Marsha Acker

How to Develop this Most Important Interpersonal Skill of Listening

One of our most basic human needs is the need to be heard and seen. Yet we live in a world where there is more transmitting than receiving.

Social media, email, video chats, etc. all exist to help you get your message and opinion heard.

We often think we are listening when in fact we are busy…

Making the conversation about ‘me’
Sifting and sorting for ideas that resonate for me
Making connections with things that are also true for me
Discarding things I don’t like
Gathering evidence to refute, persuade or cajole the other into seeing my perspective
Loading up my response and anxiously awaiting the moment I can respond
Making up stories about the other person, that may or may not be true
Drifting away, thinking about the past or worrying about the future

These are natural ways our brains function in a conversation, while it serves a purpose, it’s not really listening. So how do we develop this interpersonal skill of listening?

The Absence of Listening

Listening is foundational to communication and relationships with others.

You have likely experienced the absence of being heard in some way that led to feeling:

Disconnected
Mis-understood
Anxious
Fearful
Frustrated
Apathetic
Angry

We may not intend to have this impact on others, the absence of listening creates a loss of connection and understanding. It’s a void that can raise the stakes in a relationship. When the stakes go up, conflict and breakdown emerge.

That can look like anything from avoiding talking with someone, or having the same conversation over and over again, or a full blown argument with raised voices. The roots of conflict can often be traced back to someone feeling misunderstood or not heard.

Three Ways to Build the Muscles and Interpersonal Skill of Listening

Skillful listening is one of the most impactful skills in navigating interpersonal relationships.

It’s the doorway to genuinely seeing and hearing what’s said and not said. It influences the questions you ask and the outcome of conversations. Just like muscles that you work at the gym, the “listening muscle” strengthens with practice. Here are three attributes to concentrate on:

1 Focus of Attention

Be here now. It’s natural for our mind to wander. When it does, use a phrase like ‘be here now’ to gently bring your mind back to focus on the conversation that you are having right in this very moment.

Focus on the other. Bring the person(s) in front of you into focus and soften your focus on other things. Remove your devices or other distractions from your view, which signals to you and the other person that they are important.

2 Quality and Depth

Come with Empathy and Compassion. Empathy opens up the ability for us to imagine what it might be like in someone else’s shoes. Compassion enables us to be helpful to the other. When you start a conversation from a place of empathy and compassion, rather than a place of apathy, sympathy, irritation, punishment, or desire to prove someone wrong, it changes the quality of your presence and listening and the impact you have on others.

Listen for what’s not being said. There are the words we speak and then there is what we are not saying as well. What’s in between the words someone is saying? What are they pointing out without explicitly naming it? What assumptions do you hear being made? What’s the energy and tone in their voice? Where do they pause and where are they excited?

3 Response

Reflect. Reflect what you’re hearing and acknowledge the highs and lows. Being able to mirror back to someone what you hear them saying can be refreshing and clarifying for the other person. This is the moment when people feel an immediate resonance and when they realize that someone is actually listening. You might say things like:

This is really tough for you right now.
You seem very clear in your thinking.
There is a lot happening for you right now.
You are full of energy and excitement about this.

Inquire. Bring a mindset of curiosity and apply it when you practice skillful listening. Ask questions that deepen the conversation and create learning and insights for both the speaker and the listener. Listen to the words and phrases the other person uses and ask questions such as: :

What was that like for you?
What’s important about that?
You said it’s hard – what’s making it hard?
You said excited – what are you most excited about?

Suspend assumptions and solutions. When you notice that you’re starting to make assumptions or are tempted to start offering advice or solutions, pause and place those ideas in a mental parking lot – suspend them for the moment and use the ‘law of three’. If you have the same impulse three times then use that as a signal to ask the person for permission to share. You might say: “I have had a similar experience, would it be helpful to you if I shared what happened for me?”

Be willing to be changed. As you build the muscles of listening, be ready for change. Really listening to someone else can not only have a profound impact on them, but it can change you as well; if you allow it. I have watched someone enter a conversation with a very clear opinion on a certain topic and leave with a completely different one.. This happened because both parties were engaged and practiced ‘skillful listening’. It was through this conversation that not only did their opinions change, but the relationship became more connected because they felt seen and heard.

Over to You: How Do You Listen?

Is listening a skill you want to work on?

Will you be implementing these tips to listen with intent?

9 Ways to Recognize a Sacrificial Leader on Your Leadership Team

In a recent podcast interview with Mike Seavers, he self-identifies as a sacrificial leader. Some questions came to mind when he mentioned sacrificial leadership.

What does a sacrificial leader look and sound like, and how can you recognize a sacrificial leader on your own team? What should you know about sacrificial leadership?

