CEOs: Hearing and Listening

Bruce Nussbaum at Business Week asks whether CEOs are out of touch. 

I believe many are.

I spend many, many hours in meetings with senior executives of major corporations.  Our conversations are often focused on a single question: how can we convince the CEO of the obvious changes taking place in our business environment?  How can we get her to understand what's happening?  How can we get him to listen?

The last question is, of course, the toughest.  "C" level executives too often find it very difficult to listen.  Specifically, it is the odd CEO who allows him/herself to deeply consider information that does not confirm their viewpoint/promises to the board/wishful thinking. 

How many times have you heard, "he's not going to want to hear that," when planning to deliver, "bad news" to the boss?

So, while Nussbaum asks,

Are CEOs and top managers going to the wrong meetings? Are they having the wrong conversations?

I think the question is: how can we get CEOs and top managers to listen to things they don't want to hear?

Tags: Leadership Listening

Comments

[dilys]

The edge here would seem to be rapport -- to identify what's important to the CEO in his/[her] own terms, then to frame the message in reference to those criteria. Identifying the criteria is easy to do with a little attention to the subject, and may additionally have some (though not always 1-to-1) relationship to personality types.

I often think of a Ziggy cartoon that pictures two rabbits on the windowsill before the sun is fully up, screaming at Ziggy, "Get up! Get up! There are MEALY-BUGS in the LETTUCE!" The CEO, each of us, has his own mealy-bug phobias in his head, and is not likely to wake up for someone else's, no matter how logically urgent the situation.

So it's "listening, listening" all around IMO. Anyway, my own listening is the only part I can improve.