Listening in leadership

Leadership training has emerged to become a mandatory exercise for someone who is just stepping into the fraternity of leaders and aspires to sit at the high table. Leadership courses revolve primarily around different leadership styles, theories of motivation, team building etc. But one of the key skills every leader needs to develop and master is the art of listening.

Leaders not only need to listen efficiently but they also need to listen mindfully. What’s the difference? Leaders need to listen to not only what is said but they also need to pay attention to what’s NOT said. In addition to what is being said or reported, they need to pay attention to the body language of their team members to really understand the situation as a whole.

Listening in interpersonal skills

We are aware of how important it is to build strong relationships with our stakeholders to ensure success in our personal and professional endeavours. The communication pyramid is a very powerful framework to help people work on their interpersonal skills in a focussed manner. The foundation stone of this pyramid is ‘trust’. But how does listening help build trust?

When we listen to someone intently, we understand them at a deeper level. It builds confidence in them that we genuinely care. Hence, they find it easier to confide and give information that may be crucial to the project at hand. Studies show that active mindful listening, without bias, helps build positive and long -lasting relationships. Many successful sales people would agree that they could clinch that ‘important’ deal only when they could establish a genuine connection with the client.

Listening: The understated rocket science

It’s a lazy Sunday morning, and I’m sipping my morning coffee, more out of habit, than need. I reach out for my newspaper and find several local advertising pamphlets promoting camps and classes for kids - yoga, brain training, communication, personality development, storytelling, drama and theatre for expression etc.

While I glanced through each of these, one thing became increasingly obvious – the world has understood that exemplary communication skill was indispensable to becoming successful. It had emerged as the one thing everyone wanted to master.

We have been giving so much importance on learning how to talk well, and be an assertive communicator etc, but how much emphasis have we given to listening skills? We all know that listening is an integral part of communication. However, here’s the real question – Is listening just a part or should it be one of the most important pillars of soft skills?

Listening, as a term, has well been underrated for years, constrained by its literal meaning of attentive hearing. There may be a need to redefine this term to encompass the entire spectrum of associated activities that makes it such an inevitable skill to acquire.

In the current context, listening is not just about hearing what’s said attentively to ensure one has a factually correct understanding but it also includes associated subjective variables like comprehension of what’s been communicated in association with the underlying context, envision the narration, reading the body language of the speaker to be able to understand nuances and subtleties. In short, grasping what’s communicated, not only in terms of factual content, but also emotions. This is probably why it should receive the status of a complex skill that needs dedicated training.

With this evolved meaning to the term Listening, its not difficult to agree how listening ties back to almost all the soft skills that we aspire to hone and master.