Otis White

The skills and strategies of civic leadership

Archives for April 2011

How to Listen Effectively

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On his 27th birthday, John Francis, an environmental activist who loved to argue, decided to be quiet for one day and listen to others. The result changed his life. What he learned on his day of silence was that he hadn’t really been listening at all. “I would listen just enough to hear what people had to say and think that I knew what they were going to say, and so I would stop listening,” he said in a speech not long ago. “And in my mind I just kind of raced ahead and thought about what I was going to say back while they were still finishing up. And then I would launch in. Well, that just ended communications.”

At the end of his birthday, he decided to be quiet for another day. And another. And then for an entire year. In all, John Francis remained voluntarily silent for 17 years, during which time he earned three college degrees (including a doctorate), taught classes using sign language, and walked across America. And he listened, really listened, to the people he met. (If you want to know more about Francis’ amazing story, you can hear it—yes, he speaks now—by viewing one of his presentations online.)

I doubt I could manage even a day of silence, nevertheless years. Perhaps you couldn’t either. But you don’t have to be silent to listen more effectively. And it’s a skill worth learning, maybe the single best thing you could do to make yourself a better leader.

Why? Start with the obvious: You can’t be a leader unless you have followers, and you can’t gain followers if you don’t understand them well enough to represent them. This involves listening. If you want to be effective as a leader, you’ll have to be more than a mouthpiece for a group: You’ll have to negotiate for your followers, and effective negotiating means knowing how leaders of other groups think about things. Finally, leadership means sometimes having to change your followers, as when circumstances shift dramatically and your group has to adapt. To do any of this involves listening deeply—truly taking in others’ fears, hopes, vision and motivations—before acting.

There are other reasons listening can make you a better leader: You’ll arrive at better solutions because you’ll have more complete information. Your ideas will gain greater support if you’ve developed them after consulting others. You’ll make fewer gaffes if you know others’ sensitivities. Finally, you’ll enjoy one of the greatest benefits of civic leadership, which is to learn about people who are different from you in background, temperament and world view.

And it all begins with listening. So how can you improve your listening skills? Here are some ways:

  • Start by concentrating. This sounds simple but isn’t. The greatest obstacle to listening is distraction. Instead of paying attention to others, we let our minds wander—to what else we need to do, whom we need to see, what we’ll say next, and a hundred other things. So begin your meetings with a reminder: Stay focused on the other person’s words.
  • Ask open-ended questions that require explanations rather than closed-ended questions that can be answered with a “yes” or “no.” So you might ask, “How did you feel?” rather than “Were you angry?” because it offers a fuller understanding of the person. And keep your questions brief. The simpler the question, the more detailed and candid the responses tend to be.
  • Listen for insights into the person. People often say a lot more than they intend or we expect them to say; as a result, we don’t always take in what they’re telling us. Your meetings may be about a community issue, but if you ask good questions and listen carefully, you can learn a lot about the person who’s talking. You can not only get her opinions, you can get her life story and motivations, how she forms opinions and reads people. These things can be critically important later on as you work with this person. So listen for these deeper insights.
  • Take time. It takes a while to understand people, and the longer you spend, the more you learn. Don’t expect to learn someone’s life story, philosophy and motivations in 30 minutes’ time. Plan on an hour or more, which is why lunch can be a good time for such meetings.
  • Make it comfortable. Here’s another reason to consider lunch as a good setting for listening: It gets the person out of her office and away from her desk. Simply moving to neutral ground will sometimes open up conversations, particularly if the person has reason to see you as a potential adversary. But be careful: Chose quiet restaurants where you won’t be rushed, and think of places where the other person might feel comfortable.
  • Make eye contact. It seems like a small thing, but looking a person in the eye builds trust and comfort. And for you to listen deeply, you need people to trust you and feel comfortable sharing their hopes and fears.
  • If they attack you or your group, don’t be defensive. Ask the person why they feel that way. Keep in mind that every civic leader comes under attack from time to time, sometimes unfairly. If you meet anger with defensiveness, it deepens the antagonism. But if you seek to understand the anger, it diffuses it—and may win you grudging admiration. It’s something good salespeople know: When the customer attacks, don’t defend; probe.

At some point, though, we must move from listening to acting, right? Of course, but as international mediator Mark Gerzon says in his book “Leading Through Conflict,” we don’t suffer in American life from too much listening (which Gerzon calls “inquiry leadership”). We suffer from too little listening and understanding. Here’s Gerzon’s advice about when to move from inquiry to advocacy:

The general rule is this: inquiry precedes advocacy. If you (1) are uncertain about having reliable, complete information; (2) have not yet engaged all the relevant stakeholders; and (3) doubt that you will have sufficient votes, power, or other support to put your plan in action, then it is time for inquiry, not advocacy. However, if you (1) have access to all the necessary information, (2) have obtained input from all the necessary people, and (3) have mapped a clear road to implementing a viable plan, then go ahead. Advocate your “solution” to the issue or conflict, and begin to rally everyone behind you.

In other words, until you understand an issue from all sides, have a clear plan, and enjoy broad support, listen up.

