Are Others Pretending to Listen to You?

We have been taught that active listening is key to effective communication and collaboration.  What, though, constitutes the most effective form of active listening?  Suppose that someone is making eye contact, affirming your statements with a few simple nods, and/or uttering "mm-hmm" after a key point or two.  Are they listening closely?  Or are they pretending to listen?   

It turns out that we are not always very good at discerning whether another party is listening closely or feigning attentiveness.   UCLA's Anderson Review recently spotlighted the research of Professor Hanne Collins and her colleagues, writing:  

A burgeoning area of study, with papers co-authored by UCLA Anderson’s Hanne K. Collins, is establishing that speakers who feel heard often are not; that when the spoken-to feign attentiveness, it’s highly effective at misleading a speaker; and that a more active listening mode — volleying back a bit of what you’ve heard, explicitly stating a desire to engage, especially on topics of a sensitive nature – is the path to a more effective sort of conversing.

Collins suggests that there are two forms of active listening.  In the simpler form, it involves non-verbal cues intended to suggest that you are paying close attention. In another form, you are engaging with the other party in a much more conversational form.  This latter form of active listening is much more effective, and it signals clearly that you are in no way feigning attentiveness.  Collins focuses on three types of interaction:

• Paraphrasing: “Let me make sure I have this right. What happened at school today was…”
• Conversational callbacks: “As you mentioned in your email last week, your team needs more support to complete this project on time.”
• Follow-up questions: “I hear that you’re asking me to do more around the house. What specifically would help?”

For more on how to have an effective dialogue that includes a healthy dose of active listening, I highly recommend Charles Duhigg's book, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection. 

Testing Your Assumptions

You've used AI and/or Excel to build a beautiful model that examines the ROI of a new venture, project, or initiative.  The result? A strong case for investment, because the ROI is quite good.  You are ready to make your case to senior executives and/or investors.  How can you stress test your model?  The most important thing you can do is to test your assumptions. After all, garbage in, garbage out. If you build a model based on false assumptions, you are in big trouble.  Of course, confirmation bias afflicts many of us as we make decisions. We may be picking and choosing assumptions to deliver a rosy picture, rather than making more realistic presumptions about the future.  

How do we decide which assumptions warrant the most attention and should be tested vigorously?  Jon Fjeld was a long-time tech industry executive, and he now teaches at Duke's Fuqua School of Business.  He has a simple method for determining which assumptions need to be scrutinized first.  He argues that three factors are critical:

1. Severity:  How big is the impact on the project if the assumption is not true?

2. Probability: How likely is it that the assumption is not true?

3. Cost:  How expensive and time consuming is it to test the assumption?

Fjeld uses these three factors to create a simple ratio that can be used to rank your assumptions.  His equation is: (Severity x Probability)/Cost.   The higher the ratio, the more important it is that your prioritize the testing and validation of that assumption.  While we don't actually have a clear way to quantify these three factors, the concept of this ratio makes good sense.  By thinking about these three factors, and their relationship to one another, we can do a better job of deciding how we want to test, experiment, and prototype before making a big bet.  

Educating Students More Effectively, Preparing Them for the Workforce

Source: https://theglobalscholars.com/

Did you use a laptop to take notes in class during school?  Do your children use laptops during class to take notes?  University of Wharton Professor Adam Grant points us to a recent meta-analysis published in the Educational Psychology Review by Abraham Flanigan and his co-authors.  The results are crystal clear.  Grant summarizes the key findings: 

24 experiments: Students learn more and get better grades after taking notes by hand than typing. It's not just because they're less distracted—writing enables deeper processing and more images. The pen is mightier than the keyboard.

Perhaps all those schools requiring students to spend a big chunk of their day on Chromebooks should rethink their pedagogical approach.  As more and more companies complain about the skills and capabilities of entry-level employees, we need to rethink how we teach and how students learn.  Yes, we need to enable young people to use technology productively.  We can't go back to the stone ages.  However, we cannot just blame the phones and social media for the challenges that learners face these days (though banning phones in schools is an excellent idea).  We have to ask ourselves whether we have contributed to the challenges learners face by shifting so much teaching and learning from paper and pencil to the Chromebook (or other devices).  

Reviewing the Performance Reviews

Do you write effective performance reviews for your team members?  Have you received a performance review that you considered especially constructive and useful?  Stephanie Mehta has an interesting article about performance reviews in Fast Company this week.  She focuses on the effort by Ironclad CEO Dan Springer to improve the way his managers evaluate employees.   Mehta writes,

The CEO then read one written midyear review from every frontline manager—about 80 in total. He says about 20% were outstanding. Another 60% were solid—clear, metrics-driven, with specific examples. But roughly 20% missed the mark. Some featured long narratives that showed care for the employee but lacked actionable guidance. Others were short and vague. Springer tapped these managers for further training on how to give effective feedback. “We really did try to make it fun and not boring,” he says.

I admire the commitment to providing an in-depth examination of how these reviews are written and then following up with training.  Many managers receive very little education in how to write an effective review.  They are promoted to lead a team and then asked to take on this important task without a great deal of guidance and support.  Providing useful feedback is an art and a science.  Educating leaders about the science of providing constructive feedback is essential. For example, research suggests that providing forward-looking advice is more effective than traditional forms of feedback.  Giving them chances to practice is key to helping them master the art of reviewing their team members' performance.  

