Thursday, May 31, 2012

The Discipline Of Strategic Listening

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I read a wonderful, brief article in the Harvard Business Review which focused on speaking strategically -- essentially, using your voice only when it is to your advantage.

The insights are superb, but one of the points that needs to be brought to the fore is the Discipline Of Strategic Listening.

There are times during your social and business exchanges when it is of great strategic significance to make a concerted effort to let another person speak uninterrupted, while you listen [being truly alert, focused and 'present'] and learn valuable information.

The ancillary strategic benefit is that you've given the other person a chance to feel the ego security of being respected and heard, while you've simultaneously had time to re-program or re-fine your speaking tactics by incorporating some of what you've heard.

Bottom line:

You learn while you listen, so you can use what you've learned to refine and improve your persuasive speaking skills.

I'll stop talking now and present this wonderful article to you:

---------------

How to Speak More Strategically

Posted: 2012-05-31 19:56:53 UTC
It had been three weeks since my throat started to feel sore, and it wasn't getting better. The pain was most acute when I spoke. So I decided to spend a few days speaking as little as possible. Every time I had the urge to say something, I paused for a moment to question whether it was worth irritating my throat.

This made me acutely aware of when and how I use my voice. Which led me to a surprising discovery: I spend considerable energy working against my own best interests. And if my experience listening to others is any indication, so do you.
In my observations, we speak for three main reasons:
  1. To help ourselves
  2. To help others
  3. To connect with each other
That's not surprising. All three of those objectives are legitimate and worthwhile.
What is surprising though is how frequently we fool ourselves into thinking we're achieving those objectives when, in reality, we're thwarting them. The more I listened, the more I noticed how we undermine our own interests.

Frequently, I had the urge to gossip about someone else. I realized that I did this to help myself (I will feel better if I think I'm better than that person) and to connect with the other gossipers. But clearly that would distance me from the people about whom I was gossiping. In fact, it would probably even distance me from my fellow gossipers too; who could trust someone who talked behind other people's back? My attempt to strengthen relationships was, instead, hurting them.

I also had the urge to share information when I thought it would be helpful to someone. That's a productive reason to speak. But several times I had the urge to say something simply to show that I knew the answer. Or to get attention. Or to increase my power in the group. It became clear to me that my urge to speak in those moments came from my desire to feel special. I wanted people to like me and to think highly of me. But who likes the guy trying to show off?

Sometimes I wanted to help myself by getting the answer to a question, or making sure I was counted in a decision. That's useful. But other times, I just wanted to make sure my voice was heard over the din of the other voices. I caught myself wanting to speak over someone in a meeting. Or arguing a point to get others to agree with me so I'd feel more confident in my own opinion (which I'm hearing a lot this political season). Is that really helping someone else?

In fact, I was amazed at how often I wanted to speak simply to assure myself that I was here. I had a role. I was noticed.

As I sat silently, trying to preserve my voice, I had the opportunity to notice how and when other people spoke as well. And I noticed all the same tendencies.

If I were to reduce our counter-productive speaking to a single motivation, it would be this: We often speak to make ourselves feel better in the short-term.

But life and relationships are long-term. And when we gossip, raise our voices, speak behind other people's backs, offer unsolicited opinions, or make jokes at other people's expense we're isolating ourselves over time.

There was some good news in my experience of talking less: I listened more. And listening, it turned out, was a much more productive way to achieve my speaking objectives than speaking.

When I listened, I helped myself, helped others and built relationships at least as effectively as I did speaking and with much less collateral damage.

I'm obviously not suggesting we stop speaking; we can't achieve our three objectives unless we do. We need ask for things. We need to share information. And there are a number of ways — like offering compliments and rephrasing what we're hearing — we can build relationships through speech.

I am, however, suggesting that we think ahead — long term — when we're about to say something in the moment. And that, before speaking, we ask ourselves one simple question: Is what I'm about to say going to detract from one of the three reasons I speak? If the answer is yes, consider saving your voice.

My throat is better now and I can speak as much as I want. Which left me feeling a little nervous; now that I know how easy it is to be self-defeating, will I keep myself on the productive side of the speaking equation?

Thankfully, the sore throat left me with a gift: the memory of a sore throat.

These past few days, when I get the urge to talk, I find myself doing a little calculation in my head: If I only have so much speaking I can do in a day, is this thing I'm about to say a worthwhile use of my voice?

What's amazing is that most of the time I immediately know.
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Friends, Colleagues, Readers and Fellow Commanders -- There is not a single one of us who didn't see some aspect of himself or herself in the HBR article inserted above. And if we are adaptively intelligent, we can use the wonderful observations of the author to our strategic advantage.

This is indeed actionable material.

Douglas E. Castle for The Taking Command Blog and The Sending Signals Blog




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Friday, May 25, 2012

Leadership: Practical Experience Versus Education

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In choosing a leader, the academically superior candidate is rarely the best candidate. Field and situational experience, from a practical standpoint, give a leadership candidate confidence, finely-tuned instincts, and speed of reaction time in order to master or otherwise address a situation. The best leadership candidates have a blend of both... but the experience is the necessary and primary qualification.

