Is President Obama Out of Touch? How About You?

A recent article in the magazine, The Week asked if President Obama is “out of touch?” They point out that current events indicate that the answer is yes (e.g., Obamacare website, NSA bugging the phones of Germany’s Angela Merkel…).

You may or may not agree with their assessment. However, regardless of your politics, I hope you do agree that visionary leaders who do not monitor closely risk becoming detached dreamers. Like the Greek mythological figure Icarus, they fly too close to the sun and melt the wax on their wings.

So perhaps, a better question might be, how well do you stay in touch? If you don’t monitor closely enough, you are not engaged. If you do it too much, you might micromanage. The answer is found by managing the tension between being both a visionary and rational leader. Listed below are four simple tactics to help you stretch by monitoring closely whenever you feel you’re over-emphasizing your vision.

1. Monitor where the action is.

I met with an executive a few months ago who told me that her CEO had not visited her office in the four years she had been with the company. Granted, her boss reported to the CEO, not her. But executives must make time to visit those a few layers below them. I also encourage you to visit the front lines, where change happens first. One of Toyota’s five basic principles is genchi genbutsu, which means “going to the source to find the facts to inform your decisions, build consensus, and achieve goals.”(i)

2. Value variety.

Management expert Gary Hamel points out that it takes a thousand ideas to produce a dozen promising products, thereby yielding a few genuine successes (ii). Yet many organizations suffer from the “big bet” fallacy. Their executives set audacious goals and scramble to cut costs when their big bets don’t pay off. Big bets are fine occasionally, but nature teaches us that conducting small experiments and paying attention to the feedback leads to an agile, adaptable organization amenable to a changing climate. Effective leaders who monitor closely take small steps, observe the environmental response, and adjust to the feedback.

3. Be open to most things, attached to few.

Do you ever find yourself so attached to your point of view that you fail to see other options? It happens to me more that I care to admit. I get so enamored with my way of looking at things that my vision narrows into tunnel vision. Remember: Your team members don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care about what they care about. Being open to their feedback (even if you don’t agree with it) is one way you let others know you care about what’s important to them.

4. Avoid multitasking.

Yes, you read that right. We are living in an age of “continuous partial attention,” according to Linda Stone, a former senior executive at both Apple and Microsoft (iii).  Walk into any cubicle or office and you see individuals texting, working on a document, reading an article, checking e-mail, scanning the latest news … all at the same time. Employees simply do not want to miss anything. Stone calls that complex multitasking because the tasks demand cognition. She also points out that a study commissioned by Hewlett-Packard (HP) found that people who attempt to deal with a barrage of messages while they work on other tasks experience a temporary 10-point drop in IQ. You cannot monitor your environment well by trying to stay in touch with everything at once. Successfully monitoring your environment requires that you strategically select the most important information and focus on it … sequentially. Energy directed by a unifying force is close to genius.

I encourage you to adapt these ideas to your situation. They just might keep others from saying that you are “out of touch.”

How do you stay in touch? Do you have other approaches that work for you?

Keep stretching when you’re pulled,

Dave