How do we know we are being listened to? We have lots of meetings, thousands of conversations, yet sometimes we feel like nothing changes. Are people actually listening?
It's is nearly always the case in teams and companies that some people feel they aren’t being listened to. That is always something that should be addressed. We are better when we take the insight, learnings and views from all around us.
Throughout the past year, there has been a lot of talk about how to lead in these uncertain times, how virtual leadership is different, how we need higher EQ, to understand that everyone deals differently with change, we need to engage with our teams differently to allow for personal circumstances. I wonder if in dealing with our own circumstances and feelings, coping with moving forward, day by day and strategically; we stopped listening.
I don’t mean we ignore what we hear, or we disregard viewpoints that challenge us – I mean we are not actively listening…
Listening is the most fundamental component of interpersonal communication skills. Listening is not something that just happens (that is hearing), listening is an active process in which a conscious decision is made to listen to and understand the messages of the speaker.
Active listening is a skill that needs to be acquired and developed with practice. Active listening is difficult to master and will, therefore, take time and patience to develop. Old habits are hard to break, and if our listening skills are as bad as many peoples’ are, then we need to do a lot of work to break them.
The average human has an eight-second attention span, yet spends 60% of their time listening. With electronic distractions competing for your time and an abundance of responsibilities at work, it makes listening attentively to someone else speak pretty difficult. We effectively only retain 25% of what listen to.
“Listening is also hard because we’re often consumed with ourselves”, says Hal Gregersen, executive director of the MIT Leadership Centre. “It’s really hard to walk into a conversation without my agenda being written on my forehead and your agenda written on yours. Unfortunately with the hectic, chaotic, complicated pace of work life today, people are even more committed to getting their own agenda accomplished.”
When you approach a conversation thinking only of your own agenda, your goal is to manoeuvre and manipulate the conversation and to come out better than the other person. Trying to influence what they do, buy, or act, means the probability that you get any surprisingly new data is close to zero. Conversations end up being mostly about you, or about you controlling the other person. Neither are great conversation starters.
Walking around with closed ears is fine if what you’re doing is the right thing and the world doesn’t change. But if the world changes and we happen to not be doing the right thing, it becomes critical to pay attention to other people’s thoughts, emotions, words, feelings, and perspectives. It’s important to be open to new information that you’re not looking for but need to hear.
I don’t think there could be a description of where we are – as a race, a community, a company, a team - more accurate than that at this time. So let’s get habit-breaking together.
Here are six ways to become a better listener:
1. LISTEN TO LEARN, NOT TO BE POLITE
“Often, whether realizing it or not, people listen to each other out of generosity, not out of curiosity,” says Ajit Singh, consulting professor at Stanford. “Listening is good, but the intent has to be curiosity. True dialogue does not happen when we pretend to listen, and it certainly cannot happen if we are not listening at all. If we ever finish a conversation and learned nothing surprising, we weren’t really listening.”
Each day, ask yourself, ‘What am I going to be curious about today?’ This question effectively open your ears. It’s having a beginner’s mind-set walking into a conversation.
“When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know. But if you listen, you may learn something new” – Dalai Lama
”I remind myself every morning: nothing I say this day will teach me anything. So if I’m going to learn, I must do it by listening” – Larry King
2. QUIET YOUR AGENDA
While you can’t control someone else’s listening habits, you can control your own, and that involves quieting down your mind.
We need to turn off our agenda. Really listen to what someone else is trying to say. We need information that is disconfirming, not confirming. The curious mind is open to hearing differing perspectives, to learning something, to being challenged. But to be open it also needs to be quiet.
We’ve talked before about this need – and how you get there is different for everyone, exercise, meditation, walking the dog, cooking, singing, reading – anything that helps you get out of your own head, creating the calm and the quiet. We need to find ways of working these aspects into our daily lives. What can you do between meetings to bring that sense of quiet, so you enter each meeting, with an open and curious mind?
