Georgeena, I am just reading your Unit 5 post on the characteristics of servant leadership. A point of interest for me was your comment about the percentage of time a leader typically spends talking over listening. You state:
Traditionally followed concept in speaking- listening ratio is 70-30. That is 70% speak and 30% listen but it has been changed over a period and it’s now become 70% listen and 30% speak (Alphine, 2018)
This is compelling for me, for as a leader many times, the majority of my job in a day is talking to people. Giving them information, explaining situations, and directing them. Often, I have had to craft oral responses ahead of time to issues of conversation. In preparing for staff meetings, I take time to deliberate over what to say, in what order, and in what tone of voice to deliver the agenda. Most of my day is all about what I will say to others and how I will respond.
To flip the paradigm and choose to listen 70% of the time would make my day look very different. Instead of being busy with my agenda, I would have to earnestly listen to the concerns of employees, ask them furthering questions, and lead them to an understanding for how to solve the problem themselves. My focus would turn from talking and directing, to asking leading questions so that I could truly hear and synthesize what they are saying.
In the field of education, a large emphasis is placed on learning to ask students the right questions to develop and deepen their thinking. The focus is taken off questions that only assess their content knowledge and understanding, and placed more on asking questions at different cognitive levels such as asking them to apply what they know, analyse (compare and contrast), synthesize (generate their own creative thinking) and evaluate (compare with standards and values). As students answer questions at progressively higher levels, they develop critical-thinking and communication skills (Volger, K., 2008).
I wonder – why can’t we apply the same principles of good question asking that we use with students, with the people whom we lead as an act of transformational leadership? By leading through asking questions and listening, then asking deeper questions and listening again, followers would deepen their own thinking and understanding and would be able to clarify their ideas. If this process happens in a team setting, then other team members would become more adept at not only stating their opinions, but at listening deeply to others and refining their own questioning process. A team can only be as collaborative as they are intent listeners and deep thinkers. Collaboration is not just wanting to get your own way in a group – it is really getting clarity for what others are saying, analysing all elements of it, synthesizing the information with others’ opinions to perhaps create something new and creative, and finally evaluating if the decision is best for the group and solves the problem in the most productive way.
Leaders can talk too much. Even more than 70% of the time. To be truly transformational, we need to sit back and listen to the others around us. We might even learn something ourselves.
References:
Alphine, G. (2018, October 28). Unit 5, blog activity 2. [web log comment]. Retrieved from https://create.twu.ca/georgeenalphine/2018/10/28/unit-5-blog-activity-2/
Volger, K. (2008). Asking good questions. Educational Leadership, 65. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/summer08/vol65/num09/Asking-Good-Questions.aspx