Are You Listening to the Real Problem or Busy Putting Out Fires?

Guest post from Heather Ishikawa, co-author of Now You’re Thinking!

I was catching up on my reading this weekend and came across an interesting article, The CEO of Duke Energy on Learning to Work with Green activists in the Harvard Business Review.  http://hbr.org/product/the-ceo-of-duke-energy-on-learning-to-work-with-gr/an/R1105A-HCB-ENG.  The article describes the process that James Rogers implemented when he took over as CEO of PSI (now Duke Energy). What particularly interested me was the strategy that he implemented when he first joined the organization. He called it the “100 days of listening”.  His idea was to meet with the company’s many stakeholders before taking action.  He used this approach to help “identify the issues, set priorities, figure out who to trust and start repairing and rebuilding relationships.”  This is the essence of quality thinking.

We make hundreds of decisions everyday and most of those decisions require little to no thought.  We simply react to the situation.  In the workplace, this may look a lot like firefighting.  The largest fires get immediate attention. One key step to improved thinking is to consciously stop and think.  In this case, Rogers strategically stopped to listen to stakeholders before developing assumptions and acting on those assumptions. If he hadn’t taken the time to spend 100 days of listening then he may have acted on false assumptions and started fighting the “largest fires” which may simply be the loudest stakeholders. Even though he didn’t agree with all of them, he was able to understand their assumptions, expectations and arguments.  By truly understanding their concerns he was able to prioritize his next course of action, establish creditability and ultimately improve his ability to influence others towards a mutually agreed upon solution.  When stakeholders feel that they have been heard and have helped to create the solution then, they are more likely to support the plan’s roll out.

We may not all have the luxury of 100 days to listen but we usually can spare 10 minutes or more to stop and think.

Take a moment to stop and think today.

Are you spending your time fighting fires? Have you listened to the key stakeholders and are clear on what your priorities are?