Archive for March, 2012
Some Listening Tips from IBM’s Sam Palmisano
Following is part of an interview that I thought you’d find interesting because it’s a slightly different twist on listening. Look for my comments at the end of the interview.
IBM’s Sam Palmisano: ‘Always Put the Enterprise Ahead of the Individual’
Published: January 18, 2012 in Knowledge@Wharton
Interview with Michael Useem, Management Professor
Useem: Let’s dwell on that for a second, around the issue of mentoring and coaching. I know that an axial principle of your leadership here is to provide lots of coaching and lots of mentoring. Looking back on your own career prior to 2002, who would you single out as the most important mentor you had along the way?
Palmisano: Well, it’s interesting, because so many people helped me. The key … is you have to be a good mentee. Because you have to listen. And what happens as you become successful is you forget the ingredient of being a good mentee, which is listening to the people who are mentoring you. But I’ve had obviously lots of previous managers, previous CEOs John Akers, Lou Gerstner, other guys on the outside who are always willing to help. If you ask and listen, people are always willing to help you.
I find that people aren’t always willing to listen…. You have to be able to want to be mentored. It starts with that. I see it so often. That is the key. But you have lots of role models along the way. People who were always a good role model for me [were those who] never put themselves first. They always put their institution or society or their enterprise first. And usually they get better results. If you say, “Well, why does it work?” [It's] because you get people more excited because they can contribute versus an individual trying to take all the bows for the team. And so you could say I’m comfortable in that style. But if you put that aside for a second, I actually think it’s a more successful product at the end of the day.
My comments:
I chose this piece because it was a different take on listening. Mr. Palmisano talks about the need to be a willing listener, to be the receiver. Think about the number of times you’ve walked by an interaction between two people and noticed equality between speaking and listening.
People with different listening habits will search for information that suits their styles, so even the best mentee will select what has the most value for her. Regardless, the point here is to remember to accept help when it’s offered and be grateful.
Scary Statistics about How Employees View the Workplace
While I’m skeptical when shown absolute numbers about the condition of the workplace, I do accept the premise behind them: few people are really happy at work.
Following are some of the dismal figures from studies:
Towers-Watson, Global Workforce Study
- 20% are engaged (they don’t say though that 80% are disengaged)
- 50% don’t feel inspired by leaders
- 53% don’t feel leaders are trustworthy
- 58% don’t think senior management cares about talent development
- 61% don’t think leaders deal effectively with poor performers
- 62% don’t feel leaders have interest in their well-being
Gallup, Workplace Study
- 49% are not engaged and 18% are actively disengaged
- $350 billion per year cost of disengaged workers to the US economy
Great Places to Work Institute
650% ROI to stockholders from the organizations on their list
There is:
- Low turnover
- High engagement
- Constant innovation and agility
- Ever-growing customer satisfaction
The numbers in these studies don’t tend to change year-after-year, nor do the questions asked that determine the answers. Still, some other findings do support the results. When people are exchanged from the best to the worst places to work, they change. There’s evidence that says when top performers are put into a low performing environment, they gradually falter and fail. But there aren’t a lot of studies done on the poor performers going to a top-notch outfit. Have you known people who said they were failing where they worked before coming to your organization and flourishing? Share those stories.
I tend to believe that the purpose in life and leadership is creating value. I once heard a very inspiring motto that I feel is the best way to articulate that belief and be a positive influence, anywhere/anytime.
What choice can I make and action can I take, in this moment, to create the greatest value?
My choice was to write this post to you, someone who is not one of the negative statistics, but someone who adds value.
Notes from the Field: Listening Skills Hygiene
A few days ago I tried my darnedest to push through a post-shoulder surgery anesthesia haze. I could hear people talking, but I couldn’t understand what they were saying. Some sound came through to me, yet I had no ability to make sense of the sounds. It took several hours and a nap to be clear enough to both hear and listen. That very frustrating situation once again brought to light the complexity of listening.
In my professional life I guide people from merely being hearers to being listeners—to go from taking in sounds to evaluating, analyzing and taking action. To be a really tuned in listener one must go beyond Active Listening (AL) techniques. I think of AL techniques as Listening Hygiene, or behaviors that create the impression that someone is engaged in the interaction.
When we’re told to practice good hygiene it is usually something that we do to the surfaces of our bodies such as washing hands or putting on sunscreen. Those techniques are very good for prevention and can stave off germs, but they don’t go deep into the bloodstream to heal disease. Inadequate listening is as big a “health” threat to an organization as poison is to an organism.
For this discussion it’s important that I differentiate Listening Hygiene techniques from tactics we at Listening Impact tout. Some of the more common Listening Hygiene techniques are:
- Maintain eye contact
- Lean forward
- Mirror gestures
- Remain silent
Those techniques do work for some people, especially when the interaction is pretty superficial, but they won’t suffice when there’s a lot riding on the need to fully understand the situation and content.
If we look at just one of the hygiene behaviors, eye contact, we can see how it might appear that the listener is intensely taking in what others are saying. After all, there’s the bromide that the eyes are the windows to our soul. I don’t know if that’s a true statement, but I do know that many good listening fakers can make excellent eye contact without actually paying attention. They are like I was when the nurse tried to wake me up from the anesthesia. I looked right at her, tracked her with my eyes, and apparently spoke her name, but I was not tuned in.
At Listening Impact we use Questioning Strategy as a tactic that requires both the listener and speaker to engage in the interaction. The listener is equipped with awareness about how he prefers to listen, which informs the types of questions s/he will ask. Our listeners develop understanding of other listening habits and develop questions that fit the style of the person(s) s/he is interacting with rather than asking unrelated questions that don’t lead to mutual meaning.
While most people don’t walk around offices in an anesthesia stupor, some do substitute superficial techniques for real skilled engagement.