Improving Your "Ting" 聽

The dictionary defines “listen” as “giving one’s attention to a sound.” While this definition captures an essential part of the definition.  The goal of listening is understanding, thus, listening is a process.  As a process, listening then involves giving! Giving a lot more than mere attention with your ears.

Listening involves giving our heart, eyes, effort, empathy and so much more. The process of listening is so complex that no single definition can fully capture what really happens when one listens. As a result, from a single Traditional Chinese character, I will show that “genuine listening” involves more than auditory perception.

In traditional Chinese, the verb listen pronounced Ting literally means "to listen".  Ting is a character made up of several other distinct characters, each having a meaning that represents what we actually "give" when involved in the listening process.

Genuine listening involves giving the maximum of yourself to the process.  That is represented by the symbol "shi" (十 ) which means ten or maximum. When others know we respect them enough to give 100% of ourselves to listening and understanding them, they will be much more apt to open up and share.

Genuine listening means maintaining eye-contact (目) as represented by the character "mu" or "eyes".

When engaged in a conversation, words represent a fraction of the meaning that is conveyed. A lot more information is transmitted nonverbally. Researchers have found that the total impact of a message is about 7 percent verbal, 38 percent vocal and 55 percent nonverbal. Respectful eye-contact helps to bridge the boundary between the verbal and nonverbal. It brings a pure quality of receptivity as it opens the window to content and context of the message. So, when listening to someone, get rid of all visual distractions.

The next character "yi" means "one" or "single".  When taken in context with the character the next character "Xin" which means heart. "yi" means single undivided attention.  Coming back to the character "xin"... All humans have a need to be validated.  Listening to them with empathy allows them to feel as though they are being heard and understood.  This then feels good because it is connected to our deepest sense of self-worth. Oftentimes we listen with our attention focused on how we are going to respond or refute what the other person is saying. Genuine listening is different, it involves listening with curiosity, compassion, and with the true purpose of understanding.  Listening to someone with empathy demonstrates caring and acknowledging.  Listening with empathy gives the other person a chance to open up and to fully express themselves which is also represented by the character Xin meaning heart, as in them being able to express themselves from the heart.

As we move to the left, the next character means "ear" or hearing.  But remember ear is only part of Ting.  Listening involves more than the auditory act of hearing. We use our ears to listen by paying attention not just to the words spoken but also to the tone, pace and emphasis, to help understand The person’s relationship to the words.  Just using our hearing effectively as we listen already tells us a lot.

The last character "wang" represents king.  Formally it can also mean best.  We use our mind as we’re listening to understand.  We consider the words and ideas shared.  Many interpret "wang" in this context to mean best thinking or thinking like a king.

So if we take a look at the whole character, we could summarize the single Traditional Chinese word for listening which is Ting to translate loosely to, "Giving the maximum of yourself using your eyes, ears and heart, paying undivided attention and using our best thinking like a benevolent king."

# leader #leaders #leadershipdevelopment #ting #listening #understanding

How to Think Strategically (Critically)

Great leaders build success by learning to think differently from the average person.  

Successful people have sought to master a single skill: The ability to THINK CRITICALLY.

Critical thinking is the process of careful and deep thinking about a subject or idea. It includes being able to analyze and weigh facts, to carefully reason, and to make insightful connections.

Here are five tips:

1. Learn To Accept Negative Feedback When someone criticizes your work, it doesn't feel good. You'll be tempted to defend yourself, or to close your mind.  Don't. Steps to accepting negative feedback Recognize its value Ask for it regularly Reward it. Thank people for it Never punish negative feedback Listen actively Don’t respond right away Don’t refute the criticism or justify yourself Don’t take offense. Don’t interpret it as a personal attack

2. Block Time To Think The whirlwind and urgency of the day is a very strong pull on your time.  But don't confuse motion with progress.  Don't confuse urgent with important.  Critical thinking is hard work. So, when it comes time to analyze facts, block out time in your calendar to engage in deep thought, because it is important. Use some of the following questions to help you analyze: What is the problem preventing you from being successful? If you could solve the problem, what does success look like, how do you measure it? What are the facts and assumptions? What are some alternative solutions to achieve the goal? What are the pros and cons of each alternative? What is the best solution given the goal and your practical constraints?