In an organizational scenario, the person in command has some experience in command and knows how to think, act and look like a leader. He or she is surrounded by a team of better technically-educated individuals who have complimentary and synergistic skills in order to make the team, as a functioning unit, most likely to be successful. Experience also tends to engender trust in, and respect for a leadership candidate.




I noted a wonderful bit of information from a News Release regarding a book on entrepreneurial leadership which I wanted to share with my commanders and commanders-in-training. An excerpt follows. When you've finished reading this artfully-written (and very true) promotional news item, please come back so that we can sum up together: ---------------

SAN DIEGO, May 24, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- "Who would you rather be lost in the woods with, Albert Einstein or Davey Crockett?" asks Michael Dalton Johnson author of the new business book Rules of the Hunt. (McGraw-Hill Professional; May, 2012; Hardcover, $26.00)

He continues, "Business schools provide a solid foundation for a career but it's not possible for them to give the experience needed to deal with the many day-to-day challenges and opportunities encountered in business."

In keeping with its subtitle "Real World Advice for Entrepreneurial and Business Success," the book departs from conventional business books in voice, content and format. The book contains over 200 "rules" delivered as brief anecdotes, short tutorials, humorous observations, case histories, an occasional rant and a few horror stories.

The final chapter is devoted to the author's advice for preserving physical and mental health while in the hunt for business success.

Subjects covered include leadership, negotiating, motivating people, time management, bartering, group dynamics, recruiting winners, sales, marketing, avoiding attorneys, relationships and personal growth. [read entire article
---------------

You get experience by working beside a leader and living through several real-time, real-life challenges with him or here. Then, if that leader trusts you, he or she (if persuaded a bit) will give you a chance to sink or swim on your own. If you swim, you'll lead. If you sink, you won't.

By the way, the very best leaders are ones who almost drowned, but pulled themselves out of it and learned how to dog paddle. Survivors have the most powerful leadership experience of all.



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Sunday, May 13, 2012

Effective Leaders: The Required Persona

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The Present Moment Is Consumed By The Vastness Of Its Absence - Douglas E. Castle


Effective leadership requires a certain persona, a certain image to subordinates, peers and the public in order that it may command the responsiveness and attention which it deserves. Watch such high-tech leader-team-oriented series as NCIS, The Unit, Criminal Minds, and a host of others [hopefully less graphic and violent], and note that the leader figures tend to exude the following attributes:

1) They appear a bit older than their charges or teammates;

2) They tend to have more scars (visible, physical) than their charges or teammates; they also tend to be:

3) Fearless and brave;

4) Confrontational if provoked;

5) Fast thinkers, but tending to keep their own counsel;

6) Expectant that their orders will be followed unquestioningly;

7) Difficult to impress;

8) Physically intense, and unafraid to invade another person's personal space;

9) Comfortable with every aspect of leadership and command;

10) Direct, effective oral communicators on a person-to-person or a person-to-group level;

11) Low-tech! -- While the exceptions may be the late Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and U.S. President Barack Obama, for the most part these leaders eschew apps and gadgets and prefer to act on hunches (intuition) and facts gathered by their technological support personnel, i.e., their in-house computer wunderkind-types, nerds, geeks and others suited more to brilliant back office analyses than to fronting the band or seizing the podium and demanding attention.

In persona, a leader is many things, some of which seem conflictory or anomalous. The one that I find most fascinating is that these figures are always intimidating, yet others (followers, employees, charges, recruits, trainees, students, subordinates, audiences...) desperately want their approval and even crave closeness to them.

Douglas E. Castle for The Taking Command Blog

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Wednesday, May 02, 2012

Individual Decisionmaking Is 90% Emotional

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Individual decision making, at least for the general population taken as a whole (and on the average) is approximately 90% emotional. if we take every matter decided upon to be a decision for statistical purposes as being equal regardless of the significance or nature of that decision, we find that the primary decider is emotion.

Even more interesting is that we tend to rationalize these emotions, after the fact, with defensively-constructed rational or intellectual arguments...these are intellectual rationalizations for emotional responses. If you wish to influence people either strike at or appeal to their emotional trigger points, and save the intellectual "supporting arguments" (things like ROI, charts and graphs, guarantees, quality, research and studies, and all academic things) for after the decision has been made emotionally.

These intellectual support items are just that -- they are tools which you have in your kit to assist the decision maker in expediting his or her rationalization of a decision.

Another important command strategy which applies to all leadership, marketing and sales is that you cannot use an intellectual argument to undo or change a decision which has been emotionally made, unless you work very, very quickly (and even then you are unlikely to win a reversal) before your quarry, constituent or client has had time to fully form his or her own intellectual fortification to protect the emotional decision already arrived at.

In these cases, introducing an element of "self doubt," while exploitative, may be the easiest route into the fortress of the foregone conclusion.

History's greatest leaders have been masterful at swaying emotional sentiment.

It is important to remember this in you role as a Commander.

In commercializing this emotional quotient and feeling-based behavior and decision making, marketers are aggressively in the process of distilling this to (oxymoron coming) the science of neuromarketing. How about that? Those faithful readers of The Mad Marketing Tactics Blog should expect to be hearing a great deal more about this

Douglas E. Castle for The Taking Command Blog
 

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