What Does It Mean to Be OK-OK?

To have a greater impact as leaders, we need to be more visible. I know that you would prefer the scenario: “Who needs to know, they know” or “Our product is going to speak for itself”, but the truth is that getting people know about what you do is something that’s not just happening. We need to speak up about our ideas, about what we’ve done, what we’ve designed, what we want to change, or what we’ve changed already, because nobody’s going to notice that on their own. Nobody’s going to guess that it is important, to assume that it’s somehow valuable. Harsh, but true. So today I want to focus on what we can do in practice to build more visibility. I’m going to share with you some of my own strategies, so you can just take, copy, and paste them, adding a little bit more flavour to your individual situation. We are going to divide those things into internal and external leadership visibility strategies.     How to Build Visibility Inside the Organization?   If you’re working in the organization: It can be a big organization / a corporate world, or in a smaller organization, but you are inside, what can you do to build your visibility? First, you have your team level. I’m sure that you have some team meetings, knowledge sharing sessions, weekly meetings, retrospectives; depends on the setup that you are working in. These are the places that are already designed for you to share knowledge, experiences, lessons, mistakes, or failures (with lessons learned) that you can show to others. When you speak up, this is always something that makes you more visible. So even if you’re a Base Imaginer, Base Thinker who has the preference to not speak up very much, I would like you to challenge yourself a little bit to be more verbal. I know that you believe that if you work hard in silence, you create valuable solutions to the problems the organization or clients face, the other people will notice you. I don’t want to be a dream-crusher here, but it’s just not going to happen. People are very focused on their own things and don’t have much spare energy to look around. You need to show them. So, I invite you to do one thing like that per week, in a bi-weekly meeting, or once per month. Start small: The goal is for your brain to see that it makes sense and is worth the stretch. Share something that you’ve created, optimised, or automated recently.  Don’t make it complicated, just use what you’re already doing in your work. The second thing you can do is to share knowledge by sending some links to the podcast episodes that were interesting for you to others, a book you’ve read, a YouTube video you watched, or a digital course you’ve taken. I’m sure that you have some Teams / Slack / WhatsApp group in your company where you share some stuff. Leverage that: Share links to YouTube videos, to TED Talks, to podcasts, to books, to articles, to documentation, to Reddit, basically anything that you’re using to get knowledge. Share that with others with a short comment like: Hey! I’m sharing this as something interesting…, It helped me in a way that…, Check it out!”. Easy. You don’t even need to speak up verbally; you just copy and paste a link. But again, it puts you on the map that you share things with others. That way, you can become a go-to person for people who are looking for a certain answer or a source of knowledge. Being a go-to person builds visibility. Start with the team level and then move up. What can you do on the organizational level? Be the voice. The voice of the change or a project. Engage yourself in the project or initiative team, even if there is some extra work to do. You can always make a contract with your boss to be redirected when it comes to your work to a little bit to some project that is maybe like a matrix project in the organization. Maybe this is something different. Maybe this is something that you never done before. Being more visible by creating value is one of the most important things in organizations. The good news? It is not about speaking up all the time. It’s about being visible by being engaged. Of course, you can make some presentations, being a face of the project or initiative, during the Town Hall meeting, some other online or onsite gatherings. Even better! Check out what kind of possibilities there are in your organization that you can leverage. Be a mentor or a buddy for new joiners, or let others shadow you. There are more things you can do than you think. Choose what works for you, start with one thing, and then move to another one if you want.   How to Build Visibility Outside the Organization?   If you are outside of the organization: Maybe you are a consultant / a Fractional CTO / COO, etc.; if you are running your own business: you’re an entrepreneur, a Founder, you can do many things. And if you’re inside the organization, you can use some of those as well (these strategies are not reserved only for “the externals”). First, blogging. You can say that blogging is dead, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. People like to read, especially short forms. Because if you are a visual person, what you read sticks in your brain. So, blogging can be your visibility builder, especially when you take care of the SEO. It can be very well-positioned in Google and in AI tools where people are researching things. It is super easy and low-cost to start. Just start writing down what you know about. Share your expertise, research, pieces of lessons that you have, failures, and success stories. People love reading about those things. The second

