The Best Advice I Ever Got

Listen! Just Listen!

LISTEN! JUST LISTEN! That’s the best advice I ever got. One of the things about assuming leadership responsibilities at a young age is that you can start to believe your own media, and think that it can’t be good enough if it didn’t come from you. Actually, true leaders are altways listening and reacting to what they are hearing. Listening is humbling. You allow people to tell you what they really should be telling you. Sometimes hearing what they tell you is pretty hard to take, especially if you’re proud of the organization that you work for - but you learn more this way. I would rather hear the difficult things so that we can change what does not work.

I think listening is the essence of everything. One needs to practise active listening rather than competitive listening: active listening in the sense of you really wanting to understand what the other person is trying to say. You must approach such meetings with clients with your hand in your mouth and resist any temptation to be defensive. Part of active listening is that you learn, and the clients feel that you really are making an effort to understand them.

(source: p53, The Best Advice I Ever Got)

Nicky Newton-King 
CEO: Johannesburg Stock Exchange

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