How Quickly Should a Leader Respond to Feedback?

Suppose that you a leader receives feedback, perhaps through a 360 degree evaluation.  Should leaders respond immediately to this feedback and change their behavior?  Perhaps not.  A new study suggests that moving too quickly to adapt in light of constructive feedback may be detrimental to a leader's reputation and effectiveness. Stanford Leadership Insights reports on the findings from an interesting new study by Danbee Chon, Ovul Sezer, and Francis Flynn: 

While past research — and conventional wisdom — suggests that leaders should respond promptly to employee feedback to avoid seeming dismissive, the researchers demonstrated through a series of studies that people don’t necessarily trust rapid changes in their leaders’ behavior, especially when they consider those changes to be difficult. Instead, they may regard sudden shifts as inauthentic, betraying a lack of fidelity between a person’s actions and their genuine thoughts and feelings.

What's the implication for leaders?  Is it simply to move slowly?  Not necessarily. The research suggests that leaders should carefully explain to their employees the consideration and effort that they put into a behavioral or policy change.  They should explain how they considered the feedback, why they chose to adapt given the critique from employees, and very importantly, how hard it was to alter their behavior.  Showing that it was not a kneejerk reaction meant to placate others is critical in these situations.  

What's Good for Our Kids is Great for Us Too!

Source: theladders.com

If you have not read Jonathan Haidt's amazing book, The Anxious Generation, I highly recommend it. Haidt makes a great case for banning smartphones in schools. Now, many school systems have adopted his advice. Early results suggest that the policies are having a positive impact on learning. I do not allow phones in my university classroom, and I'm confident that removing this distraction improves our dialogue considerably.

If this smartphone policy is good for our kids, shouldn't it be good for us as well? In today's Wall Street Journal, Chip Cutter writes an article titled "CEOs Are Furious About Employees Texting in Meetings."  He writes:

A few weeks ago, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky asked his top lieutenants to identify the problems they saw quietly plaguing the company. Chesky called it the “fester list.” One executive threw out an issue: Too many Airbnb employees weren’t present in meetings because they were checking their phones or laptops. “It’s a huge problem,” Chesky said. Then the chief had a realization. He was guilty of zoning out, too. “Sometimes I’m like, ‘OK, I heard it. I know what you’re about to say. I know the subject matter,’” Chesky said. “I text, but then people see me text, they text. This is a major societal problem.”

Cutter cites leaders from JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon to QXO CEO Brad Jacobs about the challenges of distraction during meetings.  Many leaders have become incredibly frustrated by the disconnected conversations, lack of collaboration, and poor listening occurring during meetings.  Of course, many of us would say that we turn to our phones because many meetings are long, dull, and boring.  However, we have ask ourselves:  Isn't that what our kids would say about classes in which they would love to use their phone?  Are we just rationalizing our use of phones during meetings in the same way students often do?  How about the "what if there is an emergency?" excuse?  Ask yourself: Just how many true emergencies do we experience in a week?  Moreover, we can easily set our phones such that people won't disturb us unless it is truly an emergency.   Yet, we choose not to do so.  I'm just as much of a culprit as many others I know.  

You can see the self-reinforcing mess we have on our hands.  We jump to our phone because a meeting is boring.  Then, because we are distracted and not listening actively to others, the meeting discussion drags on endlessly.  The collaboration breaks down, and we end up needing yet another meeting to get key matters resolved.  We have to break this endless unproductive loop.  Team leaders need to establish a new contract with their team members.  They will focus the meeting, tighten the agenda, and avoid repeated tangents.   In return, they ask that team members stay off their phones.  Try it out. See what happens.  My guess?  The results will be very positive, much as they are in schools.  

Leaders Should Always Consider How Their Team Members Might Answer The Question: “What’s in it for me?”

https://transformpartner.com

If you don't communicate effectively with your team members during a time of significant change, you will sow confusion and doubt.  Some leaders remain silent until they have more clarity themselves and until all the loose ends are tied up.  However, a lengthy period of non-communication can be very detrimental to the organization.   As Molly Rosen and Connie Rawson write in Fast Company this week, " We see this pattern again and again: silence creates space for confusion. In the absence of clarity, people default to self-protection and assume the worst. The longer the silence lingers, the further they go down the rabbit hole."  In fact, your team members will not only be confused, but they will speculate with their peers.  They will presume certain intent on your part if you don't explain your rationale.   

Rosen and Rawson offer some advice for leaders. They suggest that leaders should always put themselves in their employees' shoes and ask the simple question: "What's in it for me?"  If you want their buy-in, you have to understand what they stand to lose, as well as gain, from this organizational change?  Leaders need to analyze why they might be inclined to resist a change, and why they might find it beneficial to embrace a new initiative.  Rosen and Rawson suggest that leaders should ask themselves four questions before communicating about a new initiative: 

1. What are they worried about losing?
2. What might they gain?
3. What does this mean for them in the next 30, 60, 90 days?
4. What will we be transparent about even if we don’t have all the answers yet?