Communication Lessons from Tiny Leaders
Recently, my 3-year-old demanded I tickle her, so I did. She laughed and shrieked with delight, after a while she asked me to stop, so I did. She calmed herself and then asked me to tickle her again, so I did. She laughed and shrieked with delight and this same pattern went on for some time. I was amazed that her delight didn’t fade, each time she asked, she got what she wanted and she was delighted. No element of surprise, no expectation that I should have instigated the game, and no worrying that I might say no.
- meet my daughter -
For more than a decade I’ve worked with extremely capable leadership teams, full of intelligent and competent people, and yet I still find my 3-year-old offers a rich source of wisdom for Leadership Teams. The tickle game was full of this wisdom, it left me thinking about how much more effective leadership teams could be if they could interact with the same level of openness as a young child.
We all fall into traps that impact the effectiveness of our team’s communication. Are you guilty of any of these?
It’s more valuable if I don’t have to ask for it - We want to feel valued and understood, so we expect that our team and its members should intuit our needs without having to be asked. Try this, ask for what you need and when/if you get that support, acknowledge that a request being met is you being valued. We’re all too busy to be mind readers.
If I don’t ask, they can’t say No - We often worry that we will be told no and this will diminish us somehow. Well, if you don’t say anything, nothing will happen, so who is really diminishing you? You! Experiment with saying what you believe is needed and ask how others could help you. You will have a 100% chance of learning what reasonable progress can be made.
It’s probably silly, so it’s best to say nothing - We’ve been rewarded for knowing, that’s how we got to senior leadership, right?! And we definitely don’t want our leadership team peers to think we’re silly. This is one of the biggest barriers to progress in teams. If the problem was easy to solve your team wouldn’t still be talking about it. You don’t need to have an answer, but you do need to be an active part of the problem solving process. Try asking questions to help clarify the issue, check that everyone is actually aligned on what they are trying to discuss (often they are not), seek out different viewpoints and offer an observation if you can see what might be impacting progress. In my ecpeirnce its often the person who injects finally with their self defined ‘silly question’ or observation that helps move things forward.
Depending on the context there are plenty more strategies you could use, but first, make sure you’re not falling into traps that prevent you from being active in the leadership work required. Progress can be more efficient, relationships more effective and results more readily achieved if we each accept the inconvenient truth that we have a responsibility to articulate what is needed for progress to occur.
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