Leadership through Listening
Effective Leadership = Effective Listening
It’s not shocking to hear that meetings are one of the most ineffective things happening at every organization. Search for “bad meetings” and the Harvard Business Review, scientific research, and Dilbert will tell you all the ways your meetings are failing.
One key factor contributing to bad meetings is that participants aren’t listening to each other. It’s statistically noisy, according to research from Emtrain: Only 22% feel their colleagues make efforts to understand their perspectives and only 40% of people consistently use a meeting agenda and ground rules to ensure everyone is heard.
If You’re A Manager, You’re A Part Of The Problem
Do you consider yourself the exception? Do you think you run great meetings where everyone actively listens?
If you’re an executive, odds are good that you are part of the problem:
Less than half of employees believe that managers show curiosity and empathy. (Emtrain)
Leaders who tend to work with other managers are disproportionally having a better time at work: 27% more managers of managers describe their experience at work as positive, compared to frontline leaders. (BetterUp)
This gap rises to 77% more managers of managers having a positive employee experience when compared to individual contributors. (BetterUp)
If you reflect for a second, would you agree that there were times where you:
-formulated a response in your head while someone else was talking?
-downgraded someone’s opinions because they were (in your eyes) underqualified/uninformed/irrelevant?
-made a decision that impacted others without integrating their input?
Everyone’s guilty of not listening. If you don’t believe that you’ve done those things, then you’re definitely a part of the problem and don’t know it 😅
Not only are you probably not as great a listener as you think, but you are also probably someone who has allowed others to not listen. It’s tough to be a highly effective listener and it;s even harder to build an effective listening culture.
Without a strong culture to support good listening habits when you’re outside the room, your organization is operating at a handicap. Imagine if your entire organization didn’t listen well, from the C-suite down to front-line customer facing professionals. Employees not listening to managers. Customer Service not listening to customers. Departments not listening to their executive leader. Leaders not listening to advisors.
Absolute mayhem.
Is this the kind of organization that is set up for success? Probably not.
Solving The Listening Problem Will Have A Clear Impact
Regardless of your personal listening habits, an organization filled with superior listeners delivers superior results. Poor listeners cause zounds of organizational pain.
Employees who perceived supervisors as high-scoring active-empathetic listeners reported significantly higher engagement scores compared to those employees who perceived supervisors to be low-scoring active-empathetic listeners (Jonsdottir & Kristinsson).
In short: active listening skills make more engaged employees.
This matches common sense: a supervisors’ ability to listen- with full attention- has a direct impact on their employees’ professional and personal work accomplishments. It also suggests that supervisors who truly, actively, and empathetically listen will boost their employees’ effectiveness, enthusiasm, and overall quality of work.
You Can Solve The Problem
It is a leader’s responsibility to curate spaces where people can speak up AND be heard, as well as model the kind of listening behaviors that promulgate good listening habits. “Social support” is considered to be one of the most important resources mediating work engagement and well-being at work (Orgambídez-Ramos & de Almeida), particularly around listening and showing empathy or trust (Jonsdottir, Rafnsdottir, & Ólafsdóttir).
If you want reliable feedback and data about the impact of your business decisions, your organization needs to be filled with reliable and trustworthy listeners.
How To Lead Through Listening
Everyone is equipped with the tools to be a better listener. To become a better listener, it simply takes intention to change your mindset when you are listening. However, to lead through listening, it takes even more intention and awareness to model good listening behaviors. You can do both by adopting three mindsets when you are listening:
1. An Open Mind
Step one is admitting that you can be a better listener.
If you are in a position where you lead others, it can be tough to acknowledge that you can be a better listener, especially if you’re accustomed to being relatively more knowledgeable/informed than your colleagues. Once you decide that you know more than others, you stop listening.
An open mind intentionally assumes that you don’t have the full picture. It’s setting an internal expectation that you lack 100% of the relevant information.
