James King

One of the first big challenges that I faced as a coach was to listen without moving to action. My natural instinct was to listen with the intention of working out what needed to be fixed. Working out what needed to be fixed allowed me to annoy people with suggestions and to decide what to do in order to facilitate a better outcome.

It seems obvious, but people did not always want advice or help, especially when they were still thinking things through. What they mostly wanted (and needed) was a thinking partner, who helped them reflect and come to a better understanding.

As I have heard it said before – they want either a new insight or greater clarity on the actions that THEY want to take.

So far so good – I have learned to listen with the intent to understand, rather than respond. I have also learned to play the roll of sounding board, focusing on helping the other person to gain clarity, rather than trying to really understand the problem myself.

But I have also been encountering the opposite problem when working with teams. Sometimes I suspect we are using analysis and discussion as a form of procrastination.

The problem here is that we get so much data and have such complex issues to discuss, that we are always in the position to better understand the problem. We can

• Gather more data
• Dig deeper into root causes and
• Seek out more views, more input and more agreement

The problem here is that it can feel like progress when we continue to learn more, but to the customer (or stakeholder), it seems like nothing is happening.

Actually, I should rephrase that – for the stakeholder, nothing is actually happening. This is not about explaining our actions better with good communication, this is about realising the value of our knowledge, rather than seeking more “potential value and understanding” before acting.

In fact – asking the same question frequently, or demonstrating that we have heard someone’s concerns and we feel great empathy for them, wears thin and can actually become annoying if the that someone starts to feel that they will talk to us yet again, with no real outcome other than us feeling better informed.

I find this in coaching teams where we might discuss the cause of something like unpredictable, out of control work, without actually taking steps to change things. Sometimes the discussion uncovers really important points, but other times it might have been better to just try something simple and see if things improved, even if we risked starting with the wrong solution.

I recently found it too as the customer. Over the weekend we got served a pretty bad meal and the waitress asked about how our meal was. We shared our disappointment and she showed great understanding. But the meal was still poor and the discussion didn’t really add much value to my life.

We then got offered a free Brownie, which created value from my daughter’s perspective. It was a pretty small thing but at least (for her) it meant that there was an attempt to resolve the issue rather that an attempt to understand that the issue was understood.

Certainly if we had a series of bad meals, having a poor waitress apologise each time would wear pretty thin, pretty quickly.

Action creates momentum that is sometimes missing when we keep listening to the same message multiple times.

This creates a need for balance, or at least judgement. When is it better to seek a greater understanding before acting, when is the goal to actually listen and not to act, and when is the only real value going to come from acting rather than listening?

I guess the high level answer is “it depends” or “yes you need a good balance with zen like presence, a bias for action and an “Einstein like” mindset of understanding the problem before acting”.

But more practically, the habit/competence I am going to focus on for the next month or so is to be deliberate in deciding when, specifically, to

• Listen before jumping to action versus moving to action before delaying; and
• Seeking better evidence and understanding versus allowing analysis and discussions of data to become an excuse for procrastination.