Tim Cook will step down as Apple’s CEO on Sept. 1 after 15 years leading one of the most valuable companies in the world. There’ll be no shortage of retrospectives about his operational genius, his supply chain mastery, and his steady stewardship through the post-Jobs era.
But there’s one thing I keep coming back to: Cook is one of the best listeners I’ve ever encountered.
As a CEO coach and the author of “Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity,” I know that in a world where leaders are increasingly rewarded for being loud, confident, and quick, his approach is worth studying.
Jony Ive, Apple’s former chief design officer, once said at a class at Apple University, where I was a faculty member, that a manager’s most important role is to “give the quiet ones a voice.” I love this. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt took the opposite approach, urging people to “Be loud!” I love this, too. The two leaders took different approaches to listen and ensure that everyone was heard.
Great leaders find a way to listen that fits their personal style, and then create a culture where everyone listens to each other. Here’s how Cook did it.
Meeting the master of silence
Before I interviewed at Apple, a friend warned me that Cook tended to allow long silences and that I shouldn’t let it unnerve me or feel the need to fill them. Despite this warning, in our first interview I reacted to a silence by anxiously talking nonstop, inadvertently telling him far more about a mistake I’d made than I intended.
Just when I realized, panic-stricken, that I was about to reveal something that might well cost me the job, the room began to shake. I was relieved to be saved by an actual earthquake.
Following in Cook’s footsteps, one of my students in the “Managing at Apple” class said that he tried to make sure to spend at least 10 minutes in every one-on-one meeting listening silently, keeping his facial expression and body language neutral.
“If I gave any reaction at all, people would often tell me what they thought I wanted to hear,” he said. “I found that they were much more likely to say what they really thought — even if it wasn’t what I was hoping to hear — when I was careful not to show what I thought.”
But quiet listening can have a downside: When you’re the boss and people don’t know what you think, they waste a lot of time trying to guess. And plenty of people are made very uncomfortable by silence. Some even feel a quiet listener is setting a trap: waiting for others to say the wrong thing so they can pounce.
If you’re a quiet listener, you need to take steps to reassure people. Don’t be pointlessly inscrutable. To get others to say what they think, say what you think sometimes, too. The manager in my class was expressionless for only 10 minutes of his 1:1s, not the full hour. Otherwise, it would’ve been hard for people to trust him or to relate to him.
Cook wasn’t always silent either, of course. But because he was generally so quiet, people leaned forward to listen to what he said. And when he spoke, albeit very quietly, his thinking was always crystal clear.
Finding another way listen
Quiet listening works for many managers, but I can’t pull it off. Luckily, there’s another model.
If quiet listening involves being silent to give people room to talk, loud listening is about saying things intended to get a reaction out of them. Steve Jobs, for example, would put a strong point of view on the table and insist on a response.
Obviously this approach works only when people feel confident enough to rise to the challenge. How do you deal with people who can’t stand up to an aggressive boss or whose position doesn’t allow them to feel secure, even if the larger culture welcomes this behavior? What about someone who’s just started at the company? They might know a good reason why you’re wrong, but they won’t speak up.
If you have a loud listening style, you need to go to some lengths to build people’s confidence and let them realize it’s safe to challenge the boss. Ive said that Jobs would often come to him and say, “Jony, here’s a dopey idea.” He was inviting Ive to challenge his idea by calling it dopey.
Paul Saffo, an engineering professor at Stanford University, describes a technique he calls “strong opinions, weakly held.” Expressing strong, some might say outrageous, positions with others is a good way to get to a better answer, he said, or at least to have a more interesting conversation.
I love this approach. I tend to state my positions strongly, so I’ve had to learn to follow up with, “Please poke holes in this idea — I know it may be terrible. So tell me all the reasons we should not do that.” Once I even put a “You were right, I was wrong” trophy on somebody’s desk.
Perhaps most important is to stick to the style that feels most natural to you. Attempting to behave in ways that feel deeply unnatural can make your team feel less comfortable with you. Instead, try to strengthen your awareness of how your style makes colleagues feel and work on improving that dynamic.
Figure out how to listen to give the quiet ones a voice without weirding out their louder colleagues. Regardless, the goal is to get to the best answer together.
Kim Scott is the author of “Radical Respect” and “Radical Candor.” Kim was a CEO coach at Dropbox, Qualtrics, Twitter, and other tech companies. She was a member of the faculty at Apple University and before that led AdSense, YouTube, and DoubleClick teams at Google.
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