to hear that as well. Thanks for taking some time to listen to the first episode and I look forward to talking with you again in just a week. Take care.