Quality relationships start with active listening. But, more often than not, our conversations consist of people interrupting, talking over each other, or impatiently waiting for a turn to speak.
When you practice active listening, really paying attention to what someone is saying, you create an atmosphere for creativity and connection in which everyone feels valued and understood. It’s an essential leadership quality, especially if you want to build trust in your team.
Even if it doesn’t come naturally, active listening is a skill set you can get better at with practice.
This article will explain how to become an active listener—a lifelong practice to build stronger connections with the people in your life.
What is active listening?
Active listening means paying full attention to what another person is saying, with the aim of connecting and understanding.
Active listening is NOT… planning your next response while the other person speaks.
Active listening is NOT… letting your thoughts wander in the middle of a conversation.
Active listening is NOT… getting distracted while someone else is talking.
And it most certainly is NOT speaking over or interrupting someone.
You can probably think of that person who tends to do all those things. For sure, every person is guilty of interrupting another person or spacing out during a conversation from time to time. That’s because active listening is just that…Active.
In order to listen to someone, you need to actively focus on what they have to say. This involves intentionality and awareness, to give your undivided attention to a person while they speak—and that takes practice. You need to learn to listen.
There is a difference between hearing someone and listening to what they have to say.
Hearing vs Listening
Research done by Stanford University shows people fail to get their message across in 9 out of 10 conversations.
When one person speaks, the person on the other end of your conversation does not understand the intended message (or you don’t understand theirs) 90 percent of the time.
That’s because good communication skills go beyond just speaking and listening. To understand a person, you need to pay attention to more than just the words that come out of their mouth. You need to read non-verbal cues and consider what this person really feels. As a good listener and leader, you want to create a space where people feel comfortable openly expressing themselves, too.
And it’s totally worth the effort! Active listening leads to stronger connections with the people around you and boosts overall well-being. You build better relationships, considered one of ten “happiness enhancing” activities by psychologists.
Humans are social creatures, and ultimately, we all want to be heard, seen, and understood. When you take the time to practice active listening skills, you create a safe space for a person to express themselves honestly. Rather than being judgemental or defensive, it means responding with insightful questions to help a person feel heard and understood.
With practice, you can become a better listener—to consider all the cues, let go of judgment, and get to the heart of what someone wants to express. That’s when the magic happens: The neurons in our brains fire up, and good ideas come to life.
Why is active listening important in leadership?
Lighthouses, semaphore flags, morse code—mariners have long relied on these methods of communication to guide their ships to safe passage and keep them safe from rocky shores.
When it comes to your communication, are you equipped with guiding tools? Or, do you function more like a ship lost out at sea?
Communication is more complicated today!
Between texting, tweeting, emails, phone calls, and in-person discussions, how many of our messages actually make it to shore, and are fully understood by the other person?
Without the right approaches, not many!
Organizational anthropologist Judith E. Glaser spent decades researching Conversational Intelligence® and how most conversations fail to hit the mark. She also helped many leaders transform their teams and achieve success through better conversations — including active listening.
A chemical company once hired her to work with 17 of their best sales executives at a time when they risked losing one of their largest accounts. Judith stepped in to discover how this team could use communication to raise their game, and beat out the competition.
They spent the next several weeks role-playing and acting out scenarios to prepare. She noticed that only 15 percent of interactions were successfully communicated between the speaker and the listener. Those numbers weren’t going to work if they wanted to keep that important client.
I had the chance to speak with Judith during our interview on What’s Your Conversational Intelligence. She explained:
“They were talking over each other, and at each other, and had many different ideas. I didn’t see any of the ideas get developed. I saw them get put on the table, and then that idea would get knocked off the table.”
As a third party, Judith observed the obvious disconnect. They had ideas. But without taking the time to listen to each other, they lost the creative process. The messages weren’t received. The boats weren’t getting to port.
Judith had a better approach. She stepped in during a crucial point to help increase their chances of getting the bid. She charted patterns.
She observed things like:
- People making assumptions
- The way that people spoke to each other
- If people were listening, or not
Judith tracked how many times people stated opinions, and how many times they asked questions. She counted markedly higher numbers for telling versus asking. She saw positioning and persuading, telling, selling, and competing.
What she didn’t see a whole lot of? Listening.
At the end, these sales reps turned the tide by elevating listening. When she finished working with them, it flipped to 80% of listening. They asked each other more questions. Although it took time, it paid off. In the end, her intervention helped them get the bid.
You’ve all heard the phrase.
Actions speak louder than words!
As a leader, you can demonstrate active listening to your colleagues, and create an atmosphere in which people feel valued for their opinions.
When you act as a leader vs boss and promote active listening, you inspire an environment for sharing ideas. People feel more confident to voice their opinions out loud. They feel comfortable brainstorming and bouncing ideas off each other, ideal for problem-solving. It opens the potential for game-changing innovations and bagging those big projects.
Benefits of active listening
Active listening plays an important role in leadership—whether during a sales pitch, on the basketball court, in the office, or in front of a classroom. Think of it as that one shining interpersonal skill that can light the way forward with lots of benefits.
Building trust
One of the main benefits of active listening is building trust, whether among coworkers, employees, clients, customers, and beyond. When people feel heard, the brain releases oxytocin, the bonding hormone that helps us trust others.
When you trust other people, you create an environment for sharing, a helpful approach for reaching compromises or asking for feedback. Stay present and engaged during communication, whether it’s for customer service, workplace discussions, or in your personal relationships.
Listening builds trust and loyalty while showing others that you care about what they have to say.
