Welcome to the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast, a conversation designed to help leaders go further faster.

On today's podcast, we'll talk about a skill that every leader needs to develop.

Andy, I think one of the things that has really set your leadership apart

for many is that your desire is that everything you teach not only be inspiring,

but it really be helpful too.

Yeah I think one of the things that I loved as a young leader was finding

either authors or speakers who didn't just give sort of a philosophy of leadership but gave me the nuts and bolts and so we've really tried to you know make that the hallmark of our

Leadership podcast and really everything we do in terms of leadership. Well today's topic is certainly helpful

Yeah, today I want to talk about listening. You said it's a skill that's important for every leader.

Obviously it's important for everybody, but I think it's even more important for leaders because we have a tendency not to listen because

after all we're the leaders everybody's supposed to listen to us. Well Andy what do you

see as the connection then between leadership and listening?

Well, intuitively, the connection is leaders are responsible for making decisions

and in order to make good decisions, you've got to have good information.

And I tell leaders all the time, look, our goal isn't to make all the decisions, it's just to make sure that all of our decisions are good.

And you can't make consistently good decisions if you don't have the pertinent information and you don't ever get that information until you decide to stop and

listen to the people around you. But you're not talking about a leader listening

to everyone. All the leaders listening know that we need to listen. What we need to be intentional about is creating systems

and even org charts that allow us to have access to the people that we need to

listen to and the people we need to listen to have access to us.

And if we're not intentional about that, we end up listening to the same handful of people

over and over and over and as you know and as every leader knows, information gets filtered,

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