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With so much talk, and information coming from all directions, does how well we listen really matter? Research by Alison Wood Brooks, and Hanne Collins, doctoral candidates at Harvard Business School, reveals just how much it does matter. They point out that psychological research shows that feeling heard by another person is essential in a happy relationship, whether that’s communication between romantic partners, a patient and a doctor, or colleagues in the office. And feeling heard at work could make the difference between employees who enjoy their jobs versus ones who don’t, something important for managers to remember at a time when many are struggling to retain workers.
We have all experienced staff or Zoom meetings when we absolutely know people are not listening. Some are looking at their phone, some talking to the person beside them, some searching the internet and some even looking as if they might fall asleep.
In an experiment to measure attentiveness, Brooks and Collins paired 200 strangers over Zoom to hold 25-minute conversations about a variety of topics, such as food and hobbies. Every five minutes, they sent a prompt to ask participants whether their minds were wandering—or whether they thought their partner’s mind was wandering.
The team found:
- Nearly a quarter of the time (24 percent), the listener wasn’t paying attention to their partner.
- Even more significantly, 31 percent of the time, the listener’s and speaker’s perceptions of attention didn’t match up.
- About 19 percent of the time, the speaker thought the other person was listening when they weren’t.
- And 12 percent of the time, the speaker didn’t think the other person was listening when they were.
Clearly if people are not listening, the speaker is likely to feel disrespected and hurt. Listening to solve a problem is another area where inattentiveness, can be fraught with misunderstanding
If we don't listen attentively, it is all too easy to fall into the trap of being 'helpful', a habit many principals display. They hear the beginning of a conversation or problem, possibly do not take in the whole conversation and immediately jump into solution mode. This is counterproductive to professional growth. If we jump in and give advice before colleagues have even finished articulating what they need, we rob them of the chance to find their own solutions.
It also saves time when you are not forced to be the only person expected to solve problems. In this situation, a good listener, continually asks the question, 'what would you do?' Often a member of staff, for example, doesn't even want you to solve his or her problem. They just want to share it with someone in authority and be allowed to find their own solution.
Collins says “good listening is the key to building a base of knowledge that generates fresh insights and ideas. Put more strongly, good listening, in my experience, can often mean the difference between success and failure in business ventures (and hence between a longer career and a shorter one).”
HOW TO LISTEN BETTER
The answer to improving listening skills may be as simple as asking speakers to repeat themselves when you realise you haven’t been paying attention. A classic example of this is not remembering names. People introduce themselves and the name almost immediately disappears from our consciousness. Instead of asking people to remind them of their name, many people are surprisingly reluctant to do so because they feel embarrassed. We prefer to listen carefully in the hope we might pick up a clue to the name rather than ask for the name to be repeated.
In his book, Power Listening: Mastering the most Critical Business skill of all, Bernard Ferrari, McKinsey& Company alumnus, suggests a number of ways to improve your listening skills. He believes that listening is a matter of respect. By listening attentively, you show people you care about them and respect their views. Showing respect must, of course, be genuine. That is, a speaker needs to know the leader is not simply ‘going through the motions’ but is truly prepared to listen and follow through.
Good listeners ‘keep quiet’. As a leader, it’s far too easy to dominate a conversation. You are likely to have thought through problems in more detail than must employees and to be confident you have solutions. If you speak too soon you deny others the opportunity to offer their ideas and may miss some very good alternative solutions. Ferrari uses the 80/20 rule as it relates to listening. “My guideline”, he says, “is that a conversation partner should be speaking 80 percent of the time, while I speak only 20 percent of the time. Moreover, I seek to make my speaking time count by spending as much of it as possible posing questions rather than trying to have my own say."
Staying quiet is also an effective way to entice others to speak and put forward their ideas as silence invites others to fill the space. When we remain silent, we also improve the odds of spotting non-verbal cues, thus observing reactions of staff members who may be too shy to speak, and picking up there is a problem.
Good listeners seek to understand—and challenge—the assumptions that lie below the surface of every conversation. We are often far too quick to make judgements about people and what we think is driving their opinions. According to Ferrari, “too many good executives, even exceptional ones who are highly respectful of their colleagues, inadvertently act as if they know it all, or at least what’s most important, and subsequently remain closed to anything that undermines their beliefs… it takes real effort for executives to become better listeners by forcing themselves to lay bare their assumptions for scrutiny and to shake up their thinking with an eye to re-evaluating what they know, don’t know, and—an important point—can’t know.
“Good listeners tend to make better decisions, based on better-informed judgments, than ordinary or poor listeners do—and hence tend to be better leaders. By showing respect to our conversation partners, remaining quiet so they can speak, and actively opening ourselves up to facts that undermine our beliefs, we can all better cultivate this valuable skill.”
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