Education
Universal thinking
How to listen and lead your organization to success
By Meredyth McKenzie
Smart Business Columbus | September 2008
Page 1 of 2
Dale T. Knobel
president, Denison University
To Dale T. Knobel, being a
leader means being responsive to many different constituencies to make the best
possible decisions for your
organization.
And the president of Denison
University says that in order to
be responsive, it is critical that
you listen carefully to what people are saying.
“Being a good listener about
their needs and reactions is important, and then trying to
take advantage of the knowledge base and experience of
your own staff and employees is
important,” he says.
Knobel, who is finishing his
10th year at the private liberal arts
and sciences school in Granville,
also relies on delegating responsibilities to his 650 employees
and setting a vision for everyone
to follow to help him lead the
school and oversee its $95 million budget.
Smart Business spoke with
Knobel about how listening
carefully can help you delegate
better and set a clear vision for
the future.
Be a consistent listener. One of
the keys to being a good listener
is not making snap judgments
based on what you first hear.
Being a good listener means listening not just to one person or
voice, it means listening to
many voices and then trying to
reach an informed judgment.
Most leaders coming into a
new organization are pretty
good at listening at the outset
and trying to get a measure of
the people and culture. But
there’s a temptation [that] once
you’ve been at a place for a
long time, it’s easy to fall in the
trap. You have to keep relistening over the course of a productive career because what people have to share changes.
You certainly use your own
experience and judgment to try
to make sense of what you
hear, but you also test what you
hear with others. I rely upon
trusted members of my own
staff to share my impressions of
what I hear and test the conclusions that I think I’ve reached
from what I’ve heard and see
whether they would arrive at
similar conclusions or not.
It prevents you from starting
with preconceived notions
about how something ought to
work and plowing doggedly
ahead without those notions
being tested, whether it’s by
those who are recipients of
your services or those on your
own team.
Learn to delegate. There’s always
the temptation for anyone in a
leadership position to try to do
everything themselves and do it
in a way that suits their own
predilections, but you soon
become aware that not only can
you not do everything yourself,
but you’re liable not to do it well
if you try to take on too much.
Press decision-making down to those who are immediately
engaged with the issue, who are
most likely to understand it,
have experience with it and are
able to come up with good
answers to an issue or opportunity. The farther you get away
from the front line, the more
likely you are to make a bad
decision.
When you empower people to
make decisions, you have to
back them up. It doesn’t mean
that you don’t ever find occasions where you can help people with that decision-making;
there are never occasions
where you don’t, after the fact,
help people see how they could
have made a decision better.
If you’re going to delegate and
empower people, you also have
to back them up, and that
means not second-guessing them. Empowering people
means not just giving them a
chance to make a decision
once, but, as a habit, allowing
them to make decisions that
affect their area. It’s only by
habit that they acquire the sense
that you have trust in them.
You’re simply overwhelmed if
you don’t delegate, and being
overwhelmed means you don’t
make decisions well and let
things fall through the cracks.
You’re liable to get better decisions because you’re delegating
to people who probably have a
more intimate knowledge of the
decision to be made than you
have.
