The Skill of Active Listening
I’m Andy Temte and welcome to the Saturday Morning Muse! Start to your weekend with me by exploring topics that span leadership, business management, education, and other musings designed to support your journey of personal and professional continuous improvement.
I’ve fancied myself a good listener throughout most of my career as an executive. In my mind, I would sit patiently as team members presented new product ideas and business plans. After the final slide of the beautiful, shiny deck faded to black, I would ask probing questions in an effort to understand the pitch more fully. I would gently push the presenter to consider different perspectives and potential challenges that hadn’t been considered. From my perspective, I received the information I thought I needed to make good decisions and helped guide my colleagues toward better outcomes by pushing and challenging their assumptions.
That was the world viewed through my lens.
My colleagues saw things very differently through their lenses. Many team members were terrified of speaking with me. I’m 5’ 6½” tall and weigh 150 pounds soaking wet, so I don’t strike an imposing physical presence, but the combination of the position (CEO) and my naturally analytical, introverted, and cool demeanor was the primary contributor to the trepidation folks would feel when interacting with me.
As a result, I never received unvarnished information. Nearly everything that made its way to me was polished, redacted, censored, edited, and sterilized for my consumption. The biases of my direct reports colored the information I was given - I was not getting the full story.
Is This the Natural Order?
For the first half of my career as an executive, I thought that this disconnect represented the natural order of things - that the boss was supposed to be an intimidating presence and the distress and anxiety my team members felt was a right of passage and an opportunity for personal growth.
While it is the case that true learning only happens when we’re uncomfortable, I was unintentionally creating unnecessary emotional waste by implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, supporting and condoning the notion that deference to organizational leaders was just the way the world worked. It was certainly an ego stroke to hear “Andy said” echo down office corridors, but were we getting the best long-term operational outcomes? Were we fostering an environment of trust and teamwork? The answer is an emphatic no. In those early years I could have done so much better.
The Necessary Conditions for Effective Listening
So if you’re looking to improve your listening skills to build trust and accountability, here are several recommendations:
Be present. Remember in the first paragraph of this muse where I fancied myself to be a good listener? The reality of my behavior was a different story. If there was a video camera over my shoulder, it likely would have caught me fidgeting, checking my phone, staring out the window, whispering an unrelated thought to another senior executive, or engaging in some other pointless multitasking. You can only truly listen when you’re present and focused. Multitasking is a myth and even if multitasking can be accomplished, mediocrity will be the likely outcome.
Empower your people. By definition, when someone is listening, someone else is speaking - either verbally, through the written word, or both. To ensure that the conversation isn’t encumbered by unnecessary tension or spin, help your colleagues find their voice. How? It’s important to lead by example and the best way to do this is to shed your emotional suit of armor. Let your colleagues see that you’re human by being constructively vulnerable. Tell a story about how terrified you were the first time you spoke to the CEO of the business and how you navigated the accompanying anxiety. Hopefully, you can share an experience where a boss from your past showed compassion and helped you overcome your fears.
Be an educator. Glassophobia - or the fear of public speaking - is real and it affects a large proportion of the population. As an employer, you have an obligation to educate your employees and encourage them to adopt a lifelong learning mindset. Given that communication is one of the most important human skills and your business results depend on the transmission of reliable information, it’s a no-brainer to invest in communication skills programming - including public speaking.
Create an environment where psychological safety can thrive. Your people will show up to work in an emotional suit of armor if bullying and intimidation are allowed to exist within your organization. In my book, Balancing Act, I tell a story about an old junior high school friend who was told she couldn’t sing by our music teacher and that she should lip sync through the spring concert. Do you think my friend ever sang again outside of the shower or her car? Not a chance. If managers/leaders in your business cut people down to make themselves look better, you will not get the most/best out of your people. Period. “Aw just toughen up you snowflake!,” are the words spoken by an individual who’s trying to hide their own insecurities and doubts with unhelpful bluster and bravado.
Conclusion
Listening is routinely found in “top ten” lists of the most important human skills for the 21st Century. Listening takes practice and can thrive in the right environmental conditions. To assume you’re cultivating improved listening skills without making equivalent investments in education, psychological safety, empowerment, and presence is a fallacy.
Let’s put the phone down, open our ears, sharpen our minds, and listen. Our people, the business’s most valuable asset, deserve it.
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Glassophobia definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossophobia
