STEP THREE

Listen

“If you want to learn, you have to give up talking,” Jennifer Buffett of the NoVo Foundation told me in our conversations. Her husband, Peter, added: “I’ve had this wonderful, privileged, lucky life in so many ways, so I shouldn’t be the one saying, ‘Here’s how to solve the problem.’ The people who are experiencing it should say that. What you need to do is get really humble, and listen, and learn. . . . Transformational change will always require challenging conversations about ‘us’—not a monologue about helping ‘them.’”¹

If I had a dollar for every time someone told me that the folks holding the purse strings don’t really listen! After 15 years in the field of philanthropy, I can’t believe I’m still hearing this. Every human deserves the dignity of being heard. The lack of listening extends far beyond philanthropy and the finance sector, of course. You could argue that the deep political divisions in the United States are caused by and worsened by a refusal from both sides to listen to each other and engage in civil conversation. People need to be reminded what it means to listen and be able to disagree without immediately devolving to hate and demonization. While funders should be devoting resources to supporting these kinds of respectful conversations happening, first off, funders themselves have to practice better listening.

Why is it so difficult for people and institutions of wealth to listen? They believe that they know more than others and know what’s best for others. They’re not open to learning or being influenced. They make positive assumptions about their own abilities and negative assumptions about everyone else. This is a reflection of the power dynamic, the white savior mentality. It’s about a lack of humility and a desire to be in control.

Jed Emerson, the “godfather of impact investing,” says that funders are plagued by “‘mansplaining,’ where men, regardless of whether or not they know anything about the topic, they just go into this explanation. As a field, we suffer from that, because you’ve got entrepreneurs who are looking for capital, and God forbid they don’t have the right answer when they’re talking to a potential investor! . . . There’s a tendency to want to always be right, to want to always have the answer, to want to always convince others of your righteousness. Those elements make for bad investing. They may make for good short-term investing, but they don’t make for good long-term value creation beyond simple financial returns.”²

Even before failing to listen, funders and investors often exert control by framing the conversation and asking only certain kinds of questions. That already places limits on what’s possible, what can or cannot be said, not to mention the predominance of advice given by funders, which shuts down conversation automatically. There is rarely space for an honest dialogue about what’s really going on, the challenges being faced, because everyone’s putting on a happy, successful face for the one holding the purse strings. When funders ignore input from outside their walls, they stifle priceless creativity and leadership.

Organizations evolve in the direction of the questions that funders most persistently and passionately ask. Rather than asking what’s wrong, what needs to be fixed, what’s broken, what if philanthropy asked a community what it is most proud of and how it could support that? Questions about what is working well are energizing: their answers spread the stories of solutions and the design of those solutions.

Otto Scharmer, a professor of leadership and management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that listening is key to leadership, but not just any kind of listening. He differentiates between “downloading,” which is when we only hear things that confirm what we already know; “factual listening,” when we filter what we hear in search of new data and evidence; “empathetic listening,” which puts us in the shoes of the speaker, connecting and feeling what s/he feels; and finally, “generative listening,” in which we enter almost a meditative flow state, which enables us “to connect to the highest future possibility that can emerge.”³ We need to be striving for empathetic listening 100 percent of the time in order to heal the past, and generative listening as often as we can in order to move forward and build new organizations and new culture.

Because wealth tends to have an isolating effect—which is only heightened when ivory towers are situated and built to exclude and alienate the people seeking funding—listening is key to undoing the rigid structures of colonization that keep wealth from flowing. Focused listening allows you to get a glimpse of what it is like to be someone else and see the world through their eyes. Being able to adopt the mindset of a person with a different background than yourself creates openness in you. It will challenge your assumptions and limiting beliefs. It may lead you to solutions or ideas that you would never otherwise have been able to access.

Words are important. In many traditions, there is a belief that words have a power to create reality and must be used with discretion and responsibility. Yet people communicate much more than just the content of what they say. People’s tone of voice, their use of metaphor, their body language also tell us a lot about their experience, their identity, and their worldview.

So good listening includes being:

• Open: not predetermining the appropriate content of communications

• Empathetic: truly inviting in and making space for the feelings and wisdom of the speaker

• Holistic: including what is said in ways that do not use words

In fact, we could call it “listening in color,” a specific way to combat the trauma of global bleaching’s relentless destruction of the number of voices that were amplified and heard within the white supremacist, colonial context.

Listening in color is a superpower that you can wield to change the status quo, no matter what role you play inside an institution on the loans-to-gifts spectrum. You may have little influence to impact a board or CEO’s funding strategy, but you can always listen to those seeking funding with an open heart. Listening attentively means holding back your own conclusions, opinions, and judgments. You do not need to jump in and say, “Me too!” This just moves the focus away from the other person and back to yourself. Give them room to breathe and take risks in conversation. No monologues and no mansplaining. Replace advice with openness and curiosity.

When funders listen in color, everyone will flourish as a result.