Lead Well by Listening Well
Many consider and classify effective communication as a “soft” skill; while I understand the terminology, I dislike the idea that “soft” makes something sound ubiquitous or easy. Listening and speaking in ways where your audience feels truly heard becomes a tricky but vital craft requiring frameworks, tools, and practice opportunities to master. And yet surprisingly few leaders do it well.
In this week’s blog post, I’m sharing the top reasons for why I believe leading well starts with listening well. And if you find active and effective listening a tool you want to cultivate, do pop in to my Active Listening workshop, starting May 26, and with other related workshops to come soon.
Active Listening Creates Feelings of Empathy
When our audience feels heard, they feel supported, understood, and believed in. The opposite can lead to teams feeling disengaged, disenchanted, and not supported. With Gallup tracking around 36% of the U.S. workforce feeling engaged currently, one way to build a more engaged team is to listen to them well. This step helps show you care.
Active Listening Builds Clarity and Saves Time
With increasingly diverse teams, we’re often struggling to understand what motivates others and the culture from which we emerge. Active listening means listening to what the speaker says (and doesn’t say), to their responses, expressions, and pauses. When you’re actively listening, you’re listening, noticing, and tapping into your intuition.
Listening at this deeper, more mindful level—with your whole body—helps determine what motivates others, their intent, and the root to what they’re bringing into the conversation. Through actively listening, you’ll find less confusion and fewer journeys down rabbit holes.
Active Listening Builds Relationships
When we’re listening actively, we’re also using the audience’s language—and by doing so, we sound more grounded, less pompous, and more alike. We’re also signaling to our audience: I’m present. I’m in this situation with you.
In coaching, when learning the core competencies of the International Coaching Federation, we learn to pick up whatever the coachee lays down and braid it in. As we listen, we ensure the coachee’s finished sharing their idea; then, ask a short, open-ended question using the coachee’s very own language.
This nuanced training on coaching presence might sound finicky; however, it’s a great tool for building intimacy and trust, reducing judgement, and saving time by helping the audience get to the root of their issue by encouraging that vital depth.
As the former New York City political leader Ruth Messinger once said: “The difference between hearing and listening is paying attention.” So true!
In closing, I’m kicking off my workshop series with Active Listening over other offerings because I believe this delightful and under-tapped skill drives excellent and compelling communication and liberates us as communicators. If we’re selective, partial, or inactive listeners and not listening with our whole selves, we’re gaining only a partial understanding of the wants, needs, and feelings of those we spend time with and serve.
For more blogs on business communication, click here.
