New Leader Tuesday—The Power of Deliberate Listening

The New Leader Tuesday series is dedicated to helping first-time, early career and even experienced professionals with a “beginner’s mind” progress on their journey towards effective leadership.

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Effective leaders listen. Carefully. Deliberately.

Listening is in short supply in this noisy, interruption driven world, yet it’s critical for leadership success at every level.

4 Ways Your Deliberate Listening Strengthens Your Performance as a Leader:

1. Listening…truly paying attention conveys respect to those interacting with you. Your leadership success is dependent upon you building credibility, and there’s no better way to earn credibility than to genuinely pay attention to and value the input from your team members.

2. Listening carefully helps you find their gaps. Deliberate listeners gain insights into how people think, how complete their solutions are and even where their developmental needs are.

3. Listening carefully helps you find your gaps. Tune out the extraneous noise and tune in to the questions and concerns of your team members, and you’ll identify areas where you need to offer clarity and strengthen or change your approach to communicating and managing.

4. Deliberate listening helps you discover intent. Most topics in the workplace and most squabbles are focused on positions…not interests. Instead of responding to positions “I want” issues, ask questions until you discern the interests behind the positions. Armed with an understanding of an individuals goals or real interests, you can then work to design mutually agreeable solutions that might be very different from the “I want” that was put forward.

6 Ideas to Help Strengthen Your Deliberate Listening Immediately:

1. Kill the multi-tasking during conversations. You cannot do it and communicate effectively. Put down the device. Better yet, put it away.

2. When someone approaches you, remind yourself to FOCUS. As simple as it sounds, it’ takes effort to move from what you were doing to focusing on another individual. Use a simple technique and as someone approaches you, simply trigger a reminder to focus. And then do it.

3. Stop that annoying habit of interrupting or completing sentences. Let people finish their thoughts. You’re not listening if you’re interrupting.

4. Strive to minimize planning your own response while someone is talking. Easier said than done! This takes deliberate effort. We all do this…and it detracts from the communication exchange. While it’s a simple lesson, I will often ask groups to pair off in twos and have a conversation. The only rule is that each participant must start their sentence with the last word that the other participant used. (Try it for 3 minutes with someone. Aside from laughing yourself silly, it will make a point.) What you learn is that you have to clear your mind, focus solely on the message coming from the giver and then once you’ve gained their final word, construct your message.

5. Don’t be afraid of the dead air in conversations. It’s not dead…it’s valuable processing time. I will often pause to construct my thoughts and one professional I know has an annoying habit of assuming this is his cue to talk. It’s not. It’s at that point that he should recognize I’m searching for a means to clearly convey a point and he should redouble his focus.

6. Ask people to assess your skills as a communicator and as a listener. I encourage managers to regularly poll their team members on different components of their communication skills, including their use of constructive and positive feedback, their listening effectiveness and their overall verbal and non-verbal skills. If it’s an awkward discussion, create a survey and hand it out seeking anonymous input.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

I’m convinced that strengthening your active listening effectiveness takes deliberate effort, particularly in our always-on, constantly connected device-filled world. Listening is a key part of the software of leadership success.

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More Professional Development Reads from Art Petty:

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For more ideas on professional development-one sound bite at a time, check out Art’s latest book: Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development.