Leaders need to listen !

Most leaders want to engage their team in planning processes but don't always do so effectively.
Recently I attended a session with a group of executives from my company.

The conversation was lively, the questions were thought provoking and we ultimately developed a decent plan for the future. Unfortunately, the Boss who was heading that meeting need to control the outcome limited the value of the session and dampened our team's enthusiasm and confidence in the future. He was was well intentioned. He asked us to come up with ideas and told them that he would just listen. This was welcomed. But somehow i thought too frequently he dominated the meetings and limited the contribution of our team. Ideas began to flow, discussion was animated and there was a sense of possibility and excitement in the room. The conversation was still lively when he ended the meeting when he said that he'd heard most of it before, and that we didn't come up with anything new and the meeting had been a waste of time. The animation ceased, the mood changed, energy dissipated and people looked embarrassed. I was bemused, however gathered the notes from the meeting, confident that there'd been many good ideas generated that could be harnessed and used. I later found out that he had wanted his team to adopt a particular strategy he'd articulated at a prior meeting. He was so focused on his own idea he had failed to listen to others. When I shared the outcomes of the meeting with him later, he was decent enough to admit he'd been too rash in dismissing the meeting as a waste of time. Unfortunately he was not quite able to articulate his error of judgement to his team.

I feel that Your role as a leader is to enlist followers and engage the hearts, minds and resources of the whole organisation to achieve something compelling - and then get out of the way.
Leaders who are too directive and don't let go, lose not only great ideas but eventually the people as well.
I am sure I have been to that same meeting. The one where the convenor purports to listen but in reality only wants to convince people to do something they have already decided. As said by many people earlier "anger dissipates when people are listened to". I think the converse is also true. We need to learn from examples such as the one above. If only we could apply the 'law of two feet' from Open Space Technology when we find ourselves in sessions like this.