The Importance of Confusion, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

When I begin an on-site training program I start by saying:

“Hi everyone. I’ll begin with a warning: I use confusion as a teaching tool. Confusion is merely your brain attempting to input new information and not finding circuits to translate it. Stuff you already know goes down familiar circuits and it’s comfortable. Your confusion is merely your brain telling you it has no circuits to translate the new data – and you’re learning! And it makes me SO happy!”

The participants laugh uncomfortably. But then it becomes a sort of gentle contest – who can be the MOST confused. Invariably someone says

“Sharon Drew, you’ll be SO proud of me! I’m SOOOO confused!”

And everyone laughs together and claps in knowing agreement.

WHY IS CONFUSION DEEMED BAD?

I wonder why confusion is something to be avoided. Why do we all have to ‘know’ everything? Why can’t we delight in the mystery, the jumble, the dark moving spaces that bring that slight bit of discomfort, a touch of fear and dollop of curiosity?

When we think we ‘know’ something, it’s because we’re using circuits that already exist in our brains. Sadly, we assume what we ‘know’ is accurate, even if it ends up being inaccurate or biased, even if it means we end up dismissing new content that might be more accurate, even if it means we restrict learning anything new.

Old beliefs, previous knowledge, habits and assumptions become concretized over time, and new ideas become suspect because there’s no precedent for them even if the new ideas are more cogent. Our brains just love our status quo. Simple. Stable. Quick. Reality? No such thing.

How do new ideas get into the world when they’re contrary to existing myths and norms? Why isn’t ok to be confused and then curious to research, think, debate new ideas?

Entire fields remain committed to researching within the confines of perceived wisdom, even when they suspect, or know, it’s not working. How does something new enter if confusion, or the ‘unknown’, isn’t considered?

Remember flat earthers? What about radio waves? Did you know only one painting of Cezanne’s was purchased during his life? Or that it took 40 years after the invention of the telephone to begin broad use – using Morse Code instead? Are you aware that initially Bill Gates told his team that he wasn’t convinced the internet had value? Seriously.

LISTENING IS PART OF THE PROBLEM

One of the initiators of our confusion is the way words enter our brains and get translated. You see, when we hear someone speak, our brains don’t accurately translate what the speaker intends to communicate!

Sound – in this case, words – enter as vibrations, get turned into signals after being filtered by our beliefs, then get dispatched to ‘similar-enough’ existing circuits that were formed from similar – but not the same – words. And any meaning, any vibrations, that don’t match our existing (and comfortable, accepted) circuits, get discarded or resisted.

When I learned this (see my book on the subject – What?), I created a ‘curiosity’ trigger as an override in my brain when I experience resistance or disbelief, and now go straight to confusion instead so I can potentially learn something new.

Sample

I adore confusion. It means I’m creating new circuits. It means I’m learning!

WE COULD ALL USE A BIT OF CONFUSION

Our brains are the problem. Indeed, because of the way we subjectively interpret new ideas we end up restricting our lives. The thing is, everything, regardless of what science thinks, or what our spouses or bosses want us to believe is true, is a subjective interpretation that we live our lives committed to!

What we read or enjoy; the colors we see and the words we hear; the friends and jobs and neighborhoods we choose; are restricted to the circuits that already exist in our brains – what we agree with and the worlds our brain circuits have created for us – obviously a carefully calibrated world view; obviously restricting a whole lotta world out there we don’t recognize or enjoy or share. We could all use a little confusion now and again.

