Be quiet and just listen.
FEARLESS LEADER,
This week, how will there be time and opportunity for people to speak – while you just listen?
“It’s what we don’t know that matters.”
— MARCELO GLEISER, physicist
Keys unlock doors and doors help you get through walls.
Keys let you in and let you out.
Among the tools you need for Re-Entry is a set of keys that you’ll use every day, across all the spheres. Carry these with you all the time. Here’s the second key, and it’s a very timely one: Listening
Listening is a radical act.
It is key to unlocking relationship and resolving conflict.
Often it’s the last thing we want to do.
We’re all being called upon to be quiet and just listen.
To listen with humility. To listen to understand.
To learn something about each other and about ourselves.
The hardest thing about listening is turning off our internal reactions, suspending deep-seated judgment and bias.
Listening is not:
Preparing your counterargument, reacting, or interrupting.
It’s not even giving advice, fixing, or ‘helping’.
This is difficult. Most of us aren’t very good at it.
“I just can’t engage with the bewilderment and the defensiveness as they try to grapple with the fact that not everyone experiences the world in the way that they do.”
— RENI EDDO-LODGE, journalist
Try this: As a leader in the society of your firm, listen to these questions and try to do so without jumping to an answer in your head:
How much time is given for deliberate listening?
What kinds of fora and channels are conducive to those who have more or less difficulty saying what’s on their minds?
What are the barriers that dissuade people from telling you what they need to say and what you as a Fearless Leader need to hear?
This week, how will there be time and opportunity for people to speak – while you just listen?
“I’m for truth, no matter who tells it.”
— EL-HAJJ MALIK EL-SHABAZZ, leader