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Practicing Active Listening
Bill Ramsey, ActionCOACH Business Coaching
- Hearing is involuntary, but listening is an acquired skill.
- Listening involves more than noticing noise emitting from a mouth.
- Lousy listening wastes precious resources and damages relationships.
- In small business where people wear multiple hats, chase deadlines, and move fast and talk even faster, listening better be a core competency.
- Five Listening Lessons:
- Seek First to Understand before Seeking to be Understood. Challenging myself to view things through another person's eyes. The more you listen, the better informed you are when it's your turn to talk.
- Be a Human Mirror. We expect colleagues to hang on our every word. Yet, if we don't first listen to them so we can lock onto their communication style and mirror it back to them, we might as well be speaking different languages.
For instance, if you're brainstorming with a coworker who thoughtfully chooses every word, your brilliant idea might zip by them if you spew sentences at the speed of light. The same goes for decibel level. Your pithy points may not register if you overwhelm their soft-spoken sensibilities with bluster.
- Value the Speaker as Well as the Speech. It’s easy for people to tell when their boss is listening against them instead of to them. A dead giveaway is the wall he may throw up. Leaning back in a chair and folding their arms across his chest. Conversely, a caring approach, a smile, leaning into the conversation, eye contact, lets employees know they're taken seriously.
The mind set is What's right with what she's saying and how can I learn from it? Rather than What's wrong and how can I object to it? A leader who actively listens sets the tone for the entire department or company; people he/she listens to will listen to their people more carefully, and so down the line.
- Hear the Unspoken. Subtle messages flow through facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice.
- Repeat What You Hear. Try not to imitate the speaker, of course, but play back your interpretation of what you heard. Paraphrasing their messages shows that you listened carefully and gives you both a chance to clear up miscommunication. Remember that one of our deepest desires is to be heard.
- Active listening is grounded in courtesy, empathy, and a desire for clarity at all costs.
You don't have to agree with what you hear, but your attentiveness and attitude speak the unspoken. I want to understand where you're coming from. Tell me how you see this.
Practiced conscientiously, active listening engenders trust, reduces errors, and encourages people to speak their mind.
The same dynamics apply to groups: How many times have you witnessed someone in a group setting going for the jugular instead of challenging another team member in a professional way? How does that make the other team members feel? What does that action do to build teamwork and cohesiveness?
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