A leadership coach argues that above all else, the art of leading others should involve listening.

Think of big organisations and often the first thing that springs to mind is physical infrastructure – skyscrapers, industrial parks and campuses, each decorated with oversized and over-designed logos. But what if, like a suit sold by shysters to a gullible emperor, these trappings are insubstantial? What if the real organisations walk and talk within?

“I see organisations as just big collections of conversations,” explains Dr Paul Atkins. “If you really think about it, it’s hard to point to a ‘thing’ that is an organisation. In reality, they are just the process of talking in one way or another. Sure, there are operating procedures and those things, but none of them are real without the people. It follows that the ways we converse, the ways we listen, ask questions and advocate our positions become critically important.”

Atkins has given a lot of thought to how humans go about achieving common goals in his role as Reader at the ANU College of Business and Economics. The experienced psychologist has long been fascinated with how individuals think and how they think differently one from the other. His PhD at Cambridge considered how artificial intelligence might replicate human thought and how humans remember foreign languages. 

But his latest work focuses on something with perhaps even wider social application: leadership. Atkins is in demand as a coach to business and public sector organisations, working one-on-one with people in leadership roles to help them make the most of their own abilities and those of their colleagues. He says many work cultures have grown disillusioned with hierarchical structures that restrict managers and repress employees.

“The old ways aren’t working – command and control isn’t working. People are looking for more meaning in their work. We’ve catered for our basic needs, and now we want more significance from what we do.

“At the same time, people are required to cope with more complexity. It’s critical in knowledge industries that managers get information from as many sources as possible. They have to look at information from many perspectives, so they need to be tapping into the knowledge and experience of their staff. That’s not just from an information point of view – it’s also about empowering people and helping them to be motivated. There’s a war for talent in organisations, and if people don’t feel appreciated, they get up and walk.”

Learning to listen

To sketch the stereotypical manager, begin by shading in a business suit. Place said manager behind a large, foreboding desk. Add a speech bubble containing words like ‘synergy’, ‘leverage’ and ‘outcome’ underlined and festooned with exclamation marks. For good measure, pencil in some pale subordinates paying rapt but slightly terrified attention to the commands of their superior.

This is, admittedly, a grotesque simplification. But it serves to illustrate the command and control style organisation, which applies as easily to the corporate sphere as it does to soldiers in the trenches. By creating a situation where some hold forth while others obey, Atkins argues that an organisation is failing to make the most of its most valuable resource – the ability of people to achieve meaningful solutions through collaborative and considerate dialogue. The first step, he argues, is to do less with the mouth and more with the eyes, ears and grey matter.

“Good listening is at the core of effective management – the basic things, like paraphrasing, active listening and so forth. At first when you do those things, they feel unnatural and clunky, but after a while you get used to it and then it changes your habits of mind. It changes what you pay attention to. If I’m really trying to understand where the other person is coming from, if I’m trying to see the world through their eyes, I become more appreciative of them, more understanding of them and more compassionate towards them.”

In this conception, leadership becomes a mutual relationship for managers and their staff. From this perspective, leadership is about helping to provide direction but also helping to facilitate the problem solving, autonomy and development of their staff. Atkins says, “In my experience, it is these characteristics that everybody cites when you ask them about the best leaders they have ever experienced”. Command relationships are being replaced by communication and attentiveness.

“To have a really good conversation, I need to be telling you something about how I’m making sense of my experience. I need to be saying, ‘This is the data I’m attending to, these are the assumptions I’m making, and these are the conclusions I’ve arrived at’. Then I should ask you to do the same. If we can arrive at an awareness that we’re both actively interpreting the world, then we can get into a much more creative space.”

Atkins gives an example of a recent seminar he helped run in the US on meaning-making in organisations. Participants who had never met before were given a short period of time to develop an effective program for social change. He says one of the groups developed an innovative environmental awareness program that centred around empowering people to pursue change. “Only one of the group worked in the environment field. The other five were just interested in conversations. I think that when we’re really attending to people we can build relationships that sustain much more creative and powerful outcomes.”

It’s clear that Atkins views authority relationships as just one type of power among many. He cites information power, network centrality, and even personal attractiveness as other potential sources of power. “One of the most satisfying aspects of my work is in helping even junior level staff to realise that they too have power and a responsibility for achieving outcomes. Once they realise this, they sometimes reflect on the ways they complain about those higher up in the organisation. It’s fascinating to watch the way in which senior leaders get held responsible for outcomes, both good and bad, that really emerge from a much more dynamic interplay of leaders and followers than we realise. I don’t think people further down in organisations appreciate the number of constraints that senior leaders often feel on the range of actions they can take.”

