It is hard to be patient. It is hard not to answer every email or text within seconds, although most of us try. In Leadership in the Information Age, I wrote that leaders are like the proverbial firefighter: any time we see a problem in the making, we feel a need to go “beat the flames.” We have always been doers. Now we just do it often electronically, and a lot faster than we should.
The trouble is that a reflex built for action makes a poor instrument for listening. The Set the Azimuth series taught us to point the organization in one direction. The last two articles made the case that listening is how a leader learns whether anyone can follow that azimuth in practice.
This closing article in the Listen series is about the environment we listen in now, because the Information Age has changed not only how we send messages but also how poorly we hear them.
We have more communication channels than any generation in history, and we understand each other no better. In most cases, we understand each other worse. That is not an accident, but it is fixable, one paused reply at a time.
When Messages Outrun Understanding
In The Power of Being All In, I noted that virtual communication is far less effective than person-to-person communication, because body language and tone carry ninety-three percent of the message. Your actual words carry seven percent. Strip a message down to text on a screen and almost the entire signal is gone before it arrives.
The results are predictable. Most of our emails and texts do not accomplish what we intend them to. Nick Morgan’s research, which I have shared earlier in this series, found something that ought to stop every busy leader cold. People who receive a two-word message like “nice job” or “great work” read it as sarcasm 60% of the time.
Process that number for a second. A leader taps out a quick compliment between meetings, feels good about it, moves on, and more often than not it lands as an insult. The reason is wired into us. We assume the worst when intent is not clear. It is the same negative bias that once kept our ancestors alive in the wild, and now it is running threat detection on your nine o’clock “nice job” text.
The Reply-All Culture
Speed makes it worse, and our tools are built for speed. Hitting “Reply-All” develops noise, not listening, and noise trains people to stop listening in self-defense.
I will confess something here. I have personally lost about 8,000 hours of my life sitting in meetings with no agenda, no clear start, and no clear end, hearing somebody’s story about trout fishing when we were supposed to be solving a problem.
That is not a typo, and it is not a brag. It is a warning. If we cannot bring discipline to a room full of people, we have no business pretending we can bring discipline to an inbox that never closes.
Deliberate looks like confirmation. I have taught the backbrief throughout this series as the habit of confirming what people heard, and in the Information Age it matters more than ever, because so many of our exchanges now happen without a face or a voice attached. Deliberate also means taking time to think about what you are hearing before you act on it. Put it on your calendar if you have to. An unread inbox recovers by morning. A decision made without understanding usually does not.
This is why the All-In Adaptive Leaders who thrive in this environment are the ones who link clarity, authenticity, vulnerability, and empathic listening — the combination I wrote about in The Power of Being All In. None of those four qualities travel well through a screen on their own. They have to be practiced on purpose, and the discipline that anchors all of them is the one I have been promising you for two articles now.
Below, I teach the “Two-Second Rule”, show you how to hold it when pressure compresses mounts, and give you the backbrief phrases that turn electronic transfer into real communication. To read the rest of this article, visit this link.
Enjoy the journey!
