Critical Friends Listen

I was on retreat again this week, this time with United Synagogue's CEO, Rabbi Steven Wernick, and six other senior staff members. We made time for the "balcony space" that Bob Leventhal writes about in the Sulam for Current Leaders module, The Leadership Plan:

Ronald Heifetz describes the requirement for leaders to occupy the “balcony space” and thus to gain perspective by viewing events from a more removed vantage point. High above the organizational stage, a group of people can get out of “reactive space,” (the constraining mindset of responding to immediate issues), and move onto the balcony to see the pattern.

For 28 hours, we moved to two balconies  - a front porch and a second floor deck of a house in New Jersey - to get away from our routine progress reports and next-step planning. We brought our goals for the year, and by the end of the two days together, we found the pattern that links all of our work.

Being able to see patterns, though, requires more than getting physically away from routine. It means learning a different way of interacting with each other. Regular meetings, (and our team meets twice a week), are no guarantee that all of the members deeply understand what other people are working on or how it intersects with what they're doing. If anything, regular meetings can reinforce behaviors of selective attention. (Think of a synagogue board meeting when the rabbi gives the d'var Torah, and how many people immediately pull out their cell phones to check their email.)

Listening requires putting aside a few irresistible things. First is outside distraction. Most of us have become addicted multi-taskers; our cell phones call us even when no one is calling. A retreat experience allows us to impose rules, like putting away our devices, that aren't present at other times. How did we ever have dinner with a friend before we could also check on how our other friends are doing? Maybe that's an objective behind a restaurant in Beverly Hills that's giving 5% discounts to patrons who give up their cell phones at the door before their dinner experience.

The second is the ego-centric intrusion of thoughts about ourselves as we listen to someone else's stories. Brain science is giving us insight into the complex process that's involved. I wonder, though, if we also learn that the shortcut to understanding someone else's story is to associate it with our own. The impact of that is not hearing or understanding someone else's. Active listening involves short-circuiting our inclination to inject our own story into what we're hearing.

So for 28 hours, the United Synagogue senior staff imposed upon ourselves a listening technique called a "Critical Friends Protocol,"  first developed by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University. It requires something that we all find difficult: listening for extended periods of time, without interruption, before being allowed to ask questions or offer suggestions.

The process works something like this: A presenter has 30 minutes to talk about his/her topic. The group listens without interrupting. The group then has 15 minutes to ask clarifying questions, and the presenter answers their questions. Then the group has 15 minutes to give their feedback, suggestions, insights, and recommendations while the presenter listens without interrupting or answering. In our retreat, presenters had a final 5 minutes to give a summary to the group of what they heard or appreciated about the comments.

We teach a condensed version of this to presidents, again in retreat, at Sulam for Presidents. Called the "Art of Asking," it requires people to listen intently to a partner without interruption. We process with the group how it feels to speak uninterrupted, (strange at first), and to listen without interrupting, (strange at first). But throughout the retreat, as we practice the technique, it changes relationships and opens everyone up to learning.

Listening is a crucial skill for presidents, but it should not begin when a person becomes a high level leader. For that reason, the Art of Asking is incorporated into our Sulam for Emerging Leaders program. What would happen if people become experts at listening years before they sit at our board tables? How will board interactions change? How will interactions change in our communities?

At this point, though, I also know that the skill of listening isn't something that you learn in retreat or at a workshop and then consistently do afterwards. We'll see if our team members can even retain it at our next regularly scheduled meeting on Monday. But we have active listening as a shared experience that we can refer back to. We have a language for it now, and can remember how we do it when we need it in the future.

As in the kehillot we work with, we expect that small changes in each individual, and the group's ability to call upon what we learned together, will have impacts in our relationships throughout our system.