Podcast Episode 10 – First Get the Whole Story

This week’s episode builds on Monday’s article on the same topic: First Get the Whole Story. Here is the transcript of the podcast:

Have you ever been guilty of jumping to a conclusion before having all the information, and then regretting your response?  I have, and on today’s episode, that’s the question we are going to explore.  There’s a verse in Proverbs, chapter 18 and verse 13, that speaks to this topic when it says, “He who answers a matter before he hears it, it is folly and shame to him.”  Therefore, I want to take a few minutes to talk about the importance of hearing before answering, to avoid the folly and shame that comes when we do the opposite.

  I have probably been most guilty of doing this to my own children. Usually, it looks something like this:  I hear a noise, or I see a mess, and I immediately jump to conclusions about what my child must have done or said, and I react.  Too many times, that response has been followed by learning that I answered before hearing the whole story, and my response was wrong.  A great example of this is one carried out by my father to me when I was a young teenager, and one that I would tease him about for years afterward.  In this situation, my elementary school-aged sister was playing with her dolls and her dollhouse and asked me to play with her, with her dolls.  I was doing something else at the moment, so I told her I couldn’t.  Unbeknownst to me, she then went to my dad and told him a story of how I had said very mean and hurtful things to her.  He came into the room and proceeded to give me a painful consequence, catching me by surprise.  It was only afterward that he heard my side of the story and had to apologize for reacting wrongly to me.

Now, my dad was a wonderful father, so don’t judge him for this unless you can say unequivocally that you have never jumped to a conclusion, made wrong assumptions, and reacted differently than you should have before hearing the whole story.  But this is often our natural tendency, and it takes intentional work to exercise the discipline of seeking the whole truth and the full story.  And that’s what we should be doing in every context and situation: setting aside our preconceived bias and beliefs, seeking to hear and learn the full story, and then determining the best response.

As a leader, this needs to characterize our responses. I know that there are situations that require a quick and decisive response, but hopefully, your leadership experience has equipped you to be prepared to respond to those kinds of situations out of your breadth of leadership when you don’t have time to gather more information in the moment.  I also know that if we can be too slow sometimes, taking the time to gather so much detail that it paralyzes momentum.  But in most cases, you need to take some time to get the whole picture before formulating the right response.  I can tell you, in my role as a school administrator, when I had to discipline student behavior, I never regretted carefully getting the whole story first.

So here’s what you need to take away:  It is important to gather all the facts and information, as much as is reasonably possible, before determining your response.  This applies to addressing conflicts between people, determining strategic next steps in a plan, or responding to a challenge you are facing.  

So, I will circle back to the verse I started with:  “He who answers a matter before he hears it, it is folly and shame to him.”  If we don’t learn to look before we leap, or listen before we respond, we will likely make decisions that lead to messes that we have to clean up, and apologies that we need to make.  Therefore, when you are confronted with a situation that you need to address . . . first, get the whole story.

/by

First Get the Whole Story

Early in my experience as an educator, I heard my administrator say to parents (tongue-in-cheek), “If you don’t believe half of what your student says happened in the classroom, we won’t believe half of what they tell us happened at home.” Like many humorous comments, this contains a morsel of truth. People have a tendency to represent facts in such a way as to paint themselves in the best possible light, and children are no different. Often over the years, I have fielded phone calls from parents who were contacting me because of what their child said happened in class (things like, “my child told me that the teacher said this in class!”). I quickly learned to redirect their concern to the teacher, so that the parent could hear the whole story. Nearly every time, the parent has come back to me and said, “Now that I have the whole story, it makes a lot more sense.” (And most of the time, the story the child told at home was an effort to cover up or misdirect from wrong choices of behavior made by the student in the classroom.)

There are two particular passages in Scripture that have greatly helped me to understand this idea. One is Proverbs 18:13, which says, “He who answers a matter before he hears the facts—it is folly and shame to him” (Amplified Bible). The Message says it even more plainly: “Answering before listening is both stupid and rude.” This verse was first shared with me by a professor when I was completing a marriage and family counseling internship, as an exhortation to probe and question thoroughly before drawing conclusions in the counseling setting. For quite a while, I literally kept the verse written on a notecard, taped on top of my desk, as a reminder. I have since learned that this verse applies to many circumstances, not just to a counseling session. When you deal with people (and most of us do), you will have the experience of people telling you the story from their own perspective, which will likely mean that it may or may not be true (as I shared in a previous post, “Either It’s True or It’s Not”). It is foolish and stupid to react or respond without first getting the whole story

The second verse is James 1:19, which says, “So then, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath.” As many grandmothers have shared with their grandchildren, “There’s a reason why God gave us two ears and one mouth; we should listen twice as much as we speak!” This verse has been a constant reminder to me to be careful to listen first, although, in the process of my growth as a leader, it was a lesson that sometimes came the hard way.

