Leaders look for unbiased Feedback

Managers May Solve problems, Leaders Anticpate Them

If you're lucky, there may be someone currently on staff who acts as a sounding board to provide you with important feedback and act as an advocate when necessary.

Leaders understand that they don't have all the answers (unless they are completely narcissistic), and are not always sure that their answers are the right ones. Instinctively, they seek out others to test their hypothesis.

The goal is to find at least one employee who has a good sense of how the company works, what has worked and not worked, and how employees think and respond. You want to have an idea of how your ideas will play out. You may be a well liked manager, but you will still not be privy to a lot of the conversations within the walls of your company. As innocuous as your idea may seem, you could still blow something up.

The purpose of a sounding board is to use the resources already available to you. A pilot is expected to use all resources available to them; it's called Crew Resource Management. The resources are not just the equipment in the plane but also Air Traffic Control, in-flight weather and aviation services and other people in the cockpit. The intent is to reduce the number of aviation accidents caused by human error by teaching pilots about their own human limitations and how to maximize their performance. The same principle applies to business.

There's likely a lot of proprietary knowledge within your company. If you can get it to bubble to the surface, much of your work may already done for you.

A sounding board is like having market research freely available to you. Just like product makeover's, when you do company makeover's you want to have consumer research available.

Turning your business around requires change; there are a lot of decisions to be made. If you're new to the company, your leadership will be tested. Having the proper feedback is a must if you want to make correct choices.

Keep in mind that no matter how incompetent the previous management was, they still tried to right the ship. Some of the previous ideas may have been good, but they failed because of poor execution. In any event, something can be learned from the previous successes and failures of someone else's leadership. Get all the feedback you can.