Listening is powerful. So why do we limit it?
“You’re forgetting that the act of listening is healing. So few people have actually been genuinely listened to, that when they are finally heard they start to heal.”
So said my mentor in a recent conversation. I had expressed frustration at my inability to provide insights to a client who was talking about all the factors beyond their control and how helpless they felt. He pointed out I had fallen into the trap of valuing answers over the act of listening itself, and had likely stopped listening enough to be helpful.
It’s easy to think of listening as a sideshow. But in communication, it’s the main event. When we listen, we attune ourselves to someone, we validate them with our attention, and we invite them to express themselves fully—leading to better communication and a stronger relationship. It’s a skill that leaders can count on to immediately improve their leadership. Because when done well, it reveals, and it heals.
Listening reveals and heals
Listening reveals what is actually true, as opposed to what is superficially said, or what you might be projecting onto the speaker. There is so much people reveal, even when they are not conscious of doing so. A leader who is good at listening learns the truth that is often concealed because of status dynamics and fear. They may detect hidden frustration, or ambivalence about a direction. They may uncover hidden ideas. The leaders who listen more than tell, the ones who walk the corridors asking “what are you working on?” or ask questions like “What’s really going on? What am I blind to?” are the ones I would trust to actually lead their organizations better than the ones who remain confident in their certainties.
Listening also heals because it enables the teller to experience their self-worth. It’s a matter of survival for us as social beings to be validated and respected by others. There is nothing worse than being ignored, avoided, ostracized—our internal threat system interprets social rejection to be as dangerous as a physical attack. When you listen to someone you recognize them as a valuable human being, worthy of love. Think of the angry customer who just wants to be heard. Or the direct report who is struggling with pandemic-induced stress and is afraid to express what they are going through. At a bigger scale, think of how the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa helped heal the wounds of apartheid by bearing witness and listening to countless stories from victims and perpetrators.
Why we limit our listening
There’s ample evidence that we listen a lot less than would be beneficial—in romantic relationships, at work, in meetings. The growth of the talk therapy industry is evidence enough that not enough people are listening to each other! So if listening is so beneficial then why do we limit it so much? After all, we’re born as listeners. All we can do in our first years is listen. Which means that somehow, over time, we learned to limit our listening.
We learned three falsehoods in particular:
1 | We learned to think that listening is passive so we switch off our attention when we should switch it on
One way we underrate listening is through the conventional thinking that listening is passive, and the listener must go on mute and simply “receive”. Think of the phrases “listen, and do as you’re told!” or “sit still and listen”.
As my colleague Laura puts it, “There's a false idea that listening resides in the ears. We're taught from a young age that to be a good listener means to be quiet so as to hear another speaking. Many modern preschools have incorporated other body parts into lessons on listening (e.g., calm hands, focused eyes), yet even they still fall short. They still present listening as a largely passive experience, when in reality, it is anything but.”
Thinking of listening as passive means we act to listen by switching off our attention, instead of switching it on.
My experience of good listening is as an attentive, full body event. If it’s a video call, or an in-person meeting (remember those?), I’m observing what is happening to someone physically as they talk. How is their energy? But I’m also observing my own body. If I’m fidgety, is it because I’m anxious or bored? If so, what does that reveal to me that I can work with? What am I revealing to the speaker? I’m also paying attention to the tone of their voice—especially on the phone—and the changes in tone and cadence, and the words they use. Why did they just speed up? What were they rushing away from? What did they mean by that word? Why did their voice drop? I will ask questions, and interrupt where necessary to encourage or clarify.
So, far from being passive, listening is active, energetic, mindful.
2 | We learned to think listening exists to produce answers. But questions are more valuable.
This was the mistake I made. You can't keep track of a speaker’s cues while also planning your response. But our culture values answers and “getting things done”. So people think that to be a good listener is to have an answer ready, and they start planning ahead and stop actually listening. But good listening is about questions, not answers.
Not any kind of questions, though. Many people pretend to listen by asking questions that are really just opinions.
Here’s an example: “Why didn’t you say something?” is an opinion disguised as a question. The opinion is “you should have said something”. Another one: “Aren’t you going to call him?”. The opinion is “I think you should call him”.
Presumptive questions will show you up as a teller full of answers, not a listener. As a fun little exercise, reflect on a few presumptive questions you have asked recently, or heard recently, and write them down.
Good listening questions do not include an opinion or a concealed agenda. Instead they elicit insight for the speaker and are sincerely meant to help them or the relationship as a whole. Organizational scholar Edgar Schein has more to say on this in his lovely book, Humble Inquiry, in which he argues that we can improve communication and listening by asking questions that maximize our curiosity and interest in the other person, and minimize biases and preconceptions.
3 | We learned to think that higher status means telling more than listening—but that’s a trap.
Humans are exquisitely sensitive to status, and in most cultures, people who see themselves as higher status are tellers and lower status people are listeners. Just think who tends to hog the conversation. It’s the higher ranks in management. It’s the general to his or her subordinates. It’s cultural elites who decide what’s newsworthy. It’s parents who tell their children vs listen to them. It’s men who indulge in “mansplaining”—acting on their perception that they have higher gender status. (Conjuring that New Yorker cartoon where a man interrupts a woman professional by saying: “let me interrupt your expertise with my confidence”).
This status orientation provokes leaders to pretend they have answers when they’d often be better off asking questions. It causes lower status people to keep their mouths shut when they have something really important to say. What a trap! It’s naive to pretend status doesn’t exist, so my point is that we have to become more conscious of the dynamics so we see where we limit our listening in counterproductive ways. The burden is on leaders to make more effort to interfere with the traditional cultural script of “telling” as a higher status activity by modeling and inviting more listening. So…
How to listen better
We can all become more powerful communicators and leaders by becoming better listeners. Doing so starts by realizing that we learned to limit our listening. And that we can therefore learn to un-limit it. Which in this era—of increasing interdependence, collaborative knowledge work, and complex situational teamwork—is more vital than ever.
It’s quite straightforward. And like any skill, we get better with practice. A good starting point is our CARE framework. The brilliant Laura Kurtz PhD explains it in this brief video.
Here’s to unlocking the power of listening.
With love,
Tom