To allow ourselves to be confused, we’d have to ignore, override or at least hide from view, some of our biases. So rather than guess what your biases are, I’ll pose some questions of you, because I’m sure confused why you’d rather keep doing what you’re doing rather than face confusion and learn, change, and be enriched:

• What would you need to believe differently to be willing to rid yourself from some of your biases? Do you know which ones you’d be willing to part with? How do you know your answer isn’t biased?
• How would you know that any confusion is worth the cost of ‘not knowing’ and being uncomfortable?
• What issues come up for you when you face the prospect of being confused in an area you’re expert in?
• Are there any areas of your life or work knowledge that you protect, that you prefer not to feel confusion around because you believe you have all the knowledge you need – and it’s accurate? Would you be willing to examine these to see if there is anything new to learn? Any areas for you to rethink?
• Think of a topic, an idea that runs counter to your beliefs and spend time with it. No, really. Spend enough time to understand it, and know precisely how it differs from your beliefs. See if you can find any fragment in there that confuses you that you’d be willing to think about for a day or two.

We live our lives, work our jobs, vote and go to neighborhood meetings, accustomed to having an automatic answer, knowledge at the ready that has been vetted by our brains, accepted and comfortable. But to gain new knowledge, reconsider old opinions, mature your beliefs and self-asessments, you can create new circuits, and then have a whole new knowledge set.

All you need is some curiosity and the willingness to be confused for a bit of time. You’re worth it, no?

__________________________________________

Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen February 3rd, 2025

Posted In: News

Are Helpers Really Helping? Why clients resist us, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

If you are a therapist or coach, manager or consultant, you’ve been schooled to be a guide, a mentor, to help people find solutions they couldn’t find on their own.

During a recent conversation with a coach who prides himself on Always Being Right! (Clients who don’t heed him are told to go elsewhere.) and wondering who would choose him as their coach, I began thinking about how Helpers go about helping, and why clients often ignore their suggestions.

I believe there’s an ‘accepted practice’ problem here: Helping professionals use questions and ‘active listening’ to ‘understand’ the identified problem. But sometimes standard questions and listening practices can’t trigger the best outcomes.

In my work developing systemic brain change models I’ve discovered that behavior change must originate in the brain. The question is how to get there to instigate the change.

In this article, I’ll provide a much-simplified explanation of how brains cause our choices, explain where conventional skills fall short, and introduce you to new skills that can facilitate permanent change without resistance.

BEYOND THE BRAIN

Currently we rely on questions to help us understand a problem and then assume our clients accurately hear what we’re trying to tell them. Unfortunately, this is where the problems begin:

• the way our brains ‘listen’ is biased by our history, regardless of what’s been said. In fact, through no fault of our own, it’s quite possible neither client or Helper hear each other accurately.
• conventional questions themselves are biased by the goals, verbiage, intent, of the Helper and may not uncover accurate data, causing Clients to sometimes offer unhelpful answers.

I’ll begin with the ‘big picture’ and explain how our brains cause us to do what we do.

Simply, our brain is an enormous motherboard that captures and mechanically organizes the data from our lives, stores it in circuits, and uses our mental models and history as the foundation from which to act.

Each of us operates from historic, unconscious, and unique neural configurations, stored as memory in 86 billion brain neurons that hold our history, our ideas, our values and from which our decisions and behaviors arise.

Obviously, we each think and act uniquely. Obviously, no one else has access to our brain circuitry; no one else has our life story or history; no one else can ‘get in there’.

Technically, change occurs when brain components get reconfigured or new ones get formed. Behavior change is a brain issue and part of a system. It’s not a stand-alone process, but the final element of a string of connections triggered by our brain. When we attempt to merely change the final element, there’s no process to maintain it.

HOW BRAINS STORE INFORMATION

I’ve spent decades unpacking how brains are organized and have developed several facilitation models that enable real choice (See How?), models that make it possible for Helpers to enable clients locate the neural circuits that initiated their problem and, by triggering and generating new synapses, reconfigure them.

Sample

And herein lie the problem Helpers face now: standard questions and usual listening practices steer the Other to where the Helper, using their own unconscious assumptions and curiosity thinks the answers should be and possibly miss where actual answers reside.

