| “Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.”
–Dr Karl Menninger, Psychiatrist and Author |
One of my clients asked me for some quick tools to improve his coaching. What was my response? I advised him to just listen.
Listening is the first step and sometimes the only step you need to take. Engaged listening builds trust and understanding. When you listen well, you’ll more easily find questions to guide the conversation productively. And the people you listen to will understand themselves better.
How to Listen Effectively
When you listen to your staff, what are you really doing?
Listening effectively is a neat mental trick where you open your thinking to someone else’s viewpoint. As you listen you have a chance to delve into their world and see it as they do. It is the only way to learn about another person. Listening is our interface with the thoughts of others.
As you listen to their viewpoint, you must be careful to really hear it and not judge it. If your mind is clouded with thoughts about ‘what they should do’ or ‘how they are wrong’, you will miss the reality of their current thinking.
Of course if your mind is occupied by any other thoughts at all you will miss a portion of what they say. Part of the trick is to keep your mind still and open, focusing on the present.
Once you’ve heard their point of view as they explain it, you can compare it to your own viewpoint or another viewpoint. By listening in this way, you’ll immediately notice what doesn’t make sense, what’s missing from the story or what you are curious about. As long as you maintain an open, non-judgmental attitude, a next step for the conversation will become clear to you, either in the form of a question, or in a statement you make in order to clarify their thinking.
For example, you may not really understand what they mean. So you can ask them to explain further.
Being Aware of Assumptions as You Listen
The key to success in this process is to be aware of your own and your coachee’s assumptions and mental frameworks.
Lets look at an example. Say you have a team member Nancy who is very blunt in her communications and who often upsets you with her direct pronouncements. If your other team member George says “I don’t like working with Nancy”, you could easily assume that he is bothered by her bluntness. But by making this assumption you could be missing a big opportunity.
For one thing you could be wrong. Maybe George isn’t bothered very much by her bluntness. If that’s the case, you will misunderstand George and completely miss the chance to coach him. You might give him some advice on how to handle her bluntness. If he’s eager to please you, or if he hasn’t analyzed his own reactions, he may assume her bluntness really is the problem. Or he may go along with what you say but feel dissatisfied. The chance to raise his awareness and empower him to think of his own solutions would be lost.
On the other hand, even if you are correct about what bothers George about Nancy, you will have missed the chance to allow George to clarify TO HIMSELF what he means.
Our feelings about other people are complex. It is often very useful to articulate those feelings so that we can understand ourselves better. There could be other aspects to his feelings that are the source of other solutions. But without having the conversation, neither of you will ever know. And George will not learn to think through these situations for himself. George will feel less committed to any solutions he decides to implement.
Listening Well Leads to Good Questions
Another advantage of listening with an awareness of mental frameworks and assumptions is that you will become aware of a host of alternative ways of thinking about the problem, each one leading to different questions and different potential resolutions. There are probably dozens of assumptions implicit in George’s simple statement about Nancy. For example, we are assuming that it is a problem that he doesn’t like working with Nancy. What else are we assuming?
Do you believe that listening well leads to good questions? Maybe that’s not true for you. Would you be willing to test the assumption?
If yes, then try your best to focus on listening openly, without judgment, while keeping your awareness on mental frameworks and assumptions. You can practice your listening with anyone around you. Rather than trying to coach, just listen and see what questions come to mind and how well they move the conversation forward productively.
Next month’s article will describe some of the barriers to effective listening and suggest some specific solutions. So please send me a list of what stops you from listening well or any questions or challenges you have about listening. I’ll write next month with specific recommendations for you.