Can You Hear Me Now? Listening As Critical Leadership Skill

Picture this.  You need to talk to someone about something.  Maybe it’s your boss, maybe it’s a colleague, maybe it’s your significant other.  You sit down to talk and the other person checks his phone every few minutes, makes minimal eye contact, interrupts you, and appears to spend the times you are talking composing his response in his head.  Would you leave feeling like you were heard?  Would the outcome of the conversation be positive or constructive? 

If you are thinking you weren’t heard and the outcome would be far from what you intended (probably nothing), you are most likely right.  It’s possible the person heard part of what you said but didn’t listen well enough to truly get what you were communicating.

We’ve all had this experience.  We know how it makes us feel and we also know its impact on work settings.  How can anything get done – new ideas and approaches tried, solutions brokered, relationships formed – when listening isn’t happening? 

Listening is commonly named as an essential leadership skill and it’s easy to see why.  Last week, we saw how listening is critical to servant leadership.  We all have a certain level of listening skill but we all can also improve.  Here are some tips on how to become a more active listener:

1. Be here, now.  The first step in active listening is attention.  It’s increasingly difficult to shut off distractions like phones and that “new email sound” from your computer, but it’s critical to focus if you want to be a good listener.  Even harder is stopping the “monkey mind” or process of jumping among the thousand other thoughts in your head that most of us live with.  Active listening requires you take a breath, commit yourself to giving your attention, and refocus whenever you get distracted.
2. Send signals.  It is critical that you let the speaker know that you are “there” with him.  Asking question is important.  Other signals that you’re clued in are nodding, eye contact, and verbal cues like “uh huh.”
3. Listen comprehensively.  Active listening involves paying attention not only to the words someone is saying but also attending to the tone, her body language, and even sometimes what she’s not saying.  Listen for content but also listen for any emotions.  Is the speaker frustrated?  Angry?  Excited?  That’s as important as the content because it will guide how you respond.
4. Look for the important stuff.  Ram Charan tells a story of a CEO who would divide his notepad paper into two sections.  He’d draw a line down the middle of the sheet where he would take notes, making the right side section about ¼ the width of the paper and the other side ¾ the width.  On the wider left section, he’d write his notes from the conversation and on the smaller right hand section, he’d jot down the two to three word “nuggets” that were the important take-aways from each part of the conversation.  Whether you do this or not, you can still seek out the key points whenever you are listening.
5. Try on their shoes.  It’s critical that you understand what’s being said from the perspective of the speaker.  You don’t have to agree with it, but you need to see the issue through her eyes before you can truly understand what she's saying.  Defer your judgment of what you’re hearing until you really understand the other person’s perspective.  Check in with him to see how accurate you are.  “What I hear you saying is…” is a very useful tool in summarizing your understanding and letting the speaker comment on how well you got it.  Even if you got it totally wrong, if you humbly give the other person the chance to correct you, she will usually be very happy that you cared enough to listen and check.
6. Practice, practice, practice.  Active listening is a skill and, like all skills, it must be practiced to be maintained.  Also like other skills, everyone can get better.  Pro sports players and actors don’t stop practicing once they get to the big time and neither should you.  Charan recommends soliciting feedback from colleagues or others who will be honest with you about how well you’re listening.  He also recommends you take a moment to evaluate yourself after each conversation, asking yourself how you did and how you can improve.  

Listening skills often decline the busier we get.  It’s easier, we tell ourselves, to just issue directives or get conversations over with.  That may be true in the short-term but most of us who fall into this mindset lose in the long-term.  Miscommunications and people around you who rarely feel heard cost you.  Active listening really connects your communication, preventing mistakes and misguided efforts, and also builds your relationships.  Listening is critical to your success.

Cited:  Charan, R. (2012). The discipline of listening. Found at: http://blogs.hbr.org/2012/06/the-discipline-of-listening/

Effective Leadership Practices, Part 1

For the past several weeks, we’ve been exploring servant leadership, a style of leadership that turns many aspects of traditional, “command and control” leadership on their heads.  Any time you discover a new leadership style or model, you probably want to know more about what the model looks like in action, so for the next three weeks, I’ll be taking servant leadership closer to ground level.  I’ll be summarizing the essential practices of servant leaders, as described by Kent M. Keith, in The Case for Servant Leadership. 

The first two key leadership practices Keith describes are self-awareness and listening.  It’s not a coincidence that self-awareness is the first practice because, in the “physician, heal thyself” tradition, change begins with us.  Self-awareness is the “mother skill” because it allows the development of the other skills.  If you aren’t aware of your strengths and growth opportunities, how can you turn the latter into the former?  How can you make your strengths even better?  You can’t. 

Further, self-awareness is important because robust teams – the outcome of good leadership – can’t be formed by a leader who doesn’t understand her impact.  Leaders in a group have enormous influence.  Keith and others describe the many studies that demonstrate that people’s behavior changes around a leader.  They literally look to the leader, either consciously or unconsciously, for his reaction and often mirror it.  Leaders set the tone.

A friend’s father understood this and had a nice way of teaching it.  He managed a plant for many years and he was well known for his positive style.  When speaking about the importance of self-awareness, he put it succinctly: “Leaders don’t have the luxury of bad moods.”  He recognized that those in leadership positions have many perks – such as the power to set the tone as just described – but there were many corollary responsibilities as well and one of those is refraining from taking out a bad mood on a team or infecting them with one.  In other words, a leader’s enthusiastic, motivated mood catches on, as does a negative, uncooperative mood.  Yes, we all have our Debbie Downer days, but leaders must find a way to deal with theirs privately lest they infect their teams with their bad moods.

The second essential practice of servant leadership is listening.  Many leadership experts extol the power of listening as a leadership skill and there are numerous ways to improve your listening skills.  Entire books have been written about this topic, so we’ll dive deeper into this skill at a later time.  But for now, it’s important to know that Robert Greenleaf, the father of servant leadership, said, “Only a natural servant automatically responds to any problem by listening first” (2008, p. 18). Stephen Covey understood the necessity of listening to the extent that he made it one of his seven habits:  Seek first to understand, then to be understood.  Keith (2008, p. 38) sums it up well:  “The main point is this: Servant-leaders don’t begin with the answer, the program, the product, the procedure, the facility.  They don’t begin with their own knowledge or expertise.  They begin with questions that will help identify the needs of others.”  (Those “others” also include the needs of the organization.)    

Self-awareness and listening are foundational practices of effective leadership.  The good news is that you can start immediately. What can you do this week to notice your effect on others and listen better?

Cited:

Keith, K. M. (2008). The case for servant leadership. Westfield, IN:  The Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership.

Greenleaf, R. K. (2008).  The servant as leader. Westfield, IN:  The Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership.