In this brief talk, the speaker outlines three essential actions for leaders to empower their teams. First, leaders must actively ask employees what they need, preferring personal, one‑on‑one or small‑group conversations over impersonal surveys, checklists, or virtual suggestion boxes. Second, leaders must discipline themselves to allocate time for these conversations, recognizing that emergencies and competing priorities often cause them to skip this step. Third, the speaker warns that failing to listen creates a communication breakdown that contributes to the high disengagement rate (about 60%) and massive productivity loss in organizations. The overall message is that a few minutes of genuine inquiry can prevent years of disengagement and lost output.
Chapters
You wanted 3 things? Here's the 3 things. Ask. Ask. Ask. Like a light bulb goes off. It sounds like the stupidest thing. Oh yeah, I didn't take the time to ask. And there's how many ways can you do it? Now there's some rather impersonal ways you can, especially with the technology now, we can do surveys, we can send out checklists, we can send out, you know, the virtual suggestion box. And these are still good ideas, they're valid ideas, but it doesn't substitute what we're talking about, that personal approach to take somebody, even if it's a representative of a larger group or representatives of a larger group, and sit with them in the room, whether that's virtual or physically, that's fine, doesn't matter, but get them together and start asking them questions. If I go in open and ask fundamental questions, "What do you need? What can I do for you?" These are the most powerful questions you can ask. They're the ones that very few leaders, even the ones that know they need to do that, very few leaders discipline themselves to do that. Why is that, do you think? Time. Time and urgency. There's emergencies, there's priorities that take us away from this, right? That's again why I use the word discipline. We can't let these fundamentals slip. If I don't discipline myself to ask, to seek these answers, to seek input from all levels, that's really a communication breakdown, isn't it? I haven't taken the time to reach out to communicate effectively with these folks. We try to save 5 minutes and it costs us years. Setting yourself back, you could be turning that person off to such a degree that they become part of that horrible statistic of 60% or so of folks that are disengaged in the workplace. Just because you didn't listen. So you don't take 5 minutes and you're losing 60% of your productivity? Those are the numbers that we're, we're talking about.
