A good leader always gets things done, we’re told. Yes, but also no. I wonder if this preconception is down to old-fashioned cultural chauvinism: a good leader should embody the (perceived) masculine trait of ‘commanding’, while listening is all-too-often denigrated as a passive (i.e. feminine) activity. But nothing could be further from the truth. In the contemporary business landscape, any good leader – regardless of gender – must be empathetic. Shortly after I joined UM, I created a leadership council, just below the board, to be the ears of the agency and understand what we can do to help our people perform better. We carry out employee surveys, of course, but I also wanted to build a culture where we listened first and ‘did’ second. It led to some immediate changes. For one, our monthly all-agency meetings had become a huge, unwieldy beast. So we listened and discovered they needed to be shorter and that our people wanted more involvement in new business and to see the work our teams created for pitches. We created a more formal and focused structure, with responsibility for each session rotated around our teams so these meetings became more about sharing insights into the work rather than senior leadership presentations – a show-and-tell rather than telland- sell.
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