How to Listen Better
Picture a great communicator. Chances are, you conjure someone who is eloquent, with the power to reach and move others. Now add that this person is also an executive/leader, and you might overlay ‘large and in charge’.
However, too often we accept skilled oratory as effective communication. Effective communication though means more than just talking. It means listening, too; and often better than you’re able to talk.
I only wish I could find an institute that teaches people how to listen. Business people need to listen at least as much as they need to talk. Too many people fail to realize that real communication goes in both directions. Lee Iacocca, Former CEO of Chrysler Corporation
Listening to those around you has significant benefits. It helps build critical relationships with clients, customers, and employees. That in turn, builds trust. That trust encourages loyalty and productivity. And, of course, this all equates to increased profitability.
Unfortunately, according to Ram Charan, writing in a Harvard Business Review article, a quarter of feedback received on CEOs during 360-degree reviews revealed a listening shortfall. This shortfall “can paralyze cross-unit collaboration, sink careers, and if it’s the CEO with the deficit, derail the company.” So, you see, listening is a big deal.
Then there is the hidden benefit of listening: the opportunity to discover and understand more than you ever could otherwise. You’ll learn about your employees (what they want/need and what makes them produce greater results) and about your clients/customers (what they want/need from your company). So, it’s easy to see why, when you don’t focus on developing this attribute, you get the negative results identified in Charan’s article.
Like anything worthwhile, building your listening abilities takes effort. Here are three ways to build these skills and help ensure you’re able to reap the positive rewards:
- Clear your mind
- Forget about you
- Remember that it’s more than words
1. Clear your mind
To listen well, you must clear your mind of everything and be ready to truly hear what the other person is saying.
You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at the same time. Scott Peck, psychiatrist and author
This includes foregoing thinking about your own position and what you’re going to say next. By focusing on the other person, you may benefit from their thoughts, opinions, and positions.
2. Forget about you
In addition to clearing your mind so you can hear, you must also learn how to compartmentalize your personal thoughts and opinions. This allows you to address the needs of the other party without having your own thoughts interfere. Peck called this ‘bracketing’.
An essential part of true listening is the discipline of bracketing, the temporary giving up or setting aside of one’s own prejudices, frames of reference and desires so as to experience as far as possible the speaker’s world from the inside, step in inside his or her shoes. Scott Peck, psychiatrist and author
3. Remember that it’s more than words
This attribute involves looking beyond what’s said and learning to read nonverbal cues like body language (eye movement and contact), posture, and proximity.
To listen fully means to pay close attention to what is being said beneath the words. You listen not only to the ‘music,’ but to the essence of the person speaking. You listen not only for what someone knows, but for what he or she is.
Peter Senge, MIT Sloan School of Management
As an executive, it is to your advantage to understand not only what the other person knows but also why this is important to them.
Summary
To be a truly great listener, the key, in essence, is to become selfless in the conversation, giving all attention to the one who is offering you an opportunity to reap the benefits that come from doing so.
Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Karl Menninger, psychiatrist
As Menninger and Charan both point out, you will gain immensely by being a listening leader who is able to gather fuller, deeper information.