Once I realized this I began researching how brains prompt our actions and eventually, after decades of study and research, developed questioning and listening models that make it possible to get directly into the neural circuits and use brain change as their foundation. I also discarded my role as a Helper and became a Decision Facilitator, to facilitate Others to their own circuits easily develop new behaviors with no resistance.

WHAT IS CHANGE? NO, REALLY?

Change is systemic, not as simple as merely doing something different. Since behaviors are outputs from instructions sent by existing circuits, new behaviors need new neural circuits to send out new instructions for new outputs. Too often, Helpers merely try to change behaviors without changing where in the brain the new instructions will come from.

You see, any change request represents a difference, a threat to the existing system and as such, will cause resistance unless it’s been accepted first. This is the problem with noted change management models – they merely attempt behavior change without generating new neural circuits for the change, or without ensuring the values, beliefs, and mental models of the existing system align with the new and put the system at risk.

It’s like trying to get a backward moving robot to move forward by explaining, questioning, and showing videos; the robot must be reprogrammed. Without taking this into account, by trying to change a behavior by trying to change a behavior without changing the neural circuits, people will resist, or not maintain, the change.

QUESTIONS AND LISTENING

Here are the reasons people have difficulty finding internal answers and making decisions.

Brains: The time it takes to figure out all the criteria needed to make a decision is the time it takes to act on it. No, they’re not dragging their feet; they’re trying to change congruently.

See, the brain’s 86 billion neurons are stored and labeled in ways that may be difficult to consciously access. In fact, words or ideas even enter brains as meaningless sound vibrations (Neuroscience actually calls words ‘puffs of air.’) which ultimately get turned into the signals that then get translated into meaning.

Let me explain the brain stuff that goes on. Hang in with me as it explains why we mishear and misunderstand.

To begin with, our brain doesn’t accept spoken words accurately, as intended. It takes the sound vibrations, turns them into signals, and then finds existing ‘similar enough’ (historic, biased) circuits to translate the signals into meaning – a very inexact process.

To make the process fast (It takes five one hundredths of a second for the entire process.) our brain chooses the quickest route to translation circuits, almost always an oft-used superhighway that may only have a tangential connection to the original meaning and intent. In other words: all incoming words get translated without any regard to accuracy!

Most of us aren’t aware that our thoughts, realizations, understandings, are merely versions of what our brains have already translated for us.

Unfortunately, questions meant to ‘gather data’, are restricted by the Helper’s assumptions. Sometimes Others uncover the exact data we need in order to help them. But sometimes our questions direct the client’s brain to an unhelpful answer, and something more valuable remains unretrieved.

To help Others find precisely where the necessary data is stored, Helpers must have NO assumptions, NO biases, and NO belief that we have anyone’s answers. All we need is to send Others to the right circuits where their answers are stored. And for this, conventional skills don’t work. If you want to better understand exactly what goes on, read my new book How?

Listening: Given we all have a ‘brain circuit translation’ problem making it near impossible for anyone to listen without bias regardless of how well they ‘listen’.

To avoid biases and misinterpretations, to help Others discover where their answers are stored, Helpers must listen differently and don’t assume they ‘understand’ what’s been said. I actually developed a process called Listening for Systems, which bypasses our assumptions and hears what’s intended.

If you’d like to learn more I wrote a book on the subject: What? Did you really say what I think I heard?.

Sample

Questions: This one is the most uncomfortable for Helpers. Conventional questions are formulated to elicit data as per the needs, intent, languaging, curiosity of the Asker.

To this end, I spent 10 years inventing a new form of question (Facilitative Question) that foregoes data gathering per se and instead leads Others to the brain circuits and memory channels to precisely where the appropriate data is stored. If you go to my site I explain how I invented them and provide descriptions and articles.

By posing unbiased, systemic questions that lead brains to appropriate circuits, by listening without assumptions, by trusting everyone has their own answers, we can truly serve Others beyond any natural biases we might have.

The new job of Helpers is to begin with the assumption that clients may actually have perfectly good answers stored in some place where their brain isn’t looking.