Solving disagreements
Another benefit is that active listening can help solve disagreements and promote more subtle discussion. It allows you to more effectively form counterarguments and can make the other person more open to compromise, especially in negotiations.
When you’re actively listening you can form a more accurate opinion and ask the right questions instead of moving around in circles in a discussion, argument, and negotiation.
Boosting productivity
If you inspire a team of good listeners in the workplace, you create a space for productivity. Why? People who listen and feel heard, feel happier in their roles. They feel more willing to collaborate and communicate fully.
On the flip side, people tend to become overwhelmed at work and ineffective when they are constantly told what to do — without being asked for their ideas and input.
Studies also show that those who listen have more successful relationships. They develop better relationships and partnerships with coworkers, clients, and suppliers. Communication training for employees and managers leads to productive, successful collaborations.
How to improve active listening skills
An effective leader needs to realize that to get extraordinary ideas, something has to happen in the brain.
Listening leads to creativity!
When people feel heard, the brain releases oxytocin, a hormone that helps them think. The prefrontal cortex opens up, the part of the brain where new ideas develop.
But when people feel shut down, just the opposite happens. If someone responds saying they had a better idea, all of a sudden you feel bad about what you shared. That produces cortisol, nature’s built-in alarm system. People feel more hesitant and fearful to speak. They have less interest in reaching out to somebody else.
A strong leader should know the type of language that produces that empowering bonding hormone, oxytocin, and avoid phrases that cause their team to stress and retract.
With the right communication style, including active listening, you create an environment where everyone feels not only heard but physically motivated to express themselves. This allows ideas to extend and expand and move forward.
Focus on the speaker
To connect involves focusing your full attention on the other person:
- What are they really trying to say?
- What are they feeling and thinking?
- What are they hoping you can help them with?
Connect to their ‘word’ and explore their world.
Become a better active listener by truly focusing on the speaker. Listen with the aim of connecting, improving focus by not letting your internal reactions distract you. Always take a moment after somebody says something to think about what they said and how you can more effectively reply.
Tune into what they are saying and how they are saying it. Consider the context of the conversation (does this person have a reason to hide the truth, out of fear of criticism or their safety for example).
Use nonverbal cues
Studies suggest that nonverbal behaviors comprise at least 60% or more of all interpersonal communication. You can become a better listener by paying attention to nonverbal cues.
It can help to provide encouraging nonverbal cues as well, such as nodding or smiling. Use the right amount of eye contact. Too much can feel intense and intimidating. Looking at the person while they speak and occasionally turning your ear slightly creates a comfortable amount of eye contact and lets the person know that you are paying attention.
Many times people say one thing, but mean another. A person may reveal their true meaning instinctively through non-verbal cues, like body language. In his book, What Every BODY Is Saying, Former FBI agent, Joe Navarro, explains common non-verbal cues, and what they mean:
- Facing away: Indicates they are ready to leave and close the conversation.
- Self-soothing behaviors: Actions like crossing the arms, brushing the legs, covering the mouth, and touching the face, indicates someone may feel unhappy or uncomfortable.
- Looking upwards in different directions: This often indicates processing information (contrary to the myth that someone is telling a lie).
- Compressing lips: People tend to compress their lips when something bothers them.
- Hands on the hips, or arms akimbo: This can indicate a person is taking issue with something you said.
Keep in mind that assessing non-verbals doesn’t mean judging the person. Focus more on what that person is transmitting at that moment, so you can better understand what they wish to express.
Refrain from interrupting
We want to stay in that old game of being the right one, that addiction of being the bright star. Becoming a good listener means we have to give that up, to transform to asking questions, listening, and sharing with other people.
Avoid interrupting and keep your questions or comments until after somebody finishes speaking. In some cases it’s worth taking notes so you can let someone speak and reply afterwards. Take a few moments after somebody says something, so you can think about your reply without interrupting.
Suspend judgment
When people express themselves, you may have the first inclination to respond with your opinion—what they should be doing, thinking, or feeling about a situation or idea. This comes from a position of wanting to be right.
This approach only confirms what you know. It shuts the person down because they feel judged or reproached.
We all want to feel right!
It gives us that hit of dopamine, the feel good chemical in the brain. Accepting that we might not know the answer feels uncomfortable. But it can lead us down the path toward connection and creating amazing, innovative ideas.
When it comes to active listening, approach from a neutral standpoint. Before and while somebody speaks, make an effort to check your frame of reference and approach the conversation with a neutral view. You don’t want to let any limited thinking, preconceptions, or predictions interfere with the outcome of the discussion.
Allow people to express their ideas!
Write them down, and don’t let judgment get in the way. Avoid shutting down people with statements like “That was stupid,” even if an idea seems way out of left field or half-baked. You might combine two ideas that are side by side, something you never thought of doing before.
Ask thoughtful questions or encourage people to speak, such as:
- “If you had the answer, how might you approach it?”
- “Share some thoughts. I’d love to know what you were thinking.”
- “This is fascinating. Let’s keep going and see what emerges.”
Keep encouraging each other to push through even to ideas that are unusual. In research and innovation, those ideas initially considered “the worst” can become the most successful.
Use the characteristics of active listening to become a better leader today
Ralph Nichols, considered “the father of the study of listening”, once said, “The most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and be understood.”
The simple act of listening empowers you to meet this need, creating the ideal conditions for mutual success.
Listening skills don’t always feel natural. We have to practice to learn how to listen actively. But when we change the conversation, we change the relationship. We change the culture.
If your workplace culture needs a shift towards better conversations, collaboration, and growth, check out Leadership Bootcamp, an unforgettable group coaching experience.