Curious? This article is for you!

The Definition of a Sacrificial Leader

A clear definition of a sacrificial leader comes from Choi & Mai-Dalton, 1998, 1999.

“Self-sacrificial leadership occurs when a leader forfeits one or more professional or personal advantages for the sake of followers, the organization, or a mission. One key aim of self-sacrificial leadership is to encourage follower reciprocity.”

Leader self-sacrifice is a tool which great leaders use to motivate followers.

Following their lead, current charismatic leadership theorists have perceived self-sacrifice in leadership to be a tactic which a leader could employ to influence follower attributions of charisma.

Sacrificial Leadership vs Servant Leadership

Sacrificial leadership and servant leadership are close cousins.

“The servant-leader is a servant first. It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first.

One key aim of self-sacrificial leadership is to encourage follower reciprocity. This behavior has the added benefit of potentially moving followers toward an organizational goal; modifying their behavior; or simply persuading them to attribute legitimacy to the leader, thus allowing the leader to gain influence.”

Read the full research paper here.

Recognizing a Sacrificial Leader

There are many leadership styles. In your career you will meet leaders with different skills, different leadership styles and of course, different agendas!

Recognizing a sacrificial leader on your team isn’t always easy. However, a sacrificial leader will often push your organization to new heights and goals!

Here are 9 ways to recognize a sacrificial leader on your leadership team!

Empathy.
What is empathy but the ability to understand and share the feelings of others? Sacrificial leaders have empathy and recognize the feelings their team members have.
Taking Initiative.
Leaders who take initiative are those who get things done. Sitting back and waiting for others to do the work is not sacrificial leadership.
Developing people.
Sacrificial leaders put people above systems and above the company’s needs. The development of each individual is important to a sacrificial leader.
Building community.
The team is everything in sacrificial leadership. Building community is therefore important and of utmost importance.
Empowering followers.
With building community, goes empowering followers. The sacrificial leader empowers his or her team to make changes and to lead.
Serving followers.
As much as servant leaders serve followers, so do sacrificial leaders. Serving followers and team members is an important leadership skill.
Providing leadership.
Sacrificial leaders are true leaders, not just in name but also in action. They provide leadership to their team, their community and their followers.
Sharing the same vision.
Sacrificial leaders share the same vision as their team members do.
Serving their followers.
Last but not least, sacrificial leaders serve their followers, sometimes to their own detriment. They serve followers to the point it might impact their own career choices.

A Sacrificial Leader in Action

Mike Seavers says:

“What’s important to me is the idea of leaders as not in command. This might sound interesting because I think a lot of people have the wrong idea about the military and how it works, but I’m more of the sacrificial leader. Like the leader who is last to eat, because you’re constantly taking care of your team or your people that follow you. That is very core to who I am as a leader.

I’m a VP. I’m probably four or five layers removed from the engineers on the front lines. We took a break over the holidays and we had a pretty bad outage at one point. The system that we had went down and I got the notification. I was well, my team’s going to be working. I’m going to be working. I jumped on the zoom video call and I was just there. “If you are all going to be missing some of your Christmas break, I think it’s important that I’m here too, to support you in any way that I can. And it’s probably nothing I can do, but at least I can, tell you a joke or make you laugh or just be moral support, or if you need anything or you need me to go get somebody for you or, you know, like I’m here.” I tend to do things like that. My team knows that I would never ask my team to do something that I won’t do myself.”

The Art & Science of Facilitation Book Club Guide

The book, ‘The Art & Science of Facilitation’ was written to help team leaders lead effective collaboration with agile teams.

When first published, we spread the word about this book with a Virtual Book Tour! How fun that was. You can rewatch the videos on YouTube!

As readers like yourself select to read the Art & Science of Facilitation, requests for Book Club session attendance have increased. While it would be wonderful to attend such weekly sessions, it’s not feasible.

Therefore, TeamCatapult developed a wonderful Book Club Guide for those who wish to read together and explore the Art and Science of Facilitation.

What is Facilitation?

“Facilitation is a skillful way to guide and assist a group to increase its effectiveness in doing its work and making its decisions. Facilitation is an approach that a leader or a participant/employee in a meeting, committee, or project can use to help the group achieve its objectives.” Source: UMass ‘Workplace Learning & Development

As we explain it:

The Art & Science of Facilitation: The Book

The Art and Science of Facilitation is your guide to moving your team further forward using the groundbreaking Five Guiding Principles of the Facilitation Stance.

For anyone ready to lead with self-awareness and group insight, this book is designed to help you navigate group dynamics so that your team can work more efficiently and effectively in a truly collaborative environment.

If you lead teams of any size, it’s time to become a true facilitator, in every sense of the word.

The Art & Science of Facilitation: The Book Club Guide

Here is a taste of the type of questions in this Book Club Guide:

Facilitating is ‘More Art’ or ‘More Science’, which one would you choose and why?
If you read this book and you are a coach, how do you see/identify the difference between facilitation and coaching?
Discuss your personal description of ‘a facilitator’ and how it might have changed while reading this book.
In Chapter 1: Maintaining Neutrality, we learn about holding the process, not the content. Moving forward, will not having answers still scare you, or did this chapter give you confidence in serating the ‘what’ from the ‘how’ in facilitation?
When you read Chapter 2: Standing in the Storm, could you identify situations where you should have ‘stood in the storm’ but instead decided to avoid it? How has reading this chapter changed your thoughts on conflict?

There are 20 questions in total!

Download the complete guide now

How To Get Started as a Facilitator!

Getting started as a facilitator is fun!

You can read about facilitation, take a workshop, learn by doing.

We know it can be confusing, at times, to find the absolute best resources. We put together a list of five such resources, resources we at TeamCatapult use everyday to help facilitators grow.

Get Started Today!

Speaking Truth to Power: How to Talk to Your Boss in a Way That Works

A common question among managers and agile coaches learning the skills of coaching others is, “How do I coach up”? In other words, “how do I coach my boss to be a better boss and tell them that I think they are the problem?”

There are two common reasons this question arises: the first is that there has been a specific interaction that has left someone feeling deflated or demoralized. Perhaps they were not heard and understood, or they didn’t like the way they were spoken to. The second reason is that they feel unsupported in their work, or maybe feel like they are being told to lead change while their boss’s behavior keeps rewarding old patterns instead.

This second scenario is part of a bigger issue—and one where it seems like the boss is the “problem.” Instead of creating change, it feels like you’re just slogging through the mud and getting your foot stuck with each step.

But chances are, what’s going on is not something that can be solved as simply as the concept of “coaching up.” In fact, there’s no such thing as “coaching up.” If what you’re actually looking for is the opportunity to give feedback about a specific incident, this is a feedback conversation. But when you’re addressing a bigger, systemic issue, it’s time for something more. Instead of trying to “coach up” or give feedback, try inviting your boss to a Thinking Together Conversation.

Speaking Truth to Power: How to Talk to Your Boss in a Way That Works

The Dark Side of Feedback

What’s missing most from feedback conversations in organizations today is the notion of inquiry. So many of us come into a conversation locked and loaded with our own perspective and the desire to just put our idea out on the table and have it heard. We expect the other person to make sense of what we’ve said and then take the action we desire.

While direct and candid feedback has a place and purpose, the common one-way delivery of one person’s experience can be unbalanced. It assumes that one person has the complete picture, that one person’s ideas are more “right” than the other’s, and that spending time asking someone else for their perspective or input is a waste of time.

This quick, get-in-and-get-out feedback style is what I call “driveby feedback.” It’s not really a conversation at all—it’s a one-way “download.”

No one wants to be told that they’re “doing it wrong,” and if you start from a place of assuming you know what the problem is—and only focus on telling your boss what they are doing wrong and what they need to do more of—it’s a monologic approach that makes you right and them wrong. You’ve invited them into a debate and set them up to either defend the actions they’ve taken or worse yet, just check out within the first few seconds of your conversation.

A Thinking Together Conversation: Speaking Truth!

So, what’s a Thinking Together Conversation and why does it matter? You’re thinking together with your boss in a way that can create real change.

Thinking Together Conversations require

all parties to come to the conversation with genuine curiosity
the assumption that solving the current problem or dilemma cannot be done by just one person
a broader, shared understanding of what’s happening

In a Thinking Together Conversation we

bring questions instead of solutions
invite others into a dialogue instead of a monologue
support the purpose of learning together to craft a better solution
engage in inquiry
engage in a real, meaningful conversation that can shift something important to the dynamic

3 Steps to a Thinking Together Conversation with your Leader: Speaking Truth

Here are some action steps you can take to invite a Thinking Together Conversation:

Step 1: Be clear about your intention.

Why do you want to have this conversation? How do you want to show up in it?

If your answer to either of these questions comes from a place of wanting to reprimand, punish, or blame your boss, then do some work on your own thinking before asking to have a conversation. Coming from that place will not serve anyone, and it definitely does not promote curiosity.

If, however, you’re coming from a place of genuine curiosity and seeking to understand—with a belief that there is more than one side to what’s going on—you’ll be in a much better position to start a real conversation. If you are willing to engage in a way that’s open to hearing different perspectives, both you and your boss will likely learn new information. From there, you will be far more likely to be able to create a new solution together.

