Managing in the Age of Uncertainty

The Art of Listening

Want to know what keeps your best people up at night?

That you don’t know what’s keeping them awake.

The best millennials and gen-z don’t have time to waste on a team that isn’t winning or a manager who doesn’t recognize performance. They know time spent on any team will be just a chapter in their career story. But they want the chapter on your team to be a best-seller, a place that makes a difference to their career advancement — because they know the corporate ladder doesn’t exist anymore, and they need to chart their own course.

Listening as a boomer manager was too often an “event” like a Q&A where the questions are pre-selected or screened; or a “site visit” where a traveling leader or manager plans weeks or months in advance for a carefully orchestrated town hall.

For this generation of talent, it’s one thing to make yourself available, it’s another thing to get your people to tell you what’s on their minds.

This issue of Managing in the Age of Uncertainty is focused on what listening means to the next generation as one of the Six Drivers of Consistency from my research into the future of managing. As you read about listening, think about your team. Are you frequently surprised about news on your team? When was the last time you held a skip-level meeting? Do you know the first names of emerging stars?

Why Listening Matters to People

Your best people are betting on you to connect the dots between a job role on the team and their career growth opportunities. This is the context for the “art of listening” as a manager.

If you are currently a manager, I’m sure you remember being an individual contributor when you were on the front-line. People in front-line roles worry about execution more than you may think. This is especially true for your best people, who know first-hand what’s working and what’s not — and its impact on their growth opportunities.

“No news is good news” was a boomer refrain. This generation feels exactly the opposite.

Millennials and gen-z want their managers to know the state of execution. They want to be held accountable because of the exposure it gives them when they succeed. They also want to share ideas about how to do things better. Most importantly, your best people and rising stars want you to know who they are.

What Expectations People Have for a Manager

Your people are already talking among themselves about what’s working and what’s not on the team. They want you to tap into it and be as current as they are.

The “art of listening” is indeed a practiced art because it’s harder to listen than talk. Here are four ways to be good at it:

1. Walk in your people’s shoes. There’s no better way to listen than to meet your people where they are, in person. It shows you really care about them, that you know their names and what job roles they fulfill. Yes, tools like Slack are great for asynchronous workflows, but nothing replaces human interaction. When I visited one of the sales labs at Cisco I managed, I spent the first day in the lab long before the town hall, learning from the team what the heck a software-defined network was and how it was different from the past. I’m grateful to engineers like Steven Moore and Denise Fishburne for educating me and pointing out where my team and Cisco could do better.

2. Commit to skip-level meetings. I’m grateful for what Steve and Denise taught me, but I’m equally grateful to their managers Charlie Lewis and Jason Angelus who recommended I do skip-level meetings in the first place.

The skip-level meeting is critical to listening as a manager. Knowing people layers below you gives your team confidence you have a full picture of the team’s performance in your mind — not just some spreadsheet in your hands.

3. If you must use a virtual meeting platform for employee communications, set it up for listening and a two-way conversation, not talking. Make sure these conditions are in place:

• Encourage open dialogue in the meeting chat room and openly ask people to express themselves — call out and recognize active participants.

• Make it possible for teammates to ask anonymous questions in meetings — eliminate fear.

• Prepare poll questions in advance that get at the heart of issues concerning employees — ask them what’s on their minds anonymously.

• Publish answers in writing to all questions via employee communications — and ask for feedback.

• Record and publish every meeting — ask for 100% participation.

• Set expectations for follow-up conversations.

4. Set a cadence of different listening activities. Your people need to know you are committed to listening in a consistent way. Depending on the size and scope of your team, publish a calendar of activities you plan for each business year, calendar or fiscal. Try hard to identify locations beyond the home office, if possible. Experiment with different communication modalities to find what works best for your style, including a moderated fireside chat with question flow; an all-hands presentation from a stage; an open, unscripted Q&A with audience; a recorded video followed by Q&A; or small group discussions. Former Cisco CEO John Chambers hosted a monthly birthday breakfast where any employee could ask any question.

How It Helps Connect Career Dots in the Age of Uncertainty

In the end, when you commit to listening to your team, you’ll learn things that will make you a better manager.

You’ll find out ways to improve performance and likely be exposed to better ways of doing things. When you take action on feedback, it only motivates your people to believe you have their back. Remember, you want to be the manager people are talking about.

You’ll also know better who your performers are. When you tell stories about your people and their execution results in your operations review, it will fill your team with pride and confidence that you care about connecting the dots to their success — which is exactly what the best of millennials and gen-z expect from their manager.

Manager Thought of the Week

“Dare to listen, don’t obfuscate.”

What Scott Weiss, then CEO of Speakeasy, Inc., told me when I asked him to summarize what managers can learn from his excellent book Dare about the role of leaders and managers in creating team trust.

In Summary: Principles of Managing in the Age of Uncertainty

• I left Cisco to answer this question with research and evidence: What does the manager of the future look like? What are millennials and gen-z seeking in a manager? Which behaviors, tactics, skills or processes matter? What’s it going to take to attract and keep the best people over the next decade?

• Based on this research, the core philosophy of this newsletter is rooted in one idea: successful managers in this moment in time, for this generation of talent, need to be “career dot-connectors.” The next-gen doesn’t expect to spend their entire career on your team — that’s an idea boomers grew up with. A job on your team is like a chapter in a career story to the current generation. If you want the best people on your team, you have to connect the dots between roles on the team and the career opportunities of the people working on the team.

• What is the“Age of Uncertainty”? If the industrial age was about taking predictable steps up the ladder, the age of uncertainty is about finding or discovering the path of a career without any predictable steps, without an obvious ladder — it’s why being a career dot-connector will differentiate you as a manager.

• How to be a Great Manager in the Age of Uncertainty: Be a Career Dot Connector is available on Amazon.

• What kind of manager are you? Take my free self-assessment and learn about yourself.