Atkins sees that part of the problem is that managers often value the job they have to get done over the relationships with their staff. In his view, this is the wrong way round. “If you’ve got happy employees, you’ll have happy customers; if you have happy customers, you’ll have happy shareholders. I see it in that order. You’ve got to keep your staff happy. If people are genuinely valued and appreciated, then morale is increased and their productivity improves.

“The conversations need to be solution-focused. This is a key idea in coaching. Psychological therapy is sometimes about identifying the problem. The classical view is you go back and think about what your mother did and so on. It’s about problems and trying to analyse the reasons and causes. A coach won’t get into that space because it often is not particularly helpful. A coach is more likely to say, ‘What would you like to see happen and how do we get there?’ It’s extremely pragmatic.”

Personal pragmatics

In his role as a leadership coach, Atkins has worked with organisations to develop business ethics, organisational change and decision-making capabilities. He says a typical coaching relationship involves regular one-on-one meetings with his client over a period of months. Sometimes, the sessions begin with goal setting. Other times, the person being coached needs more time to articulate what it is they wish to achieve.

“People are different stages of readiness to change,” Atkins says. “Some have been thinking about it for years and they’re itching to go. All it takes is some direction and they’re off, making huge leaps and bounds. Other people are in that pre-contemplation stage where they don’t know what they want and it isn’t that helpful to force them to try to articulate clear objectives. In that case, I find it is best to just listen and try to be a sounding board for helping them make sense of their experience. I often find that just being heard at a deep level helps my clients to begin to get clearer on what they want to do.

“I want them to succeed and I become very invested in supporting them because I care about them a lot. One of the nice things about listening to people closely, irrespective of where you start out, is that you usually end up liking them, or at least appreciating all the unique qualities that make them human. At the same time you have to hold this distance. It’s never about me – I’m simply a facilitator for their change.”

The approach taken by Atkins in his coaching and research is strongly influenced by the work of the Harvard education professor Robert Kegan, who thinks about maturity as a capacity to take a bigger perspective on ourselves and others. As we mature, we get better at stepping back from our habitual and unconscious patterns of response so that we can make choices about how we will react. Kegan describes our developmental journey as consisting of five major stages starting out with the child, who is unable to distinguish between their perceptions and reality, and then moving up through growing levels of awareness to self-authorship, which involves making our own reckoning between perception and the world, and self-transformation, where we are also able to transform our own perceptions. Atkins uses these signposts in his coaching to help people realise that the world is not just an objective thing – they play a role in actively perceiving and interpreting that world. They can change the way they play that role to
achieve better outcomes for themselves and those around them. 

“We’re subject to ways of seeing the world that we can’t make conscious. When we can make something objective, we can see it and reflect on it. A very young child will stand at the top of a tall building and look down at the cars and will say, “Look, the cars are tiny”. They actually believe there are tiny little cars, tiny little people and tiny little roads. An eight-year-old will say, ‘The cars look tiny’. They know that there’s a difference between their perception and their reality. They can make their perceptions into an object they can observe. Much later, we can learn to objectify our emotional reactions, then our values, then our identity and so on.

“The development of wisdom is about making more and more of our experience objective so that we can reflect on it. Eventually that includes the whole sense-making process.”

By learning to moderate our reactions to the complex information of the world, Atkins argues that all of us can be happier and more effective, even if not all of us take on leadership roles.

“Ultimately, it’s not what happens to us that matters – it’s how we make sense of it that counts.”

Dr Paul Atkins: Hints for effective leadership

1. Pay attention to your sense-making. Your intuition is distilled experience and sometimes gives you critical information about the situation. On the other hand, your automatic judgments about people can get in the way of relationships and learning.

2. Developing and empowering your people is part of the real work of leadership, not just something to be done in the spare time you’ll never have.

3. Leadership occurs at any level in an organisation. It isn’t a position but an attitude and the act of taking responsibility.

4. Leaders should always add value to the work of those they lead, not just pass on information to the next layer. Generally ‘adding value’ means taking a bigger or longer perspective on the work.

5. Build on strengths, don’t try to fix weaknesses. We all have weaknesses but it is our strengths that are the wellspring of our passion and commitment.

6. It is always a good idea to ask, “What can we learn from this?”

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ANU Reporter 
Summer 2007