For example, in one particular organization in which I worked, I made a spectacular blunder that loudly and clearly drove this lesson home to me. I was leading a small group of event planners in planning for one specific event, and everyone in the group (except me) had been involved in that organization for several years. As the leader, I felt that I should take charge of presenting good ideas, so I began the first meeting by telling the rest of the group all of my ideas. My enthusiasm (combined with the fact that I had not yet established trust or relationship) resulted in the rest of the group shutting down while giving verbal support to my ideas. However, over the next few days, I began to hear from others that the entire committee was frustrated with me, and the event was now in jeopardy. I had to go back to the committee and apologize for speaking without listening, and then I had to make it safe for them to talk. When I did that, I learned so much about the history and tradition associated with that event and could see that I had been on the verge of causing damage to the culture. I needed to take the time to listen, understand history, and get the whole story.

The added bonus is that when you take time to learn the whole story, you are much more likely to be able to discern if it is true or if it is not.  In Deuteronomy 18:21-22, Moses provided some direction to the people of Israel to help them understand how to discern this, when he said, “And if you say in your heart, ‘How may we know the word that the Lord has not spoken?’— when a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the Lord has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him.” He made the point that if you take the time to observe and get the whole story, beginning to end, you can tell if it is true or not.

It is easy for a leader to assume that leadership means taking charge and giving direction. However, I believe that these principles from Scripture give us a very different picture: leadership should be characterized by listening. Ask questions. Make it safe for people to share. Validate. And make sure you get the whole story before you react.

/0 Comments/by

Quote Your Dad

“Sometimes it costs less to pay someone else to do it than it does to do it yourself.”

/by

Podcast Episode 9 – You Don’t Have to Do Everything

This week’s episode builds on Monday’s article on the same topi: learning to delegate. Here is the transcript of the podcast:

Have you ever worn yourself out doing something by yourself because no one else will do it, or because they will not do it as well as you know it needs to be done?  I have, and on today’s episode, that’s the question we are going to explore.  It’s really the question of control, of whether or not we are willing to relinquish control and to ask, assign, or allow someone else to do something.  Therefore, we’re going to talk about the importance of delegating.

In the first few months of my first experience as Head of School, I was confronted with this lesson.  And I mean that literally – my boss confronted me about it.  I was young, and although I had administrative experience, it had been in a supporting role.  I had never had my own administrative assistant before, and I was used to doing all the detail work on my own in order for my necessary tasks to be done, and to be done well.  But now I was the Head of 

School, with an administrative assistant.  In spite of that, I was doing my own detail work – preparing and printing documents, managing my calendar, and running errands for myself.  It didn’t take long before my boss called me into his office to tell me I needed to delegate to my assistant.  I felt guilty about handing off work that I could do myself . . . until he reminded me that there was other work that I needed to be doing that she couldn’t, and therefore I needed to give her work that she could do for me, so I could focus on the other things that only I could do.  He also reminded me that by not delegating many of these things to her, I was preventing her from doing her job well, which was not fair to her.  

The truth is, you cannot do it all.  Exodus 18 paints a picture of this with Moses when we see him handling ALL of the legal disputes and cases.  His father-in-law pointed out to him that it was a pace he could not maintain, and explained how the end result would be bad for both Moses and the people.  In the same way, if you are leading an organization, you are not and should not be a one-man show.  And so, you need to be willing to delegate.  Other people have skills that you do not have (or they need to be able to learn those skills), or they have specific responsibilities that are part of their duties, and so it is important that you not get in the way of that, for their sake as well as yours.  You also need to be willing to let them do it even if you don’t think they can do it as well as you.  First of all, humility is a much better character trait than arrogance, so accept that you might not be as good as you think, and they might be better than you think.  Second of all, they cannot learn and grow the way that they need to if they are not given the opportunity to try and to make mistakes. 

This boils down to the fact that the ability – and the willingness – to delegate is an important and necessary skill. Remember, It’s not just important for you, it’s also important for them. In your leadership, you need to be looking for three things:

  • Those things that should be done by someone else, because that person is better at it than you, or that person has the responsibility to do it, and you don’t.
  • Those things that can be done by someone else, and be done well enough, in order to free you to put more focus on things that are more important for you to do. 

  • Those things that ought to be given by you to someone else, so that you can be intentional about giving them opportunities for growth.

Here’s what you need to take away:  If you don’t learn to delegate appropriately, both your leadership and your personal well-being will suffer.  You will likely burn out, cause others to feel unvalued or inconsequential, and your work will become less effective and less excellent.  As my dad would say, sometimes it costs less to pay someone else to do something than to do it yourself.  In this case, it will likely cost you more to do it yourself than it would if you were to delegate.

So, it’s time to self-reflect and identify where, why, and how you need to begin delegating.  If you already are, that’s wonderful, but if you are not, then go back to three things you need to look for:  what should be done by someone else, what can be done by someone else, and what you ought to give to someone else.  Then take your first step, and delegate.

/by