“Most of the successful people I’ve known are the ones who do more listening than talking” – Bernard Brauch
3. ASK MORE QUESTIONS
One of the simplest ways to be a better listener is to ask more questions than you give answers. When you ask questions, you are actively demonstrating to the speaker that they have said something that interest, intrigues or concerns you. That creates a space for them to give you more. Ideally it creates a safe space where they will share with you, the unvarnished truth. That’s where the surprising thing live, where you gain the insights, the disconfirming nuggets that help you evolve and grow.
Listening with real intent means being open to being wrong; and being comfortable with that. In a world that is getting more polarised, being able to listen is critical to reducing unnecessary conflict at any level.
“Curiosity – asking questions – isn’t just a way of understanding the world. It’s a way of changing it” – Brain Grazer
“If you don’t understand, ask questions. If you’re uncomfortable about asking questions, say you are uncomfortable about asking questions and then ask anyway” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
4. PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR TALK/LISTEN RATIO
Strive for a 2:1 ratio of listening to talking. If you are a note taker during meetings or conversations, try keeping track of how much you listen versus how much you talk. Mark off a section of the paper and write down the names of all the people in the meeting. Whenever a person talks for more than a sentence or two, put a check mark by their name. That includes you, too. The visual representation of comparing listening to talking might hold some lessons for you.
“We have but two ears and one mouth, so that we may listen twice as much as we speak” – Thomas Edison
This is definitely the area I need to work on. I have stopped taking notes recently, I am trying to hold it in my head, and that means I need to get it out whilst I remember it. That definitely stops me from listening – instead I’m trying to remember and wait for a space to talk. My notebook is back out my desk, open and pen poised to help me demonstrate I am listening consciously and actively.
5. REPEAT BACK WHAT YOU HEARD
Any number of problems can interfere with people’s ability to understand accurately what another person is trying to communicate. We all have various filters applied to our interpretations based on what our subconscious programmes are that control our inactive listening and communication – our intention, our beliefs, our experiences.
One way to ensure you are remaining active, is to repeat back to the speaker what you heard as an active demonstration of shared understanding. If the speaker agrees that what you heard is what they intended to say, you move on. If not, they can reword their statement until you really do understand.
If the purpose of the conversation was to finish with a shared outcome – understanding, plan, decision – then clarity is your friend. Restating what has been said, so you can both agree is a great way to gaining clarity by avoiding assumptions that can avoid later cause confusion. What better way is there to ensure the speaker knows they’ve been heard and understood.
“Finding clarity is eliminating options and aligning values”
“Clarity and simplicity are the antidotes to complexity and uncertainty” - General George Casey
6. WAIT UNTIL SOMEONE IS DONE TALKING BEFORE YOU RESPOND
The most difficult component of active listening is waiting for a period at the end of a sentence before formulating a reply, says Leslie Shore, author of Listen to Succeed. “When we begin working on a reply before the speaker is finished, we lose both the complete information being offered and an understanding of the emotion present in the speaker’s delivery.”
This is dangerous, as if the listener sees themselves as the most important thing in the world, then they are most likely to be thinking about the next thing they are going to say instead of listening to what is being said. Gregersen commented “At the very core, that’s what going on; I’m declaring to the world I am more important than you. That’s an uncomfortable moment of self-awareness, and a self-serving way of approaching life.”
“The biggest communication problem is we do not listen to understand. We listen to reply”
Active listening not only means focusing fully on the speaker but also actively showing signs of listening – using all of our senses. As well as giving full attention to the speaker, it is important that the ‘active listener’ is also ‘seen’ to be listening - otherwise the speaker may conclude that what they are talking about is uninteresting. Interest can be conveyed to the speaker by using both verbal and non-verbal messages such as maintaining eye contact, nodding your head and smiling, agreeing by saying ‘Yes’ or simply ‘Mmm hmm’ to encourage them to continue. By providing this 'feedback' the person speaking will usually feel more at ease and therefore communicate more easily, openly and honestly.
“Genuineness requires listening through both verbal and nonverbal channels” – Joseph Michelli
Julian Treasure summarises the above even more concisely with his acronym (and we all love one of those) RASA.
He also articulates the need for conscious listening far more eloquently in his Ted Talk.
Over 8million have listened to him!
This week I ask that you join them, and give him 7minutes of your conscious listening time.
“The world is giving you answers each day. Learn to listen”
Until next time...
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