I’m sure you are familiar with the idiom, ‘Don’t shoot the messenger.’
Long before we got our bad news from Facebook, news websites or TV, messengers were sent back from the front lines of battles to deliver progress updates. A foolish ruler who was displeased with the news from one such messenger killed him, rather than listening to, and acting on the message that was delivered.
There aren’t too many bearers of bad news in sports clubs, community groups and charities who actually get shot. In modern times, we’ve had to become resilient to bad news and not take out our frustration on the people who tell us about it, whether it’s a COVID-induced lockdown, a bushfire or another flood.
The more common problem among committee-run, non-profit organisations is the ugly cousin of ‘don’t shoot the messenger’, which I call, ‘Don’t ignore the words of messengers you don’t like’.
Non-profit clubs and organisations are small democracies, which can make them quite political. Leaders are elected from among the members and charged with the duty of making decisions on behalf of the broader membership. Contested elections can be unpleasant events. Just like in a race, there will be a winner. But unlike a race, there’s no prize for coming second or third. So in an election, apart from the successful candidate, everyone else loses.
Interestingly, it’s not only the losers who can harbour ‘sour grapes’ after an election. Winners often grow to dislike the people who ran against them and it’s this dislike that can make them dismissive of anything that the ‘losers’ seek to contribute to the organisation during their term in office.
I ran a planning workshop recently with the board of a state-level association. As part of the consultation for this planning program, we conducted a broad survey of members to collect their ideas for where the organisation should head for the next five years. During the workshop, we came to one of the almost 200 survey responses that happened to be submitted by someone who lost in the election for president.
Because of the nature of the suggestions in the survey response, the president could tell who had submitted it. Without considering any of the suggestions in the response, she immediately launched into a passive-aggressive attack on the character of the person. What was really interesting was that the rest of the board also seemed happy to dismiss the survey response before anyone considered its content.
It’s fortunate that all of the members of this board have a high degree of self-awareness, so after only a few probing questions from me, they realised that they were ignoring the words, simply because they didn’t like the person that was saying them. After further consideration, they ended up adopting every single suggestion in the survey response.
Good listening skills are critical in any leadership role, especially in cases where you may need to seek the counsel of people who you defeated in elections (hey, it worked for Abraham Lincoln). This is important in cases where you will need to listen to bad news and adjust your course accordingly, without ‘shooting the messenger’. Equally, you need to keep an open ear and an open mind when listening to the guidance or suggestions of people who may be on the other side of the political spectrum of your organisation to you.
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