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      As a leader, you are responsible for establishing a vision for your team. At the same time, the people you lead come to you with widely diverse backgrounds and experiences, and they have valuable wisdom to offer you. This chapter’s lens is about leveraging the priorities in table 4.1 to ensure that you find the right mix of setting direction (leadership) and gathering the wisdom of those you lead (listening).

Table 4.1: The Leadership and Listening Lens Domain

      In this chapter, we explore the interdependency of leading and listening by learning from a school principal who understands how to best leverage the priorities inherent in this lens. We follow this by explaining how you strike a balance between the leadership and listening poles, establishing an emotional intelligence connection for this lens, and explaining how you can best leverage the priorities inherent in this lens.

An Example of Leading While Listening

      When Timothy Brown first became an elementary school principal, he announced that he was devoting his first months at the school to listening, observing, and working to understand all of its staff (what was working well, the challenges they faced), and helping them get to know him. The broad reaction was roughly, “Yeah, right. When are you going to start changing things?”

      The staff reaction isn’t surprising, is it? Most new leaders bring tools that have worked elsewhere, mandates from the district office, and other elements of overall direction for the year. Often, the district hires them on the basis of changes they promise to bring about.

      Tim acknowledges that being born into a more introverted culture (he is an enrolled member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe), and being introverted himself, perhaps make it easier to prioritize the listening pole of this lens. However, his experiences fostered his belief that the listening pole is an imperative for school leaders:

      I think leaders know this, but think they don’t have time in their day…. Kids and adults don’t just walk into a building and become students and teachers. They have Venn diagrams of things going on, complex and competing and conflicting diagrams. The more you try to steamroll, simplify, flatten that landscape, the more you potentially disenfranchise and alienate people. I don’t know how to slow down and unpack that more other than to listen to people to understand them as individuals. If they feel listened to and respected, they can bring their better selves to work that day. (T. Brown, personal communication, August 8, 2017)

      Listening for those first months on the job let Tim confirm that he’d been given the right advice by a mentor regarding his new position: “Don’t mess it up.” The staff already worked collaboratively and held each other to high standards. Listening helped Tim understand the culture he was joining, what motivated his staff, their shared values and purpose, and how he could become part of an existing safe and trusting environment.

      Listening also allowed him to unearth some unproductive norms, such as the staff believing “if I’m in the principal’s office, I’m in trouble.” They were trying too hard to solve their own problems, whereas running interference for staff, seeking additional resources, facilitating difficult conversations, and so on, are part of a principal’s job.

      Tim took concrete steps to counteract this norm. First, he communicated the value of time for one-to-one conversations by talking about how ineffective walking meetings were for true listening, what with inevitable interruptions from happenings in the hallway or questions from others along the way. Instead he told his teachers, “Make an appointment. Let’s really dedicate time without texting or watching students or anything else.”

      Then, when the meetings happened, he explicitly talked about his desire to both support and protect teachers. Teaching is stressful! He conveyed that whether it’s a particularly difficult parent situation or a personal crisis or other frustration, he wanted staff members to involve school leaders before they were fighting back tears or otherwise being overwhelmed by stress. It was common for him to say things like, “You don’t get points for beating yourself up. It’s a long school year. If something is exhausting you, or you sense verbal, physical, or mental abuse, it is not okay. Come and talk to me sooner, not later.”

      Then, he took time to thank them for coming and urged them to come sooner. The word spread, and the one-to-ones slowly became a new norm. Why slowly? Because while Tim ranks listening as a top leadership responsibility, it took time for teachers to grasp that the one-to-ones were as valuable to him as his other responsibilities.

      Tim wanted one more new norm—percolating. For him, silence is natural as he digests new information or thinks through a decision, but he knows that most people are uncomfortable with silence. Normalizing it and helping others embrace it were important to his style. His staff got used to his longer-than-expected silences and learned to ponder their own ideas. They frequently bantered about “He’s percolating

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