The Goodness in Active Listening
Being a good listener is a valuable workplace skill – and arguably for leaders and managers especially where the role for those functions is shifting from ‘micro-managing‘ (decreeing what people should do, how they should do it, and sometimes when) to more ‘coaching’ your people at work and ‘developing other leaders’, enabling them to be the best versions of themselves.
In short, it helps you to listen more actively and to serve your co-workers, in this instance for the better as it helps you to lead better.
In the next few paragraphs we are going to see briefly what active listening is, what are the benefits of this empowering skill, and why all leaders should strive to master it.
What is it exactly, and what are the payoffs of this psychologically powerful ability ?
Listening is an essential element of leadership – and of any relationship. Few of us listen to gain a victory, or to make ourselves the hero of the story. Its normally our mouth that speaks our wins.
Yet usually the best option is to pause and observe with more mindfulness what’s actually happening. You can often achieve a degree of joint clarity about what the other person thinks and about the circumstances – if you are paying attention.
To give your full attention to the other person speaking, you have to put an end to your inner ego – and to relinquish the desire to control what comes out next. In fact, active listening is one way to put your ears to use, and it certainly beats staring down at your hands innocently clasped on your lap. Sincerely focused listening is really fulfilling for both parties when done correctly.
This is where you, as the listener, make a sincere attempt to understand the whole message the speaker has sent you. You make sure you aren’t jumping in on the verbal track as soon as the other person pauses (to fill with silence) with an ‘um’ then jumps in (rather than letting him have an awkward, but silent, 30-second pause).
You also signal, both verbally and non-verbally (eg with nods, a glance in the eye, and the odd ‘Yeah’ or ‘Uh-huh’ said here and there) that you’re following the message or that you’re listening to what the other person says.
It’s easy to be distracted by other activity, or by our thoughts, in a workplace when somebody is speaking.
What active listening is about is showing up and actually listening to what he’s saying the other person, not listening to what I’m going to say to him to get to as soon as possible.
The Benefits of Active Listening
Being a good listener is not easy. Do it though, and you will put into yourself a better way of communicating. What will those benefits do to help you in work?
Below we describe six ways to reap the rewards of active listening.
- Active Listening Builds Trust and Strong Relationships
Trust is another valuable relationship builder that active listening will enable you develop. For example: Look at your team. Are these people less responsive to you than they were years ago? Less interested in what you are saying? Less present? Are they beginning to miss more meetings? Are they less likely to come to you? What about the one person you might even have to coax into a conversation works through email more and more? These are signs that your team doesn’t trust you. All these things can knock you off your productivity — and build resentment.
When your team was not there for you as they were purportedly ‘listening to you’, ‘hearing from the heart’ is an invitation to listen and to work on re-establishing your relationship and trust with your team.
- Active Listening Can Help You to Resolve Conflict
You can take this to the bank: there will be conflict in your workplace. People will misperceive you or just simply disagree. If that happens, active listening is called for, because we almost always know only one side of any issue or problem. We rarely even reflect like this at how things could be from someone else’s (or someone else’s’) perspective.
Active listening leads us to see problems from multiple perspectives; it allows us to empathise and share each other’s feelings; and, quite generally, it enables us to see – and treat – other people with respect.
Now return to the scenario of the last time you were at work and you, or two of your co‑workers, didn’t agree on something. Were you able to see their perspectives? Was this the root of the problem?
Active listening is the means, to hear so that others can find their way, but also we can create a culture of that at work.
- Active Listening Prevents You from Missing Important Information
Indeed, this focus within active listening on the toto – on the message as a whole – will ensure your being totally (and thus, at the highest cognitive level) present ‘with’ the speaker, and that alone will guarantee your being able to digest the nitty polys of the idioms. If you are undergoing training, literally, of any sort, or being oriented, on-the-job trained, you will retain the detail.
Chances are that, if you are a leader, there will come a time when you might be required to train others and someone will ask you to say X. Or, you might need to pass on a message to another person or group of people – to tell them Y in your own words.
When you don’t remember what you said, […] other people will start to behave as if they heard what you said, and they will behave according to the piece of the original message that they were given.
So, if only part of the message is heard, only that part of the message will be duly communicated. And that imperfect communication can mean misunderstanding the kinds of decisions that are being taken, whether about how to move forward with a task, or the actual quality of what you’re working on.
- Active Listening Enables You To Identify or Anticipate Problems
When you communicate well you can foresee issues within the words people use. Sometimes they may be avoiding, minimisng, deflecting or persuading. If you listen carefully you can hear the message and even see the unspoken message at times depending on peoples word choice.
- Active Listening Helps You To Build More Knowledge
What leaders must learn to do all the time is learn. And listening — listening more, as much as you can, more times, over and over — to the people who are right at your fingertips is how you do that.
You just make your hearing more active, and the stuff will come hurtling in. Information will come better integrated, better ingested.
Active listening, particularly, is most useful when you must develop a new plan or company design – something you might jot down, take back to your organisation, and play off of to set a new direction, become more innovative, for example; when you must re-educate yourself in industry trends; the more empty your wheel will be, the more you can leverage what you do learn when you fill it back up again.
That’s why, by paying attention to the full picture, you’ll be in a better position to capitalise on what goes on in your market, and will do a better job of examining the implications developments carry for your organisation and how to seize opportunities on the basis of those implications.
Active Listening Empowers You as a Leader
What gives you the confidence to listen actively is the feeling that you are empowered. To listen well is powerful – it is this feeling of empowerment that gives you confidence.
If you start listening well, you become empowered because you can learn how you will operate in the world of work, and you will think bigger, will think larger, and look larger, and within that framework you are empowered.
The extent to which this rings true depends on just how much you know about what’s happening in your own place of work – and about how to talk to your bosses, as well as to your underlings. It should, I hope, help you to lead more confidently, too.
Book a Course With Us
It’s about good active listening, which is a communication skill that helps you earn trust with the people you work with, and that helps a team, or an organisation make decisions, problem-solve and move toward success – all of which is done with a clear, accurate awareness and absorption of all the information you need to get there.
We run various courses on where you can learn various techniques for active listening and other transitional skills in order to improve your own leadership.