3. Create The Conditions For Insight Quiet moments: Quiet moments help reduce external perceptual competition (e.g., sights, sounds) for our conscious attention or awareness, allowing the brain to detect weaker signals more readily. Looking inward: Looking inward, or thinking about your thinking (also known as metacognition), shifts the focus of awareness away from older, more established solutions, and away from external input. It also can shift your focus to your thought process itself, as opposed to just the content of your thinking. Positive emotion: Research suggests people are more likely to solve more problems with insight when in a positive mood than in a negative mood. Distance from the problem: When you walk away from the problem and allow your attention to drift, this frees up the conscious mind from focusing on very strong and well-rehearsed signals.

4. Zoom In and Zoom Out One pitfall that prevents critical thinking is focusing only on the detail and the short-term. Zooming Out is essential to big picture decision making. It helps you to put things in context and stress principles that are important, but perhaps you may miss some subtleties and nuances. Zooming In brings the details into sharp focus. Opportunities may look large and compelling, but may lack context.  One trap of Zooming In is that the constraints of the details become "the problem to solve" rather than trying to achieve the original outcome. The best leaders work the zoom button in both directions.  When faced with a crisis, they can address the immediate situation while seeking structural solutions. They can zoom in to see problems while zooming out to look for similar situations, root causes, and principles or policies that will help prevent the crisis from recurring.

5. Take a Break From The Problem You'll benefit by taking a break and letting all the facts settle in your mind. This allows you space to learn and adapt from your experience and room to process what you have been thinking about and release negative emotions. Learning to think critically can take you and your work to the next level.

# leader #leaders #leadershipdevelopment #strategy #strategic #strategicthinking #criticalthinking

Delegating Effectively

In this chat I talk about how to become more effective at delegating.

First I talk about barriers to delegating.

• Not enough time to teach or train on how to perform the task
• Feeling of loss of control
• Feeling that you may lose credit
• Enjoying the task being delegated
• Feeling you can do this better
• Feeling you may be delegating yourself out of a job
• Lack of confidence in the team
• Team may say they don’t have the time
• Team member may have a fear of failure
• What else?

Next I talk about the benefits to delegating

• To the organization
• To you
• To your team
• To the individuals

I talk about part of your job as a leader being to

• Create capacity and capability
• Making sure work gets done at the right level

I make a case for building capability and capacity on your team

I explore what it looks like when work is getting done at the right level and when it is not

I close with several tips to delegating

Spend the time up front to clarify and align on

• The problem that needs to be solved
• The objective and the scope of what needs to be achieved
• The vision of success (the outcome)
• How success will be measured

Delegate the right level task/objective for each team member’s skill set

• Work with team member’s strength

Allow time for learning and growth

• Delegate important things, but consider carefully when needing to delegate urgent things

Create lists of questions or a template

• Share how you think about the task or the project

Set up a good cadence of accountability

• Set more frequent outcomes that together lead to the goal
• Check-in in a timely manner such that if the task/project is off track, there is time to have the team member get it back on track.

Be patient and supportive

• Mistakes will happen.  Adopt a growth mindset and help your team to learn from the mistakes.  Encourage them to keep learning and growing.

Resist the urge to “tell” or jump in and take over.

• Use the “Problem Ask” or “Solution Ask” technique when coaching

Do not abdicate accountability

• Ultimately, you are accountable.  Own that accountability.  You are responsible for the team’s success.

Recognize and celebrate success

Don’t give up.  Developing your team and learning to delegate takes time.

# leader #leaders #leadershipdevelopment #delegation

7 Things Great Leaders Do

In this chat, I talk about 7 things all great leaders do.

1. Great leaders improve how you are showing up

• Understanding how your nature affects the team
• Detecting if you am contributing to a problem
• Considering how you can improve
• Shaping a culture of learning and growing teach by example and use feedback as a tool for continuous improvement

2. Great leaders give meaning to the team

• Establishing the mission and vision of the team
• Setting rules, principles and values for the work the team is doing
• Planning short -term goals, both as a group and individually
• Establishing the roles and responsibilities of team members

 3. Great leaders build a high performance teams

• Encouraging a deep and mutual understanding among team members
• Creating an environment of trust and interdependence
• With trust, we don't fear conflict.
• We have healthy conflict where everyone speaks up and is heard
• With healthy conflict, we have commitment - even if the decision did not go our way
• With commitment we can have accountability
• With accountability, we pay attention to and deliver results
• All of this promotes teamwork

