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Listen with a “Beginner’s Mind” for Executive Success
It might seem that the big insights about business have all been shared. Yet an entrepreneur who has launched several successful healthcare enterprises recently offered a nice turn of phrase:
A beginner’s mind is essential for building businesses. If you seek to learn from your clients and members who use your offering, they will often tell you or show you what they want. Listen to and watch them carefully.
Glen Tullman, LinkedIn, October 2022
Glen Tullman founded Livongo, Transcarent, and other large companies, and this recommendation Is part of his personal reflection on keys to business success. A beginner’s mind is an odd phrase that contrasts with the arrogance of so many leaders and innovators. Yet it is not just an attitude—it is best understood as a discipline. One must learn to listen carefully.
Listening well takes practice. One must suspend assumptions, biases, and ready judgments. This is the essence of a beginner’s mind. It is an ability to tolerate ignorance and not impose one’s knowledge or experience on a situation. The beginner is best served by understanding the views of others and not prematurely try to fit information into a framework.
This is comparable to empathic listening in therapy. One must concentrate on the client’s thoughts and feelings, avoiding the temptation to fit problems to therapeutic solutions. If empathy is walking in another’s shoes, a beginner’s mind is thinking like a student. One must absorb the details of a situation and not rush to analysis or debate. Listen, watch, and learn before trying to solve problems.
Success in business ultimately requires more than a beginner’s mindset, much as effective therapy entails more than empathy. However, unless one starts with this open, non-expert attitude, one is potentially losing critical information. If arrogance and presumption are toxic for entrepreneurs, they may well be more destructive for leaders of established businesses.
An Executive’s Mind
A beginner’s mind is difficult to maintain when a business is replete with familiar patterns and problems. All forces push toward resolving issues according to proven formulas. Executives clearly differ in the degree of effort they are willing to exert listening to clients. Everyone has a favorite example.
A successful CEO for a large academically based healthcare system became well known for his habit of walking the hospital floors for 2 hours every day taking informal satisfaction surveys with patients and their families. Are there less time-consuming ways of learning what people think and what they want? Here are a few well-known sources:
- Free-form comments in satisfaction surveys can be withering, yet quite accurate—numerical satisfaction ratings alone do not tell the story.
- Measurement-based care is at bottom a process that listens to the client—people convey what they think of your services by rating their symptoms and functioning.
- The inclusion of consumers and network providers on oversight committees is a best practice formalized by accreditation bodies like the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) and the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO)—any executive who has participated in such meetings knows feedback from these individuals is the most stimulating part of the agenda.
Striving for a Beginner’s Mind
The problem is that most executives abandon a beginner’s mindset in reviewing feedback. They have explanations ready for poor performance, staff willing to resolve problems without pondering root causes, and abiding hopes that everything is basically sound despite occasional troubles.
New companies frequently fail, but older ones can fail more slowly. A beginner’s mind is well-suited to catch early decline. It is like a polar opposite to the complacency found in some successful companies. A beginner’s mind is alert to problems, and sometimes a single complaint is all the warning one gets.
Many companies have rich data for tracking performance, but they may also have multiple ways to discount negative findings. A beginner is non-defensive in asking questions and exploring possibilities. It is fine to be confident, but never so much that confidence impedes critical assessment of a business.
Our healthcare system has many shortcomings, but one frequent complaint about it is especially infuriating to patients: “No one listens.” The reasons for not listening are many, but largely irrelevant. Reminders are more useful, and a beginner’s mind may simply be a clever phrase reminding us to listen.
Executives should routinely sift through business data without preconceived ideas. Signs of trouble are there for those who watch and listen. The needs and preferences of our clients tend to emerge only with sustained attention. Staff members have good ideas if you establish safe forums for sharing them.
Leadership books espouse a variety of essential skills for success. Glen Tullman embraces an idea taken from Zen Buddhism, a beginner’s mind. He makes it his own. This may be the real lesson he offers.
Ed Jones, PhD is currently with ERJ Consulting, LLC and previously served as president at ValueOptions and chief clinical officer at PacifiCare Behavioral Health.
The views expressed in Perspectives are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Behavioral Healthcare Executive, Addiction Professional, the Psychiatry & Behavioral Health Learning Network, or other Network authors. Perspectives entries are not medical advice.
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