Citizens Are Not the Same as Customers

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Analogies are a basic way we think and communicate. They help us see things in new ways and explain our experiences to people who haven’t . . . well, experienced them. Analogies, of course, draw similarities between things that aren’t really all that similar. So you could see life as a marathon, an election as a football game, a debate as a tennis match, and so on. (Needless to say, sports analogies are popular.)

We often use analogies to understand cities, too. But in doing so, we should be aware of the limits of analogies and the harm that faulty analogies can do. The ones that I think do the greatest harm are those comparing cities to businesses and citizens to customers.

Before beginning, let me say that I like business. I’ve owned several businesses in the last 20 years, and before that I was a business journalist. So mark me down as a fan and beneficiary of capitalism. Further, I think cities can learn a lot from the ways businesses approach things. In many cases, cities and their leaders suffer from a lack of focus. If there’s anything successful businesses do well, it’s retaining focus. Finally, there’s a great deal written about business that’s relevant to cities. So if you’re looking for new approaches to common civic leadership issues—like finding good ideas, developing young leaders, managing crises or dealing with difficult people—you’ll find much of what you’re looking for on the business shelves of bookstores or in the pages of Harvard Business Review.

And, in truth, there are times when citizens can be seen as similar to customers. In the early 1990s a popular book, “Reinventing Government,” urged government leaders to do just that—regard citizens not as constituents but as valued customers and use what corporations know about customer satisfaction to make it more pleasant dealing with government agencies. (If you’ve found it easier in the last 20 years to renew a driver’s license or apply for a permit, you can thank this book.)

So if it helps deliver services that are cheaper, better and faster, then I’ll all for using business analogies. But here’s where I grow wary: the relationship I have with where I live should be far deeper than my relationship with Apple Computer, Ford Motor Co. or Coca-Cola.

Let’s start with the basic analogy that citizens are like customers. Yes, in receiving city services like garbage collection, water and sewer, and even police and fire protection, we’re like business customers in the sense that we want the greatest value for the lowest price. And don’t underestimate the importance of these services in making citizens happy. If you’ve ever spent a long day at city hall trying to get a business license, or waited an hour for the police to show up for a traffic accident, then you know how poor service makes you feel about a place. And keep in mind that the majority of city governments’ payroll and budget is in the delivery of direct services to citizens, so money saved and satisfaction gained by doing these things right can have a huge impact.

But beyond this point, the business analogy breaks down. If we’re sometimes consumers of city services, then we’re also part-owners of the city, especially if we own a home or rental property. Does that make us like shareholders in a corporation? Well, in the sense that we want asset growth (that is, the value of our property to rise), yes. But, in truth, we really don’t own homes like we do stocks. Homes aren’t just financial investments; they’re comfort zones, objects of pride and self-expression, and centers of family and social life. Stocks are impersonal financial instruments; homes are full of meaning, much of it connected to the community around it. I’ve bought and sold plenty of shares, but I’ve never found a way to use a share of Ford Motor for hosting a family dinner or organizing a block party.

There are other roles that citizens play. If you want to use another business analogy, here’s one: the citizen as employee. In companies, employees create the goods or services that the company sells. In cities, much of the community’s value—what it “sells” to visitors, prospective businesses and future residents—is created by its citizens. Think about it: If you’ve been impressed by a city’s lovely neighborhoods, creative festivals and parades, or thriving economy, you’re looking at things the citizens themselves brought about. Yes, government often plays a supporting role, but it’s usually a portion of what the citizens are doing for themselves.

So even if you’re partial to business analogies, you quickly realize that the citizen-as-customer works only in some instances, and there are other times when you could see citizens as owners or employees. And there are yet other ways that citizens relate to cities that no business analogy can cover. Take identity. Yes, there are some companies that inspire great loyalty among customers and employees (think Apple Computer or the sporting-goods retailer REI), but these are rarities. Identifying with the place you live is the rule.

Doubt it? Remember the old “Seinfeld” episode, where Elaine is assigned a new telephone area code, 646? She tries desperately to convince people that she still lives in Manhattan, home of the 212 area code, but can’t. Finally, she finagles her way back to a 212 area code because living in Manhattan is so important to her she can’t bear for people to think she lives anywhere else.

Why does all this matter? Because one of the greatest problems civic leaders have is understanding the potential and power of citizenship. When we compare citizens to customers, we are selling them way, way short. It’s like comparing life to a marathon. Only in the most superficial way is life like a marathon. And thank goodness for that. Otherwise, we’d be out of breath all the time.

Photo by Victoria Pickering licensed under Creative Commons.

About Otis White

Otis White is president of Civic Strategies, Inc., a collaborative and strategic planning firm for local governments and civic organizations. He has written about cities and their leaders for more than 30 years. For more information about Otis and his work, please visit www.civic-strategies.com.

The Great Project

Otis White's multimedia book, "The Great Project," is available on Apple iTunes for reading on an iPad. The book is about how a single civic project changed a city and offers important lessons for civic leaders considering their own "great projects" . . . and for students in college planning and political science programs.

For more information about the book, please visit the iTunes Great Project page.

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