HELPERS AREN’T HELPING

Unfortunately, these skills are not taught in coaching schools or MBA programs which continue to teach to ‘be aware’, be ‘open minded’, take a ‘different perspective’, do ‘active listening’, ask ‘probing’ questions to ‘give the Helper the information’ they need to ‘help’. But as you now know, neither standard questions or conventional listening will always collect accurate information.

When Helpers try to have answers for Others, our track record is spotty: clients use some of our suggestions and ignore others because they may not have gotten to the core (and unconscious) factors that caused the problem to begin with.

And because our advice ultimately brings Others up against their own inabilities, they push the Helper away regardless of the length or success of the relationship. Inadvertently, because no other way has been developed to professionally help Others, we infantilize our clients.

I know that most coaches, leaders, managers, and Helpers truly want to serve Others. Please consider shifting your goal and learn new tools. I’m happy to help. I’ve developed new skills for Helpers (coaches, sellers, managers, healthcare providers, therapists) to enable folks to discover and create their own answers while reducing the power imbalance and bias, as well as learning tools to teach you how to listen without bias and pose Facilitative Questions. Please contact me in case you’re interested in learning how to do this, and we can all Help as true Servant Leaders. sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

_____________________________

Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen January 24th, 2025

Posted In: News

Change Facilitation™, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

The CEO of a midsized company recently called me after reading my article on avoiding resistance during a change initiative. He said ‘resistance management’ was built into all their projects due to its prevalence. Curious, I asked him to send me a typical project flow chart. The problem was obvious: ‘people implementation’ was #6.

Resistance management has become standard in change management initiatives. Indeed resistance is so common that hundreds, if not thousands, of books, articles and programs (including a department in Harvard) are dedicated to managing it.

But resistance is only triggered when two necessary elements are overlooked:

People: Too often change management processes are led, designed, and organized by a few ‘leaders’ who tend to overlook some of the folks further down the food chain. It’s necessary to put people #1 to include their voices, unique and vital information, ideas, needs, and early buy-in of everyone who is either part of the problem or who will be part of the solution.

Systems: Any change must include not only behavior changes, but amendments to the underlying system – the rules, beliefs, assumptions, practices, expectations, and norms that have held the status quo in place.

By overlooking people and systems, and with a focus limited to changing behaviors, resistance is a typical output as the cost, the risk, of change is unknown. With a shift in thinking it’s possible to prevent resistance entirely. In this essay I’ll provide thinking on how to accomplish this.

WHAT IS CHANGE?

Theoretically, we’re delighted to change, to realize our best selves, solve a problem, find better solutions and learn new things. But unless the risk of the proposed change is known, understood, and managed; unless the stability, beliefs and norms of the system are maintained, the system will resist change.

Change is an alteration to a system (defined as a set of beliefs and rules that are agreed to by people (or things) included) and entails modifying an existing structure that has been working well-enough for some time, accepted by all, and habituated into the daily norms.

Current change management models focus on changing the problematic behaviors/activity but ignore addressing the norms and beliefs that have created and maintain the system. Without simultaneously managing or shifting the hidden systems issues that have been keeping the defined problem in place, the system faces an unknown risk and will resist.

Before agreeing to change, the system must know:

• How will the new match the existing beliefs, values, norms, rules, routines? Are they compatible? Are the core beliefs/values of the group maintained?
• How will daily tasks and working/reporting relationships change?
• How are individual ego beliefs and job identity factors managed? Are the folks most affected by the new included in information gathering and goal setting at the beginning so they have input around their own (new) jobs? Do these folks get a voice in generating the goals and outputs for a new solution? In sharing their unique experiences to best understand the problem from the customer side?
• What must be relearned and in what time frame?
• What if the new doesn’t represent the output needed by those most affected?

Without answers to questions like these, change becomes a threat and folks will resist doing anything different. Below I discuss a route to determining risk and generating buy-in.