Communication Intelligence is always first about understanding what we do. And there’s one skill in there that a lot of Tech Leaders are not treating with respect. Not a lot of them focus on that one, and it costs a lot. I’m talking about the listening skills. When I was doing the research for the book that I’m going release soon, I was thinking about different angles of CQ. All of the algorithms that people are using consciously or mostly unconsciously when communicating with other people, especially when being leaders. And there are so many courses, books, podcast episodes, articles, YouTube videos, and TED Talks about speaking, public speaking, or speaking to others. But it dawned on me that there are not a lot of courses and other sources of knowledge about listening. And I’ve started to wonder why that is. I think it is because we think that listening is so easy. You just need to sit and listen, right? Nothing further from the truth. To make a little mindset and skillset shift in this area, today I’ve decided to give you 4 types of listening and some active listening tools and techniques for tech leaders. Let’s dig in! 4 Types of Listening There are 4 types of listening that tell us more about our intrinsic, mostly unconscious motivations: Why do we even go into the conversation with other people? Listen to reply. This is what most of the people do. We listen only to make a moment for ourselves to tell something. We are not listening for other reasons. And if we have this habit of not interrupting, we just cannot wait to jump in and say something. Most of the time, for us is to share information. So, saying what we know, what we have in our brains. We are not there to do anything more than reply. Listen to understand. In this type, people paraphrase, they ask additional questions; they can tell something like: “OK, this is interesting; tell me more.” They can say something with their own words, like: “OK, so I understand from what you’re saying that… Is that correct?” It is to understand, without guessing. Listen to connect. When people want to connect with us, they go deeper. They talk about something important for them, and they share reflections, opinions, values, thoughts, or emotions. They want to connect and find something meaningful for both sides. So, they ask more, they are more attentive, they’re curious about the other person, with an intention to build a relationship (regardless of the context). Listen to co-create. I’m listening to you to create something together, to make some value, to create a solution, to solve a problem, to create a functionality together, or to make a change. We are co-creating something, building a thing that can be valuable or useful for other people. So, I’m listening to what you’re saying, you’re listening to what I’m saying, and we make the synergy from those two things to create something together. Statistically, most people are listening only to reply. Secondly, they listen to understand. Then they listen to connect with some, and very few listen to co-create. The question is: Why is it happening in that order? From my observations and experiences with different leaders, teams, and organizations, it happens because of the way we work and the pressure we have (external and internal). So, my advice for you here is to just reflect on what you do. Next time, when you are going to have a conversation with somebody, just be more aware of how you respond to them and what you’re doing. What do you have in your brain? What is your priority for the conversation? What is the goal of the conversation? It can be private, and it can be professional (maybe private even is going to be more insightful). If you’re only talking, talking, talking, talking to vomit information on the other… Make a pause and observe: “Hey, I’m doing it. How can I be in a different bucket, more curious about the other person, more attentive to what they’re saying, more observant of them?”. Start with that small step, notice the difference. And how to do it? Here’s a list of simple techniques to strengthen your listening leadership muscle. Active Listening Techniques for Tech Leaders   #1 Paraphrasing It’s literally repeating what the other person said with a few different words. It’s the simplest tool to check if you got what was told, not assuming that you did. You can start with: “What I’m hearing is…” or “From what you say, I understand that…”. Facts, not opinions. Even if you are a Base Persister, you need to stick to the information without using much of your own frame of reference. Paraphrasing is for you to confirm understanding and de-escalate any misunderstandings that can appear during the conversation. #2 Asking open-ended questions This is the one that a lot of people struggle with. What I observed over the years of working with people from different cultures, it differs from culture to culture. Some countries have a preference to ask closed-ended questions to maintain harmony and avoid confrontation (i.e., Poland, Japan, Korea, Latin America, India). And some of them ask more open-ended questions to drive clarity and efficiency in discussions (i.e., USA, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Arab countries). Asking closed-ended questions is fine if you want to get a straight, yes/no answer. But especially during workshops when we train with leaders on how to give feedback or just use the requestive PCM® channel, it appears how often they use this type of question by coincidence, purely unconsciously. And they’re so surprised that they don’t get the answer they aim for: Especially when they ask a closed-ended question with negation inside (i.e., “Don’t you think that’s a good idea?”). Open-ended questions directed to the Base Thinker or Persister will open a whole new conversation. You can get to know so much, only from changing one piece of