Your Friend in Leadership

Public leaders are often remarkably effective at engaging your communities through active listening. After decades as a communication and leadership consultant, J.Marie has found that leaders often miss an easy opportunity to use what you've heard to not just make good decisions, but to also build trust and credibility. She will talk about the extra step you can take to demonstrate to your constituents that what you've heard has transformed your thinking and is guiding your decisions and actions moving forward. In this episode, J.Marie provides you the roadmap by which you can close the loop of communication to demonstrate to audiences that not only do you listen, but you care.


What is Your Friend in Leadership?

Hosted by veteran communications strategist and leadership trainer J.Marie, Your Friend in Leadership is an inspiring and approachable podcast created to empower today’s public leaders. Each episode delivers strategic insights, transformative ideas, and actionable communication tools to help you better connect with your communities and move your mission forward. With deep appreciation for the important work of public leaders and the knowledge that leadership and communication are skills that can be built and improved, this podcast is your guide to confident and effective leadership every step of the way.

[00:00:00:00 - 00:00:03:10]
(Music)

[00:00:04:23 - 00:07:26:01]
J. Marie
Greetings friends and welcome back to this podcast on leadership and communications. You know, we've talked a little bit in earlier episodes about listening skills, the importance of listening, listening as a continuum, and some more specific skills like giving and receiving feedback. And I want to talk today about listening as an organizational activity, specifically how you as a leader can use your listening activities to not just inform your decision making, but also to actually build trust in you as a leader and in your organization itself and the activities that your organization is known for. And so I want to start by thinking about listening through the lens of, well, quite frankly, through the lens of democracy. And so we're going to cover a lot of ground here in just in a short amount of time here. But, you know, if you think about yourself as a citizen in a multi-layered democracy, you know, I think about what is my ability as a citizen to influence the policy decisions that are made by my government. And, you know, I think about that at the national level, the idea that I personally could do or say anything that will actually change the trajectory of what's happening at a national level seems vanishingly rare to the point of very nearly impossible. You know, what the national dialogue, you know, right now, it doesn't even qualify as a dialogue. It's people yelling at and across each other. It's a lot of positionality. It's very us versus them, right? But at a state level, you know, if I think about the decisions that are made in Washington state where I'm from, it's still pretty hard for me to imagine being able to do or say anything that would, you know, fundamentally move the needle on any of the issues that I really care about. But at a local level, I can change things. You know, I could show up at a school board meeting. I could volunteer for a committee at my local library. I could support my fire district, right? Like there are activities I could engage in that could meaningfully support and influence the way the world works at my local community level. But in part, that depends on how public leaders engage with their constituents. This is where talking about your approach to organizational listening, where this matters. So in my work with leaders over the last 20 plus years, I have found that typically, public leaders do a good job of listening. You don't become a superintendent or a fire chief, or a city council member if you aren't good at hearing what matters to the people around you. So typically speaking, I actually find public leaders to be pretty good listeners. Where I find the gap, where I think public leaders are most likely to drop the ball in this particular dynamic, is on reflecting back to the public or to their constituent groups, how they are different as a result of that listening. And I think that is the critical piece, closing the loop so that listening becomes not just an information gathering activity, although that is an important part of why you listen, so that you can better understand those you serve and what matters to them. So that if you close the loop, if you circle back to those people that you listen to, then not only does what they shared with you affect the decisions you make, it actually can be used by you reflecting back to them that you heard them. And not only that you heard them, but that your thinking is changed as a result of what you heard, you actually build trust. Because people trust others that they think care about them. It's not just about your competence in the field that you are serving. That matters too. Competence is important. There's no shortcut to competence. But competence isn't enough to build strong relationships and trust. In addition to competence, people have to know that you care about them. And the way that you can demonstrate that you care about them is to demonstrate that you know what matters to them. And the way you know what matters to them is to have listened to them. So when you engage in listening activity, so let's back this up, in an earlier episode, I talked about communications 101, the idea that you need audience, you need to know your message, you need to have your tool, and then you need to schedule out your activities. Well, part of this, the reason why it takes longer than most people realize to schedule out the communication activities is that really skillful communicators not only communicate their message, but they leave enough time in the communication schedule for people to respond back, whether they're answering a survey, whether they're attending meetings and giving you input. But in the process, you build in some opportunity for those people that you represent or serve to tell you what they like and don't like about what you're proposing. And then you take what you've heard and you use it to influence your thinking and then you share back with them what you heard and how what you heard mattered. But here's kind of the cycle. If we were to put it into like a five-step cycle, you would start by communicating to your internal and external audiences some baseline facts or information about the issue that you're seeking to address. So it can be as simple as annual budgeting. You might start with some baseline facts, reminding them about the general size of the budget, the priorities from last year. You might say, "Here's some of the things that are changing this year. The legislature's done this, or we got this big grant, or this form of funding is ending. So here's the big things that are changing. And here's some of how we're thinking about laying out next year's budget based on that." So you lay some baseline facts. You share your initial thinking based on these baseline facts. We're thinking of investing more in A, B, and C and phasing out X, Y, and Z. Then you reach out and you say to people, "What do you think about that?" So you share that kind of steps one and two, baseline facts and initial thinking. You share that broadly and you use a variety of tools to do that. So you might send it out in your newsletter. You might schedule a selection of staff meetings or meetings with the public or with your volunteer groups or your leadership team. You schedule a variety of opportunities to share out the baseline facts, your initial thinking. And then when you share that, you create opportunities intentionally for people to reflect back to you. So you might have a closing questionnaire at the end of all these public meetings, or you might in your newsletter, you might pose a couple questions and give people an email address where they can respond back. You might do a formal survey, but you create some opportunities for you to actually hear how people are responding to those baseline facts and your initial thinking.