THE STEPS OF CHANGE

There are actually 13 steps that all change takes, most of which occur before a problem can be accurately diagnosed or the goal defined. By enlisting these in your change management processes, you’ll have a good chance to avoid resistance.

Sample

Note: While seemingly a book on helping buyers buy, Dirty Little Secrets is about the 13 steps of change/decision making.

Here are the main categories involved:

1.   Where are you? What’s missing?
The full problem set can be understood only when everyone who touches the existing problem and will be involved with the new solution are assembled to share their thoughts. How did the problem occur? How has it been maintained over time? What systems, rules, relationships, job descriptions are maintained per the existing circumstances? How would they change as a result of doing things differently? What might the fallout be?

Without knowing this, it’s impossible to get an accurate understanding of the full data set involved or set an precise goal. When leaders and senior managers propose goals for a project without including input from these folks or without recognizing the possible risks the change might trigger, it’s a certainty that time delays, inadequate results, lack of buy-in and resistance are sure to follow.

Too often leadership develops a change project without appropriate input, working only from their unique perspective. Unfortunately, I hear the same thing repeatedly: “Leadership knows the full problem set. They don’t need to call in front-line workers. They’re smart enough to figure it out for themselves.” This assumption is responsible for a cascading array of follow-on problems.
2. How can the system fix the problem with available resources?

Change doesn’t happen unless the system itself recognizes an incongruence. And unless available resources are disqualified, anything new will be questioned. The questions to be answered are:

• • • • What has prevented this problem from being resolved already?
      • What is keeping this problem in place? (rules, jobs, outputs)
      • Is there anything we already have that might solve our problem if used differently? Any known consultants? Apps?

3.   Brainstorming
Brainstorming is a great way to discover everything and include everyone. For large companies it’s possible to assign representative work teams that bring back the ideas to a main (and representative!) team. Note: it’s vital that everyone’s ideas get included as each job role will have different needs and ideas. Generally, leaders don’t have day-to-day contact with customers and cannot know the full set of issues that must be included in any change initiative.

Brainstorming should include:

• • • • The foundational beliefs/values to work from
      • Random ideas for solutions from each department/working group
      • Managing the elements holding the old in place and what would change if it’s altered
      • What are the risks to making a change? To not making a change? Is the risk of change more/less than maintaining the status quo?
      • Possible solutions (to include workarounds)
        • The risks of each
        • The danger signs that indicate upcoming problems

 4.   Managing risk
The risk of change must be equal to or lower than the risk of status quo.

Change can’t proceed successfully unless the risk of change is understood and approved by all. During brainstorming, it’s vital that possible risks get discussed, and the signs of possible failure be understood and managed beforehand.

There are several types of risks involved in change projects:

• • • When folks are left out, there’s incomplete data to work from and goal-setting might be flawed and folks who touch customers might not buy-in. Obviously this is a risk to the company, the customers, and revenue.
    • The risks each group face from a change must be understood and accounted for before the project goals are set.
    • When the core beliefs and values of the company or team are omitted from the identified outcome, people will resist and feel at risk.

It’s only when

a.  everyone who is involved with the problem and will touch the solution,
b.  the core beliefs and values are agreed-upon by all involved at the start as the foundation of the change,
c.   the risks are understood and steps are in place to manage them,
d.  the Group chooses the specific goals to be met and what specifically an outcome must include

that it’s possible to avoid resistance.

I suggest it’s possible to manage change in a way that encourages buy-in and avoids resistance, garners the full data set with which to set goals and expectations, conclude with a new behavior/belief outcome that can be maintained through time.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Change is a multi-faceted endeavor that needs to include both behavior, belief, and systems changes:

• • • To lead folks think to think and act differently takes belief change and buy-in.
    • To clarify the intent of a change requires unbiased questions (I’ve invented a wholly new form of question called Facilitative Questions™ that avoids bias entirely).
    • To engage people to feel safe enough to act in new ways takes inclusion and being heard.
    • To collaborate, organize, build new teams, set goals, and manage takes new leadership skills that involve ‘soft’ skills.
    • To align stakeholders and design solutions takes collaboration.

