Sounds like just a cheap joke, but it's a serious problem for anyone in business (and it can often affect personal relationships as well). I'm talking about recognising when you commit yourself to an opinion, a decision or a course of action. And my point is that being too quick to commit undermines your leadership impact, so it's worth paying attention to.
I was triggered into posting this by a recent discussion on a programme with a participant who had been working on being a better listener. He thought he was getting better, he said, but it took a huge effort, sometimes didn't work, and he wasn't sure it was worth it. What was clear as he talked to me was that his order of doing things was:
1. Work out what he thought needed to happen
2. Talk to others to show he was "listening" to their objections and getting their "buy-in"
3. Do exactly what he originally planned
To be fair to him, this is not an uncommomn approach. And yet it inherently undermines the idea of "listening".
So we talked about changing the point at which he committed to his view of what should happen until after he had talked to people. Just by this mental move of the timeline, the listening becomes genuine - it is data gathering for your decision. And if you have internally not yet committed, this will be detected (in subtle and largely unconscious ways) by those you are listening to, so it will be seen as genuine. Which is a good example of the simplest way to communicate your good intent being to make it the genuine truth!
The same mental discipline of delaying your commitment is essential for leaders in playing the political game. As I have written in previous posts, politics is something you do before you commit yourself, not something you do to influence events after you have committed. The activities of the political game provide essential data to inform your decision. Those who don't play the political game sometimes criticise those who do for always "waiting to see which way the wind is blowing". What they are really saying is that they prefer to make decisions before they listen! Which is a surefire way of ending up simply "pissing into the wind"!