Step 2: Create an invitation.

Invite your boss into a conversation for learning and exploration.

Behind every dilemma are multiple truths and perspectives about what’s creating the current situation. So make it inviting for you and your boss to want to come to the table.

Imagine that you’d received the results of a 12-month engagement survey suggesting that your boss’ lack of engagement was impeding progress. You could give driveby feedback that would get you nowhere, or you could create an invitation:

“We just got the survey results back. I would love to have a conversation with you about it and get your thoughts.”
“I notice that the engagement survey shows a ‘lack of engagement by senior management’ as the greatest barrier to our performance. I’m curious what you make of that?”

Understand that when managers are invited to a conversation, they are often expected to solve a problem or have some solution immediately. Instead of replicating that dynamic, try inviting them to a conversation for learning and understanding. Together, you might co-create a solution.

Step 3: Be prepared to offer your observations.

This can be one of the most challenging aspects of a Thinking Together Conversation. It requires you to both be curious about your boss’s experience and perspective and candid about your own observations. David Kantor calls this the speech act of Bystand—a morally neutral observation about what’s happening. To pull it off, you need to be prepared to share what you notice. Pulling from the scenario described above, here’s an example of how you might offer a morally neutral observation about what you see happening while remaining curious about what’s happening for your boss:

“Would it be helpful if I shared what I’ve observed? You asked that we schedule more collaborative planning meetings and include you. We now have these meetings booked every two weeks. However, you have attended 2 of 12 meetings in the past 6 months, and it’s left the team feeling confused and unmotivated. What’s happening on your end that’s pulling you away from these meetings?

Thinking Together Conversations move us away from looking for someone to blame and hold us accountable to the kind of inquiry that supports meaningful dialogue. When we seek to understand multiple perspectives and learn more about what’s happening in the current situation, it’s much easier to discover a new solution that might not exist yet. It’s an effective way of speaking truth to power while creating space for real results.

Speaking Truth: How to Talk to Your Boss in a Way That Works

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How to Facilitate Agile Meetings That Help Your Team Thrive

➡️ Do your team meetings always go as planned?

➡️ Are you able to achieve the desired outcome?

➡️ Does your team leave meetings with a clear purpose and clarity in what needs to be done next?

If any of the answers are “no,” keep on reading. We have some tips and tools to help you!

In this article we lay the foundation for leading engaging and productive meetings with purpose, clarity and confidence so that you can support agility within your teams.

The Role of a Facilitator

As facilitators we convene and we host.

Our primary focus is to identify the desired outcomes and then create a space that fosters connection, authenticity, trust, in an environment of equal voice.

A unique characteristic of facilitation is that when it’s done well you hardly know it’s happening. Good facilitators make it look easy…like all you need to do is grab a marker and head to a flip chart or open up a Zoom line and people start collaborating.

In reality there is a lot going on for a facilitator. It takes formal training and practice! Just like playing the piano or flying a plane. Facilitation is a professional discipline that is both art and science.

Mistakes To Avoid When Facilitating Agile Meetings

Here are some common misconceptions and mistakes facilitators make when first starting out.

Believing that you can just do facilitation after having seen others make it look so easy.
Participating in the meeting rather than facilitating.
Cutting short the planning and design phase or not doing any planning at all.
Seeking “agreement” from the group on decision-making.
Believing that your role in the meeting is helping the group reach a decision that has already been made.

It takes time to learn how to properly facilitate meetings. It’s also important to practice the facilitation role throughout your journey by building competency!

How to Facilitate Agile Meetings Like a Pro!

It wasn’t until many years into my facilitation journey that I learned how to:

Really connect a group
Have greater awareness of my own beliefs about the group and understand what a profound impact my beliefs had on my ability to work with a group.
Let go of control; to turn it over to the group.
Really listen to what people needed or were trying to say.

These were profound shifts in my mindset that

…allowed me to move from simply instructing people to write on sticky notes that overlooks the real issue.

…to leading meetings that got to the heart of what is blocking the team and support their journey beyond continuing in their same patterns.

How to Facilitate Agile Meetings

Would you like to get started with leading engaging and productive meetings with purpose, clarity and confidence so that you can support agility within your teams? Here are 3 ways to do just that!

The mindset and practice of Being Neutral
The key steps of Planning and Designing
Decide how to decide

If you are ready for the full roadmap to facilitation, I highly recommend you read the book ‘The Art & Science of Facilitation’.

5 Resources to Get You Started as a Facilitator

In a recent article, we laid out five resources to help you get started, or to continue your education as a facilitator.

These resources include a book, toolkit, website, self-assessment and workshops!

No matter where you are on your facilitation journey, there is room to continue your learning journey to competency!