Idea 94: A listening leadership
If authority has no ears to listen, it has no head to govern.
Danish proverb
When managers do not listen they cease to be business leaders and revert to their former status as hired business administrators. So-called managers of this low calibre hardly listen at all: they ignore, forget, distort or misunderstand much of what they hear.
With a small group or team, as a leader you can communicate by informal personal contact. But organization implies that you communicate through formal channels, such as a military chain of command. A corollary is that if you work in organizations you have to respect these formal channels.
That doesn’t mean to say that informal communication is totally absent from organizations; that ...
