Are you a good listener? Most people like to think they are. But next time you are in a conversation with someone try paying attention to how you are listening. Notice how your mind is cluttered with all sorts of things other than what the speaker is telling you. It’s very easy to be preoccupied with something else: perhaps you find yourself preparing to rebut what the speaker has just said, or maybe you are half-focused on a solution to the speaker’s problem. Or are you are distracted because you are running late for your next meeting?
Even if you can suspend your judgement and prevent your mind from wandering, listening is still difficult because listening is about being able to understand someone and often people don’t (or can’t) say what is really on their mind. I’m reminded of this quote attributed in jest by The Economist to master obstructionist ‘wordsworth’ Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the board of the US Federal Reserve:
I know you believe you understand what you think I said. But I am not sure you realise that what you heard is not what I meant.
– misattributed to Alan Greenspan
In executive coaching – indeed for all types of coaching – listening is critical and good coaches train themselves to be better listeners. Good listeners – whether executive coaches, bosses or subordinates, spouses or partners, parents, teachers or children – all have the following characteristics:
- Good listeners suspend judgement and their personal prejudices. It’s not that they don’t have a view; it’s just that they don’t let it get in the way of listening to the speaker.
- Good listeners are not defensive and do not feel compelled to justify themselves. This means they put their ego away and don’t allow negative, critical or blaming comments interfere with listening to the meaning behind what the speaker is saying.
- Good listeners can identify with the speaker and be empathetic but they don’t divert the speaker’s attention towards their own issues or get dragged into a ‘me too’ mutual appreciation discussion.
- Good listeners hold back on giving advice. A good listener waits until he has really understood the speaker before offering advice – if at all. It’s easy to fall into the trap of providing advice when none is wanted.
As management consultant, Peter Drucker once said:
The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.
– Peter Drucker
Let’s go ontological!
So let’s kick this up a bit and go ‘ontological’ to learn about some second-order learning. Listening is not just an auditory phenomenon of receiving a transmitted sound. Ontologically, listening is a continuous process of interpretation. Sometimes this interpretation is noticeable to us but often it is buried in pre-conscious brain processing, part of a bundle of thoughts, images, feelings, biases and other clutter like I mentioned in the first paragraph of this article.
An indispensable competence in second-order learning is to be able to listen to our listening. This is about paying attention to those silent conversations we are having with ourselves about the things going on in our worlds.
A few years ago I was working with the regional head of a luxury consumer product company. Jacques (not his real name) is a lively and very entrepreneurial leader who had driven this business to something like US$400 million sales across Asia. Now he had been tasked with taking this to US$1 billion. The business had reached a tipping point where his entrepreneurial style which had been so useful before was now getting in the way with his ability to stabilise the business and integrate it more seamlessly with what the New York head office required. I was helping Jacques with a number of communication challenges connected with this.
I shared the concept of ‘listening to your listening’ with Jacques and he loved it. He described his work ‘as conversations with others to get things done’. He painted a vivid image of these conversations being performed on a stage in a theatre with all the various actors (stakeholders). As a newly minted second-order learner, Jacques realised that he could go up onto the theatre balcony and watch himself performing on that stage. This was his analogy for listening to his listening.
But what I assess was a massive insight for him was his realisation that when he was having a difficult conversation with his boss, he could invite his boss up to the balcony with him. Brilliant! Why not have a conversation with the boss about their respective interpretations of what they were communicating about? Such a powerful way to cut through some of the fog of unspoken communication – by having a conversation about what isn’t being said.
So when you hear your coach saying something like ‘What I’m hearing is’ it’s probably code for (and I’m going to mangle that Greenspan quote): ‘I think I understand what you said. But I realise that I have my own set of interpretations and listenings so I am not 100% sure that what I heard is what you meant. I’d like to play it back to you so I can check whether I understood.’
There’s a lot more to listening than this but paying attention to yourself when you are paying attention to the speaker is a good place to start. It’s hard work but comes with training and practice.
I’d love to hear what you have to say about your listening experiences. Please use the comments section below!
[This is a substantial re-write of an article I wrote in 2008 about listening. I wrote it when I was first training to become a coach but a lot has happened on my learning journey since then so I have updated it to incorporate some ontological principles and to reference a client case.]
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