Active Accessibility & Leadership
Initiative is a desirable trait, especially in people occupying leadership positions. Instead of waiting for people to come to them, effective leaders take the initiative by becoming actively accessible. They don’t wait for people to come into their offices through their “open doors”; they use those doors to exit their offices. But when they get to where their employees are, they don’t settle for “management by wandering around”, they employ two communication techniques favored by truly effective leaders: They ask & listen.
Collaborative processes
One of the most important things people in leadership positions can do is facilitate collaborative processes, activities that will enhance organizational success by:
- Identifying areas in which changes would be beneficial
- Identifying specific changes to make in those areas
- Identifying specific, worthwhile and realistic objectives that can be achieved by making those changes
- Developing actionable plans for doing so
- Implementing and fine-tuning those plans
Collaboration means active group participation. All parties to this process bring their own perspectives, opinions and suggestions to the table and share them. All parties also demonstrate their willingness to consider the input provided by others. And none of this happens unless someone steps up to facilitate the process. That’s why I believe that facilitating such a process is one of the most important things leaders do.
Active accessibility and facilitation go hand-in-hand
Leaders who are actively accessible get out where the action is, where the people whose efforts are essential to organizational success are doing what they do. While they’re out there, effective leaders ask those other people to share their perspectives on things they think need to be changed and on the specific changes they would make. Effective leaders understand that the best way to obtain others’ ideas is to ask for them. They also understand that in order to get input from as many people as possible, they’ll have to ask for it more than once!
Ask & Listen
Before you can benefit from others’ ideas you must know what those ideas are, and the best way I’ve found to encourage people to share their ideas is to ask them to do so. Pretty tricky, right? Leaders initiate collaboration by asking questions; they sustain it by listening to people’s responses to their questions. Here’s my rationale for encouraging you to ask more than once. Let’s say that you take my suggestion for asking and listening to heart, and that it is a bit different from your past behavior. After reading this post you get out of your office and begin asking members of your team questions about areas they think could be improved or for their ideas about how to make improvements. What do you think their first response might be? Here’s one you can expect: “Oh no, he/she’s been to another workshop or read another book; let’s just lay low until this blows over and things get back to normal”.
You’ve got to ask them often enough to convince them that you’re genuinely interested in what they have to say. Here’s a common comment from people in leadership positions who discontinue their facilitation efforts based on some staff members’ initial responses: “I tried that, and it didn’t work”.
Trust me when I tell you that asking once will not generate the response you’re looking for from everyone, maybe not from very many of them. You must persevere, and by doing so, you’ll convince others that you are, indeed, interested in what they think and that you are committed to facilitating a collaborative process.
Your commitment, as evidenced by your perseverance as a facilitator, will have an impact on the behavior of others. Commitment, like apathy, is contagious. When you function effectively as a facilitator of collaborative processes, you show others what commitment and perseverance look like. Telling them that you expect behavior that reflects those characteristics is how you inform them. Showing them what that behavior looks like is how you lead them.
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