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CHAPTER 3

THE TRANSFORMATIONAL IMPACT OF ACTIVE LISTENING

Colin D. Smith

Active Listening is widely acknowledged by top leaders and coaches as being fundamental to their business and personal success. It is a skill that can be learned and embodied into the way we lead, manage and coach. When our clients, colleagues and employees feel deeply heard, they will be more willing to share their deepest challenges, needs and concerns. As a result, the business will gain more engaged, motivated and higher performing individuals and teams, transforming into improved results.

Covered in this chapter

• How the Relationship Journey builds trust, engagement and stronger personal relationships with your peers, employees, clients and suppliers, and especially those closest to you

• The 7 steps on how to actively listen to your clients

• The difference between hearing and listening

• How trust is built step by step

• How to create a safe place and how to use it with good intention

• The 12 elements of Active Listening

• The value of appreciation

• Simple Active Listening tips and exercises to include in your practice

INTRODUCTION

Why Active Listening?

Why is Active Listening so important, and why this chapter? Active Listening is at the heart of achieving transformational change with our coaching clients, as well as being the foundation of all our relationships, both at work and personally. A coach who is able to listen effectively builds deep levels of rapport and presence with a client and is able to tease out and work with the deeper elements that make sustainable change possible. These include a client’s beliefs, values, emotions, ways of being, and identity.

The journey within, therefore, begins with focusing one’s conscious attention sufficiently to be able to have a meaningful conversation. The key to this is to build trust through listening and holding a clear positive intention.

Active Listening is vital and life changing and is the starting point for:

• Developing more meaningful relationships

• Building deeper connections with your clients

• Enabling clients to express themselves more freely

• Giving clients space and time for more creative and original thinking

• Supporting clients to experience greater self-awareness, confidence and presence.

We are not trained to listen

We listen more than any other mode of communication. We listen 45% of the time compared to writing 9%, reading 16%, and speaking 30%. Yet we have little or no formal training in listening, that is, how to listen effectively, what to listen for, and the benefits of listening in business and in our everyday relationships.

We speak and think at different speeds

We speak at around 125 words per minute (wpm), yet we can think at around 450 wpm. This means that for the listener, we have the capacity to hear everything the speaker is saying and have the bandwidth to think of many other things. This is one of the reasons we listen so poorly: we get distracted.

For the speaker, they too are thinking at 450 wpm, yet can only speak their words at 125 wpm, which means their first words spoken are most likely to be from the top of their mind. If the speaker is able to pause and not be interrupted they will continue speaking. It is only then that their words will come from a deeper part of their thinking.

Listening does not mean counselling

Listening has always had a big part to play in counselling and psychotherapy. In business, however, listening is more often seen as a ‘soft skill,’ a ‘nice to have’ or even something to quietly smile about to ourselves. After all, where is the profit in listening?

It is, however, becoming increasingly accepted that listening is a crucial skill for everyone, especially leaders and coaches.

By adding listening to your repertoire of skills, you will notice how it profoundly affects all those around you. When they feel heard, you will notice their increased attention, openness and willingness to bring their best thinking to meetings where previously they had remained quiet.

Furthermore, as people feel more open and willing to share their feelings and concerns, the impact is felt across the business, e.g. projects run on time and within budget, safety issues and concerns are raised earlier, new ideas are more frequent, creativity and innovation are increased, and open sharing becomes the way.

Overall, you will notice an improvement in individual and team performance.

Research highlights the importance of listening

The global sales training company, Huthwaite, completed an international survey in 2016 that identified customers’ attitudes towards sales teams and what they considered most important. Listening scored 73%, second only to product knowledge at 79%.¹

A recent CFA (Chartered Financial Analysts) survey also showed that the most useful consulting skill was listening 54%, followed by presenting at 15%.²

When was the last time you felt really listened to?

For many people, this is not an easy question to answer. In considering our answer, we run through the many and varied conversations that we have had, and we suddenly realise that most of the time we didn’t really feel heard or understood.

As we think more deeply, we are only able to find one or two occasions where we did feel heard, and, typically, it evokes a positive feeling within us.

In asking a group, ‘Raise your arm if you believe you are a better than average listener?’ usually, everyone raises their arm. When then asked, ‘Keep your arm raised if anyone has said, “Thank you for listening”, in the last two weeks.’ The majority will take them down.

Hearing or listening?

Let’s look at the meaning of hearing and why it is fundamentally different from listening.

• ‘We hear from’: we don’t have to do anything to hear the speaker. Hearing is passive. It is an ability the majority of us have and happens without our needing to think. For example, if someone calls your name out across a noisy room, you will hear it. If a train passes whilst you are sleeping, you will hear it, until you get used to it. Hearing, primarily, keeps us safe.

• ‘We listen to’: we have to choose to listen to the person speaking. Listening is active and participative, yet it looks like you are doing nothing. We don’t talk over people, we don’t interrupt, we don’t finish off the speaker’s sentences. Instead we patiently allow people to finish what they wish to say and we ask questions and summarise what they say to ensure we understand them. This clearly demonstrates to the speaker they are being heard.

When a speaker feels they are being heard, they are more likely to like and trust the person listening.

THE RELATIONSHIP JOURNEY

The Relationship Journey is a series of steps, along with the ongoing awareness of the intention we are holding throughout the journey. These steps apply whether the relationship is professional or personal.

Figure 3.1: The Relationship Journey

Intention

In Figure 3.1, intention is shown alongside the steps on the Relationship Journey because it is present at all times. Intention is a conscious choice and may be unseen and unheard. In the context of coaching, however, it is important to let your client know your intention, honestly and clearly, at each stage of the coaching and precisely what is expected of them, as this will facilitate building a trusting and effective relationship between you. This, in turn, facilitates more effective outcomes from the coaching as there will be more openness and less resistance from the client.

Trust

On the right-hand side of the Relationship Journey is trust. Building trust is important for leaders and coaches. It can take time to achieve this, and yet it can be broken in an instant through lack of attention, or through focusing on what we want and not on the needs of the client. Perhaps too there may be a need to get results quickly and therefore some people inadvertently rush through the stages of the relationship before rapport is truly built.

Great leaders, as well as great coaches, who create high levels of followership, are known to be experts at engaging with others and actively listening to them. In this way, they build highly effective trusting relationships and hence followership.

For further information, see Chapter 2: ‘Take the Plunge and Dive Deeper using Transactional Analysis’ by Shirley Attenborough, in which she references the Adult Ego State and its relation to non-judgement.

THE RELATIONSHIP JOURNEY: THE 7 STEPS

1. Preparation: understanding the logistics

Top performers would not dream of just ‘turning up’ to an event or a job interview, hoping to be successful by just ‘winging’ it. Yet many of us are so time pressured that sometimes we just ‘turn up’ with insufficient preparation.

Whatever the situation, before you arrive, consider

• Your audience: is it one-to-one, a board, a team, or a large group?

• What is your outcome and purpose of the meeting?

• The conversation: is it formal, informal, feedback, or learning?

• The location: clients need the space to relax and feel comfortable, safe and secure. Does the space show that they matter to you and that you care?

• The environment: is it appropriate for the conversation, could there be interruptions, could it be too noisy, too quiet, and will it be suitable if emotions arise?

• The style: sitting, standing or walking whilst talking and listening?

• What else might be required by the client or those in the meeting?