While many models claim to do the above, our current tools don’t teach how to accomplish it. My book HOW? not only lays out the steps but teaches Faciltative Questions that facilitate core decision making with no bias; a new form of listening that hears accurately; and the full compliment of the steps of change.

• Sample

As a good starting point, I suggest the following be the core framework:

Our goal is to have/do _______ to alleviate/fix _______ and will include ______ group/departments to help us define the problem and generate a solution design. We understand that any change must include these underlying beliefs, norms, and rules: ________. We understand that the risks of not including these are _______; the danger signs we’ll experience if we’ve left anything important out include _______ that we will address by _______.

If you would like to develop a change management process for your team, or get help with an initiative triggering resistance, call me to discuss: sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

___________

Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including her new book HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change and decision making, the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen January 13th, 2025

Posted In: News

Why Women Make Great Leaders, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

When my son George was born in 1972 I was determined to give him attributes I found compelling: kindness, respect and an awareness of others, creativity, a willingness to listen and to collaborate. To accomplish this, I kept TV out of the house, gave him creative toys like blocks, Legos, and art supplies like paints and pipe cleaners. I brought him to theater and galleries as was age appropriate. I began teaching him colors at the Picasso exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum when he was 18 months old and in a backpack. I began a storytelling routine so I could instill in him the skills to listen. Yup. I was raising a creative, kind leader.

By the time he was 2, George was making guns with his pipe cleaners, drawing pictures of rocket ships and army tanks. Where did he gain an affinity to guns? How did he know about army tanks? No idea. But it wasn’t from me.

Eventually he turned into a professional jock (Ok. I’m proud. He’s a silver-medal Olympian.) and a game hunter (Not so proud.). But he’s not creative, certainly listens with very biased and judgmental ears, and only kind under a gruff exterior. How did I not raise the person I tried to raise? Sure, it was ‘nature’. But where did the ‘nurture’ go?

DO MEN WANT THE SKILLS TO CONNECT?

I have come to believe that men and women have vastly different communication skills and assumptions that seem gender specific, so obvious in this story: Friends recently did construction on their house. When they showed me around, one of the new rooms had 5 comfy leather chairs lined up side by side facing a huge TV screen. It was obviously a Man Cave. I started to laugh.

Peter: What’s so funny?

SD: This is obviously your man cave.

Peter: Why is it so obvious?

SD: Women would never line chairs up like that. They’d be in a semi-circle.

Peter: Why would you do that?

SD: So we could engage with each other, communicate, see and hear each other.

Peter: But why would I want to do that?

Right. Why.

THE REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN IN LEADERSHIP

I was the second woman on a public Board of Directors in the UK in 1986. I quickly learned to keep quiet during our Board meetings: men would over-talk me when I spoke; seize and spout my ideas to broad approval with no attribution; fail to invite me to meetings even though my group was bringing in 142% of the net profit of the company. I was once so furious tears of rage seeped out of one eye. “Awwww. Let’s give Sharon-Drew a moment to compose herself,” said the Chairman. “I have no need to compose myself. I’m just enraged at all of you.” Funny, but the next meeting one of the other Board members cried. As women have done for centuries, I had given them permission.

Times have changed a bit. But why, why, has it been such a struggle? And why, why are women in leadership still uncommon? 25% of leadership positions go to women, even though 60% of the workforce are women; 5% of women’s start-ups get funding; 20% of companies have at least one woman on their Board, and there are 53 women CEOs – 9% – in the Fortune 500.

There are lots of reasons offered as to why the numbers are so low: women have babies and aren’t represented in the workplace; women aren’t accepted into the Boys Club and don’t have the mentors to provide them a leg-up; men don’t respect women and won’t listen to them; women don’t play by the rules. Obviously these are all silly. And yet.

