4 | Listening as a Leadership Skill
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in the first place: to be listened to and to know it.
Proactive listening is attentive, engaging listening,
and it accomplishes much more.
First, you take in more accurate information
because you maintain a tight focus. Also, greater
investment in response and feedback anchors
you in the moment and intensifies the message.
This boosts retention. (Listening passively, without
responding, makes us more likely to forget vital
information.)
Proactive listening makes a connection, gets
people thinking, and sparks some discussion.
Open-ended questions (such as: what? why? how?
when?) that elicit more than a yes or no answer
stimulate dialogue. Empathy jump-starts rapport.
And acknowledging feelings and making an effort
to understand facilitate speedier resolution of
conflict.
We can also have more success in recruiting
others to our viewpoints by asking, "What do
you think?" and then really listening to legitimate
concerns and alternatives. The conversation
becomes relatively quick, and you get instant
credibility, instead of simply stating the way
something is or the way you want it to be.
Understanding each other's concerns and
committing to each other's successes build trust.
Successful listeners know that feedback turns
talk into collaboration. And collaboration is the
lens through which deeper mutual understanding
is captured. In this way, you positively affect the
direction, dynamic, and depth of the conversation.
Indeed, proactive listening is influential listening —
it motivates your speaking partner to feel more at
ease and to be more forthcoming. As a response-
enabled manager, you then obtain more open,
honest, and meaningful information.
Meeting the Challenges of Global
Communication
As many point out, the workplace is becoming
increasingly multicultural, and a global economy
requires increased interaction with bosses,
subordinates, and co-workers in other countries.
And in the future there will be greater interaction,
with inevitable consequences for listening — and
language — practices.
Incompetent listening generates waste and
conflict. Achieving global understanding will
require new approaches and solutions to solving
challenges of communication. And one powerful
way is to bring the full listening experience
into the mainstream of leadership thinking and
practice. Therefore, it is incumbent upon those of
us who recognize the value of functional feedback
in conversation to champion its cause and model
its use.
The take-home message here is that managers
who fuse understanding with responding
and feedback have a much better chance of
influencing the flow and outcomes of conversation
than those who don't. Be a leader — a listening
leader — and use these productive new patterns to
help all parties get more out of conversations.
Good listening is good business. But more than
that, it's good human relations.
— Richard M. Harris, Ph.D.