 4. Great leaders know how to motivate individual team members

• Detecting and understanding the needs and motivations of each person
• Comprehending and using motivational factors
• Using resources and tools to increase the motivation of the team and its members
• Using communication as a motivational tool
• Recognizing and rewarding results

5. Great leaders develop their people continuously

• Some of the most common areas of development are the fundamentals
• Improving communication skills of team members. Interpersonal communication
• Solving problems and making decisions
• Solving conflicts quickly and efficiently
• Improving the efficiency and effectiveness of daily work
• Time management

6. Great leaders see their job as improving the effectiveness of the team

• Delegate effectively. Allowing time for mistakes.
• Use Coaching as an effective tool to empower and develop their people
• Giving and receiving positive and negative feedback in a frequent and timely manner.

7. All of this is centered around great meaningful communication.  Communication that is concise, coherent, and relevant.

And they repeat this cycle endlessly.

#leaders #leadership #leadershipdevelopment 

Communicating Across Cultures

The world today is Globalized. We can often find ourselves in situations where we need to communicate effectively with people from different cultures. This is not just a necessity at work. It is highly likely that your neighbors or the people you socialize with come from different cultures.

In this episode, I chat with my good friend Gustavo Guillemin about Communicating Across Cultures. Gustavo is a published author, a Professor, and had delivered TEDTalks.

Gustavo and I share stories about times when we both made notable mistakes while communicating with people of different cultures.

Gustavo also shares the Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory. This is a framework for cross-cultural communication, developed by Geert Hofstede. It shows the effects of a society's culture on the values of its members, and how these values relate to behaviors, using a structure derived from factor analysis.

If you work or communicate with people from different cultures, you'll find this chat very informative.

#hoefstedemodel #hoefstede #hoefstedeframework

Characteristics of Great Leaders

This chat is somewhat an extension to my previous chat on the differences between a "Manager or a Leader".  

In this chat, I delve deeper into the characteristics that define great leaders.

• The five levels of leadership as defined by Jim Collins in his book, Good to Great
• Why leaders are important
• The importance of teaching and having a teachable point of view
• Having great ideas provide the framework for actions at all levels
• How values define the behaviors you want in an organization and how they provide the grounding for the right actions
• Having high-energy and creating energy in others
• Having the courage to see reality and acting on it
• Being able to create and communicate a compelling vision of the future in a manner that engages people emotionally and rationally
• The power of Humility based leadership

Are you a Manager or a Leader?

In my career I often see folks getting promoted to “Manager” and that is typically because they were a great operator.  They were the best technician, or the best barista or the best sales person, but in the end their team was unhappy, or overall they didn’t achieve what they were supposed to so this person ultimately failed as a leader.

The biggest reason for this is that being a Manager and being a Leader are two totally different skill sets and the individual contributor who was promoted to Manager, was never trained as a leader.

In this chat, I’ll explore the different behaviors of a Manager vs a Leader.

Before we run through a side-by-side comparison, let’s talk for a second about who can be a leader.  As I talked about before, many people see Managers are Leaders.  I’ll submit that you can have leaders at any level in the organization.  This will make more sense as we run through the side-by-side comparison.  Also, as we run through this list, think about other leaders to see how these attributes align.  Leaders such as the President of the United States, or the informal leader of your own social group.  Thinking about how leaders behave in a different context will help you better grasp the ideas.

Purpose:  Managers provide stability and predictability; Leaders drive change

Focus:  Managers manage the work, Leaders lead people by inspiring and motivating

Vision:  Managers look at short-term / today; Leaders look at long-term / Horizon

Direction:  Managers follow existing direction / maintain status quo; Leaders provide new direction and change the norm

Values:  Managers value results; Leaders value achievement

People:  Managers view people as subordinates; Leaders view people as followers 

Control:  Managers exert formal influence; Leaders exhibit personal charm

Appeals to:  Managers appeal to the head; Leaders appeal to the heart

Culture:  Managers endorse the culture; Leaders shape the culture

Approach:  Managers plan details around constraints; Leaders sets and leads direction

Decision Making:  Managers make decisions; Leaders facilitate decision making

Rules:  Managers makes the rules; Leaders break the rules

Action:  Managers tend to be more reactive; Leaders tend to be more proactive

Risk:  Managers minimize risk; Leaders take risk

Concerned:  Managers are concerned about doing the thing right; Leaders are concerned about doing the right thing