Active Listening- Leader's Superpower
Being a good listener is a superpower. This is one of those simple to understand but hard learn skills. It can help you take your personal and professional life on whole another level. Yes, your attention or listening level changes based on the topic and whom you are listening to. It does seem like more of a contextual thing but it is a skill that you can learn and hone.
Active Listening is, "a technique for careful listening and observation of non-verbal cues, with feedback in the form of accurate paraphrasing". It is not about understanding the content of the message but understanding the speaker's feelings.
This skill becomes even more important when you are leading a team. Employees[1] feel more heard when a supervisor practice Active Listening. Salesforce Research surveyed over 1,500 business professionals on the impact of equality. Their report shows that employees who feel their voice heard at work are 4.6x more likely to feel empowered to perform their best work.
Active Listening helps you Build trust, Connect with people and Digest more information.
Build trust: Building trust is a long process but it starts when people see you genuinely making efforts to see the world from their point of view. People trust you more when they know they can openly talk to you without interruptions and judgments.
Connect: When you practice Active listening that helps you understand each persons' story. Based on our own experiences, we all have our own version of the world, when you understand other people's world it helps you connect with them on a deeper level.
Digest more information: You get a lot more critical information when you Actively listen. When you carefully listen, understand and summarize the information then you tend to retain more information.
Want to learn Active Listening? Just be HONEST
Highly Attentive: A most important aspect of active listening is to provide your undivided attention. Make sure you keep the phone, email, or any other distractions away while having a conversation. Maintaining eye contact is a great way to stay engaged and show your undivided attention.
Open-ended Questions: Always ask relevant questions to stay engaged and show your interest in the speaker. Remember to use open-ended questions to keep the conversation flowing. Questions which has binary answers like Yes/No, True/False, or Agree/Disagree are generally not very helpful. For example, “How do you feel about your new assignment?” is a better option than “Do you like your new assignment?”It is important to Not Interrupt the speaker but do not hesitate to ask clarification questions whenever required.
Non-Judgemental: Never prepare your response while listening, be open, neutral, and withhold judgment. Stay non-judgemental till you fully understand the speaker’s point of view. Keep your biases in check and question your frame of reference before making any judgments.
“The biggest communication problem is we do not listen to understand. We listen to the reply”, Stephen R. Covey
Empathy and compassion: Try to put yourself in their shoe, that will help you be emotionally available and engaged in the conversation. Acknowledge that you do understand the speaker’s emotions. Using nonverbal affirmations like nodding, smiling and facial expressions are great ways to show some empathy without interrupting. Using short affirmations like “Yes”, “ok”, “great” also helps your speaker to gain more confidence and open up more.
Summarize: Make sure you summarize the conversation in your own words. It helps you test your understanding and is a good opportunity for the speaker to correct you. Also, the speaker does feel heard and empowered knowing that you do understand their point of view.
Turn off your thoughts: Most challenging aspect of Active listening is to shut down your own thoughts. If you are thinking about your dinner while listening to someone, they will feel it. It takes a lot of energy to dismiss your own thoughts and focusing on the speaker. It is like a mediation, the more you do it better you get at it.
Active Listening is a skill, not an easy skill. But the good news is that you get the opportunity to practice it every day.
Remember to be HONEST in your next one-on-one conversation.
[1] Harry Weger Jr., Gina Castle Bell, Elizabeth M. Minei & Melissa C. Robinson (2014) The Relative Effectiveness of Active Listening in Initial Interactions, International Journal of Listening, 28:1, 13-31, DOI: 10.1080/10904018.2013.813234