Much has been written about the differences between men’s and women’s leadership styles. And yes, it’s been proven that working for a woman leader offers more success – staff are happier, there’s less turnover, more profit is generated, teams work better with a more creative output. For sure more women are being hired in leadership roles. But it’s not enough and it’s not representational.

Given that we make up 51% of the population, women are misrepresented, leaving their experience, ideas, people-orientation and leadership capabilities outside of standard practice.

Instead business employs timeworn bastions of testosterone-laden traditions that put technology, rules, time, and money where relationships, kindness, service, people, and collaboration should be.

And it’s costing us via increased stress levels, dysfunctional teams, lost and disloyal clients, incomplete roll-outs, and far, far too much hubris.

WOMEN HAVE GREAT SKILLS

With so many excuses as to why women aren’t promoted to leadership positions, maybe it’s time to explain precisely why women make great leaders.

1. We care. That’s right. We not only care about the bottom line, our place in the market, our regard among competitors. We care about people – staff, teams, creativity, well-being. In my company I gave staff one week and $2,000 a year (in the mid-1980s) to take some type of program that wasn’t work-related to boost their creativity and expand their thinking. They had to take one day off a month to do volunteer work in the community. They weren’t given vacation days but told to take off whatever time they needed to maintain their creativity and clarity, so long as they covered the work. But they were having so much fun at work I literally had to push them out the door to take time off.
2. We listen. Women not only listen for details, but we closely attend to differences in speaking patterns so we can ascertain shifts, problems, feelings. Our listening enables us to bond with another’s humanity, not for what they’re doing but who they’re being.
3. We’re curious. When women notice a problem, we get curious. Instead of going straight into action, we wonder about its origination, how to fix it from inside, how to assemble the right people to design a fix. And then we trial different approaches, get team agreement for different outcomes.
4. We’re problem solvers. And not in conventional ways, but often out-of-the-box thinking.
5. We’re risk takers. This is a well-known fact. Women have less fear of failure then men, with a greater understanding of possibilities. Since we’ve had to go-it alone, we’re willing to offend the status quo.
6. We communicate. We inspire discussions, ask questions, pose hypotheticals. We start conversations where there is too much silence. We don’t do denial.
7. We collaborate. Working in groups is natural. If you’ve ever done an exercise where everyone in the room is given 6 pipe cleaners and told to make a ‘reporting’ structure, all the men attach each to the ones above and below. Women make a daisy chain, in a circle. It’s endemic.
8. We work to the future. Instead of taking steps sequentially with a perfect forward-moving plan, we think in systems, in circles. We see the aggregate and try different actions to cause change as a whole.

I will never understand the full set of reasons given why women are kept out of leadership positions. But I do know that by leaving us out, our companies suffer, lose market share and profit and have diminished creativity and kindness.

It seems that in today’s workplace, change is afoot. I look forward to there being an equal number of men and women leaders someday. And just maybe we can all raise our sons in an environment where kindness doesn’t have to be hidden, and equality and respect is the norm.

______________________

Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including her new book HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change and decision making, the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen November 11th, 2024

Posted In: News

Why We Misunderstand Each Other: brains don’t listen very well, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

We all know the importance of listening, of connecting with others by deeply hearing them share thoughts, ideas, and feelings that enable us to be present and authentic. We work hard at listening without judgment, carefully, with our full attention. But are we hearing others without bias? I contend we’re not.

WHAT IS LISTENING?

From the work I’ve done tracking how words and sound enter brains, I believe that listening is far more than hearing words and understanding another’s shared thoughts and feelings. Listening is actually a brain thing that has little do to with meaning. It’s about puffs of air.

Indeed, there are several problems with us accurately hearing what someone says, regardless of our intent to show up as empathetic listeners. Generally speaking, our brains determine what we hear. And they weren’t designed to be objective. There are two primary reasons:

1. Words are meant to transmit meaning, yet they emerge from our mouths smooshed together in a singular gush with no spaces between them. Our brains then have the herculean task of deciphering individual sounds, individual word breaks, unique definitions, to understand their meaning. No one speaks with spaces between words. Otherwise. It. Would. Sound. Like. This. Hearing impaired people face this problem with new cochlear implants: it takes about a year for them to learn to decipher individual words, where one word ends and the next begins.
2. When others speak, their words enter our ears as puffs of air – sound vibrations that have no meaning at all. None. We only ‘understand’ or ‘hear what’s been said’ after these vibrations go through several iterations as electrochemical signals, being distorted and deleted along the way before finally being translated into meaning by our existing circuits. And our brain doesn’t tell us what was deleted or distorted, leaving Listeners to incorrectly assume that what they think they heard is what the speaker meant.

What we think we hear is not necessarily what a Speaker intends to share. Here’s my definition of listening that includes the full set of brain factors:

Listening is an automatic, biological, electrochemical, physiological, mechanical process during which spoken words, as meaningless, incoming puffs of air, eventually get translated into meaning via existing neural circuitry.

In other words, there is no direct route between what was said and what’s heard. Hence the reason for arguments, confusion, and all kinds of errors in communication.

HOW BRAINS LISTEN

Like most people, I had thought that if I gave my undivided attention and listened ‘without judgment’, I’d be able to hear what a Speaker intended. But I was wrong.

When writing my book on closing the gap between what’s said and what’s heard, I was quite dismayed when I learned that what a Speaker says and what a Listener hears are often two different things.

Sample

It’s not for want of trying. Listeners work hard at empathetic listening. But the way our brains are organized make it difficult to hear others without bias. Here’s what our brains do when someone speaks:

– Words enter our ears as mere vibrations (puffs of air with no meaning),

– get turned into electro-chemical signals (also without meaning) that

– get sent to existing circuits

– previously used for other translations,

– that then discards whatever signals don’t match

– and using what’s left as the basis for translating the new incoming content

– that we mistakenly believe was what the Speaker said.

It’s mechanical. As a result, we not only mishear what was intended, but – because the new content is translated by historic circuits – we unwittingly maintain our biases, not to mention our ability to expand our knowledge base is restricted.

With the best will in the world, with the best empathetic listening, by being as non-judgmental as we know how to be, as careful to show up with undivided attention, we can only hear what Others say according to what our brain allows us to hear.

IT’S POSSIBLE TO GET IT ‘RIGHTER’

We can’t easily change the process itself , but it’spossible to interfere a bit and add new circuits with the brain change models I’ve developed.

Sample

I’ve come up with two ways to listen with more accuracy:

1. When listening to someone speak, stand up and walk around, or lean far back in a chair. It’s a physiologic fix, offering an Observer/witness viewpoint that goes ‘beyond the brain’ and disconnects from normal brain circuitry. I get permission to do this even while I’m consulting at Board meetings with Fortune 100 companies. When I ask, “Do you mind if I walk around while listening so I can hear more accurately?” I’ve never been told no. They are happy to let me pace, and sometimes even do it themselves once they see me do it. I’m not sure why this works or how. But it does.
2. To make sure you take away an accurate message of what’s said say this:

To make sure I understood what you said accurately, I’m going to tell you what I think you said. Can you please tell me what I misunderstood or missed? I don’t mind getting it wrong, but I want to make sure we’re on the same page.

Listening is a fundamental communication tool. It enables us to connect, collaborate, care, and relate with everyone. By going beyond Active Listening, by adding Brain Listening to empathetic listening, we can now make sure what we hear is actually what was intended. To train your team on how to listen without bias, please contact me for a one-day zoom course.  sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

______________________________

Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharondrewmorgen.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com. 

Sharon Drew Morgen November 4th, 2024

Posted In: News