Active Listening and Checking Your Ego

In my last post, I talked about leadership via the principles of a successful organization. In this post, I talk about two critical leadership qualities essential to a cultivating a successful organization – active listening and checking your ego at the door.

As I last wrote, I very much subscribe to a leadership style and philosophy of surround yourself with character people. Tied to this, your senior leadership team should include individuals you empower that allow them to run with projects in an entrepreneurial manner. Your role, as a leader, is to push the envelope, advocate for them via resources, coach and mentor them, and actively listen to their thoughts and concerns so you can put them in positions to be successful. Ultimately, our roles as leaders, and as athletic coaches, are to put people in positions where they can achieve successes. Again, this involves actively listening to their needs, concerns, and ideas while pushing and challenging them such that they can achieve greatness. This also involves cultivating a culture such that not all ideas have to come from you. It is your role as a leader to encourage and facilitate entrepreneurial thinking – not being the sole bastion of knowledge. As a leader, you cannot be in all places at all times so you need creative character people on your leadership team who can run with projects. Sure, you will have ideas that you convey and pass along but giving people the freedom to do their jobs, assuming you have hired correctly, will lead to greater more expedient successes.

Tied to this, you need to check your ego at the door. I think the notion of being egoless is well stated but I think some level of self-assurance and presence is important. To be a successful leader, this comes with a level of authenticity and knowing who you are. That said, the notion of the all-knowing all-powerful leader, to me, is way overstated. There are certainly times where a leader has to make the tough decision. I once heard Larry Bacow, President at Harvard, then Tufts say, “all decisions you make are 51-49 decisions; all the others can and should be delegated.” I think this is well said. Being egoless involves a level of self-assuredness and level of trust in your leadership team to make decisions. I was lucky enough to learn from Tim Lannon, SJ, that there are five ways to make a decision – me, you, me with your input, you with my input, and we. I think most often the best decisions come from me with your input and you with my input. This avoids the group think – we, the solo all-knowing leader – me, but involves a level or collaboration and dialogue. I have personally worked in environments that were toxic because decisions had to be made by a narcissist ego-driven leader. These environments moved slower, were less entrepreneurial, and the teams operated in a toxic unmotivated demoralized environment – not a recipe for success.

There is also a piece to leadership that has to do with listening. I recently spent time with an old college friend who talked about some of the challenges he experienced in his organization. It had to do with listening to people in the organization who do the work at the grass-roots foundational level. I think this is well said. I will add that your senior leadership team should also be bubbling thoughts from the team to you. However, if your senior leadership team only agrees with you or stifles ideas from the people doing the work, you have a leadership team problem. There is a place where you, as a leader, should engage people doing the work from time to time, to ensure you have your ear to the rail of actual goings on in the organization. There is also an important piece to this where you are out and about actively engaging the team, listening, and showing people you care. This has to be done from an authentic place. If you are just going through the motions inauthentically, as I have written, this will be recognized.

So, to sum up, while I hold true the principles I wrote about leadership of a successful organization in my last post, active listening and checking your ego at the door are important compliments to the principles. Those who try to lead from an ego driven all-about-me perspective, can be successful in the short term, and sometimes need to be front and center in cases of a crisis, however, over the long term, this practice is not sustainable.