Help Your Audience Feel Heard (vs. Ignored)
With distractions and stresses mounting, many audiences feel their leaders don’t truly listen. And yet incorporating a few coaching tips indicates the contrary: That you’re truly listening and that you truly care. In this series on the coach-approach to executive communications, consider these short (and easy) techniques leadership coaches must master to do well.
Listen more than speak
To help honor the space and to encourage input, strive for a 80:20-90:10 ratio where you’re speaking a bare minimum and inviting (through open-ended, short, powerful questions) deep and insightful responses. This approach might not feel natural initially, but with practice, you’ll see huge, delightful shifts in meeting dynamics—and more sharing from your team.
Get comfortable with silence.
Practice pausing a few moments before immediately responding to something the audience lays down. This step might feel different to your conventional work culture; but cultures across the globe use silence as a way to:
Offer pauses for reflection
Create moments to study non-verbal queues and get to the root of what’s holding a team back or what’s going on behind the scenes
Encourage the extroverts to quieten down and more introverted speakers to speak up. Silence can quieten the survivalist part of our mind, too—and with that, you’ll find more thoughtful ideas surfacing
Show (again) you’re mindful of the team and not always wanting to insert yourself
Weave in the language the audience lays down
When we practice active listening, one way to help our audience feel truly heard becomes weaving in the exact language the audience lays down and then braid it in. Here’s an example to illustrate:
“I’d like to jump on this project, but right now, I’m feeling bogged down.”
“What must change within your workflow to feel less bogged down?”
Ask short, powerful open-ended questions
And related to the earlier point, you’ve a powerful active listening tool available to you with short, open-ended questions vs. closed ones which illicit a non-revealing and surface “yes” or “no” response.
Best practices for short, powerful sentences include:
Keep them really short, like 5-7 words (or even three becomes possible)
Avoid feeling attached to the response
Make it safe for the audience to answer
A few examples follow:
What’s the main outcome you seek from today’s meeting? (After stating what you hope to achieve; ask them.)
What would bring the most value from today’s meeting? (And: What else?)
When will we know we’ve met with success? (Helps build some accountability.)
What’s your (or, the team’s) inner conflict with this?
What feels hard/challenging about…
What’s your biggest hope for….
What do you really want to happen?
What’s the new thing you want to move forward?
Now you’ve some powerful coach-approach tools and techniques to weave into your next meeting with the goal of helping your team and audience feel heard. With that, they’ll likely feel more supported and trusted, too.
More blogs on executive communications live here.