[00:07:27:03 - 00:08:34:09]
J. Marie
And you give that a little bit of time so that folks can give you that. Then step four would be for you to synthesize and summarize what you heard into two to four key points. And then step five is that you go back out and you share again. So you either send a follow-up email message or you do a follow-up newsletter post or something in your social media, whatever the appropriate tools are. You say, "Hey, back in such and such date, we came out and we talked in all these ways." So you remind people of all the ways that they had to hear about the big idea and to respond. And you're saying, "We gave you these opportunities to provide feedback. And here are the two big things. We heard that you were most concerned about protecting A, B, and C, and you liked our approach to L-M-N-O-P." And then you say, "Based on that, here's what we're thinking now." So the last step in the process is to demonstrate that you are now thinking differently as a result of all of that listening that you did.

[00:08:35:09 - 00:12:26:08]
J. Marie
And that is where the real power comes in. Because even if I don't get my way, if I'm one of the people that you've come and talked to about this issue, and I shared with you that I actually care about E, F, and G, and that didn't end up rising to the top. But you can show me that you listened deeply to my colleagues and to other constituents and that based on all of that listening, your thinking is different. And now you're moving forward in a slightly different way. Even if my opinion didn't win the day, I am more likely to trust the decision you came to if you're able to demonstrate to me how you are different. And that's really the key thing is, how are you different as a leader? How is your decision different because you took the time to listen? Because if you did all that listening and you didn't change your mind at all, it undermines the idea that you were actually listening. It makes it look like maybe you were just going out and looking for a bunch of rubber stamped approval. I will say sometimes you will go out and share all of your thinking. And what you'll get is a lot of affirmation that your thinking was good, that you had already thought it through. And if that's the case, that's okay. But make sure you're clear about that. Make sure you can articulate it to say, we talked to these different groups. And maybe even if nothing is really different, what you might point out is that you all really emphasized this. While it looks like the team came up with a good plan from the beginning, what we heard a lot was that you particularly liked this and this. So we're going to make sure to attend to that as we move forward. So even if the plan itself doesn't change substantially, demonstrate that you listen deeply enough to understand what parts of it were most important to people. And that's how you go from just being informed by what you heard to actually demonstrating that you care about people, demonstrating that your thinking was changed, that it actually was worth people's time to share with you. Because if you want them to share with you again in the future, you have to show them that it was worth their time to sit in that meeting or to fill out that survey and to give you their input this time. So you were taking your decision or your new program or even something as boring as the budget and you are using it as an opportunity to build rapport, to deepen your relationship with people, to deepen trust. So that's how you can draw that direct line between listening well and trust in you as a leader and in your organization in general. And quite frankly, if we bring it back to the beginning of this episode, if you are a leader of a public agency, then you are the front line of democracy in your community and the way that you go about engaging your constituents, the public, the voters, so that they know that when they tell you something, it matters and that you administer your government agency differently in accordance with their values. You're not only building trust in public schools or in libraries or the fire department or the city council, you're actually demonstrating to people that democracy itself, that participating in the decision making process is worth their time and that democracy itself works. You know, I often close off by telling y'all that who you are and what you do matters. And when it comes to public leaders, I can't stress that enough. I have a real love of democracy and I really appreciate the hard work, the good hard work that you all do to move that democracy forward, to make sure that your organization actually serves the public. So thank you very much for doing what you do. Thank you for being who you are. Take good care, friends, and we'll talk again soon.