Listen to the People around You

I feel like I’ve been gone forever.  Between conferences and vacations, it’s been a while since I was able to blog, but it’s great to be back.

This may not seem relevant at first, but I promise there’s a great connection to how you communicate at work.  One of the conferences that I attended in the last month was on how to be a better teacher, and several of the sessions that I attended had to do with not lecturing.  A consistent theme at a number of sessions was that lecturing is an ineffective way of teaching, that guiding discussions was better in terms of student enjoyment and more importantly, student learning.  One reason for that is that a lecture assumes that the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing.  There are occasions when this is true, but they are in fact rarer than we typically assume.  In fact, as I teach organizational communication, my students have a great deal of knowledge before I walk into the classroom.  They’ve listened to their parents and others who work full-time, many have had part-time jobs, most are part of student organizations, and many have preconceived ideas from television programs.  I am a better teacher if I don’t depend solely on knowing more than my students and instead help them to share their knowledge in such a way that we all learn.

So I promised this is relevant.  In businesses today, there is usually too much to know for any one person to know everything.  We depend on the knowledge, ideas, and expertise of many to be the best, yet sometimes we act as if we don’t need others.  We ignore someone’s input, we dismiss someone’s idea, or we speak in such a way as to dare someone to disagree with us.  When your organization is faced with a problem, don’t hesitate to present solutions to that problem, but also know that you may need information from others to make your solution workable.  If you’re a decision-maker, remember that you have people around you with ideas and expertise.  A good leader, like a good teacher, relies on good people around him or her.