Having an open mind slows down your day-to-day work by allowing others to “bring you up to speed” or “explore a different opinion,” so this is not a cost-free hack. If you truly want to be a better listener as well as model good listening behaviors, it starts by budgeting time for listening and solid active listening skills
Some of these active listening skills are pretty self-explanatory:
Make eye contact and appropriate facial expressions
Pay full attention, intentionally removing distractions that prevent you from giving an employee your undivided attention
Make time to listen, both in the moment when your staff asks but also in the normal work environment (such as 1-1s or weekly check-ins)
Continue developing your own emotional intelligence to better read between the lines
Leadership skills are a long burn: keep working them and you’ll get better in time.
2. A Curious Mind
Once the time has been created for someone to share information, it is then the listener’s responsibility to be curious without judgment. A curious mind, aka Beginner’s Mind or Shoshin, is when you gently examine information in order to promote understanding. The best curious minds do so in a manner that does not push a preconceived notion, but seeks to simply elevate awareness.
Curious minds ask open-ended questions. For example:
How does this idea of yours work in a business critical situation?
What are the predicted benefits? What about the predicted downsides?
What is the most important differentiator between our existing solution and this proposed solution?
As a listening leader, you should model how to ask great questions to build a culture of highly effective listening. Being asked a relevant and interesting question does more than exchange information, but it helps someone feel heard.
You should also incorporate the kinds of body language that reflect effective listening: facing the speaker, not fiddling with a distraction like a phone, nodding your head, restating words the speaker has said, etc. Great questions and appropriate body language provides critical feedback to a speaker that they are being truly heard.
3. A Clear Mind That’s Addicted to Action
Once someone has been heard and understood, a meeting’s final step should be to make a decision. A meeting without an action item isn’t a meeting-it’s an email update!
To lead through listening, the first step in closing a meeting is to recap the most important points for accuracy. It is imperative that participants remember the key points that underlie a choice: restating the highlights from the conversation ensures that everyone has a common understanding and reinforces the context for a decision.
If team members were actively listening and engaged in the conversation, a decision is either 1) likely to be clear, 2) require some kind of vote/executive choice.
Even if a decision is, “We can’t/won’t make a decision right now,” that’s a decision! However, if you’re paralyzed by choice, we at Learn to Scale recommend leaders to lean towards action. When a decision is made that leads to action, new information will come to light as things start to happen, even if the choice turns out ultimately to be a failure.
No choice = no action = no change = no learning.
In situations where laying out the relevant information provides more than enough evidence to make a certain choice, a leader should still endeavor to solicit feedback and nuance that may impact the final outcome. Again, having an Open Mind entertains the possibility that you might not know all the relevant information!
In situations where the best choice is difficult, the organization’s culture should govern how decisions get made:
In more egalitarian organizations, a simple vote may be best
In more hierarchical organizations, a designated leader should be vested with the responsibility to make the call
One way or another, a clear choice needs to be articulated before a meeting ends. If your organization struggles to listen and make decisions, it may help to explicitly state at the start of the meeting that a decision will need to be made by the end, before any discussion has taken place. Long term, this expectation-for-action will create a work environment where decisions are easily made and acted upon.
This Sounds Like A Better Meeting
Leaders can and should model effective listening habits in order for their organization to scale and remain a great place to work. At the very least, you’ll be on the way to being a great leader.
Allowing more time for listening, asking great open-ended questions, recapping critical information, and articulating a clear choice in every meeting are the kinds of behaviors that will rub off on everyone while delivering superior outcomes.
If you want to learn more about effective listening research, dive into our sources and additional readings below:
PS. You’re Probably OK
Fortunately, business leaders tend to be somewhat better at listening than an average person. Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman surveyed more than 4,000 business professionals through a self-reflection assessment and a 360 assessment from peers and colleagues. They found a statistically significant correlation between the self-administered listening test and the effective listening scores provided by others.
What this means is that your own interpretation of your own listening skills is probably accurate. Not only that, but the average listening score from Zenger and Folkman’s research was 5.14 on a range of -8 to 8: that’s not too shabby in the grand scheme of listening.
You could be a little better, though.