Strategic Fund Development: Building Profitable Relationships That Last, Third Edition

Leaders as Communicators

Read any business book. The job of leaders is to make information “useful and meaningful to others, as a way of moving them toward committed engagement in [the organization].”62 That’s not much different than the theory that communication is a two-way endeavor and begins with listening.

In Clicks and Mortar, Pottruck and Pearce state: “As a leader, every day I try to remember that others will tolerate my point of view, but they will act only on their own. Accordingly, part of my job is to reconcile those points of view, to try to help everyone, including myself, gain a more insightful view of reality. In this work, listening is every bit as critical as speaking. Two-way communication is vital.”63

But too often people confuse listening as the precursor to answering, rather than listening as a way of learning. How many times have you watched someone prepare his answer while listening to another, rather than truly listening to hear and learn? How often have you done that yourself?

Pottruck and Pearce talk about listening as an “attitude with a single focus: the more I am known by those I want to follow me, and the more I can know them, the greater will be our ability to do great things together.”64 Approaching listening with this attitude allows the leader to reaffirm that others are “real partners in the enterprise,” being heard and sharing accountability.

Conscious leaders have the ability to listen simultaneously to three dimensions of language—the factual, ...