How Listening Shapes Success: Three Approaches to Try Today

The most effective people I have worked with – the people who can develop strong relationships, make interesting and powerful offers, and provide the most insightful view of a situation – all share the quality of being exceptional at listening.

Listening is not a passive act. It is a skill for producing meaningful interpretations about the world, one which can be developed and refined. It means going beyond the words people are saying and understanding their motivation for saying it, the pressures and goals that have led them to that point, the wider context of their world – their career, family, or nationality.

Many people are really only interested in the world to the extent that it conforms to what they know about it. Not knowing is difficult, confusion is uncomfortable, and as we get older the temptation always is to return to the comfort of our own experiences – what we know makes sense. People who are great listeners take a different stand. They embrace the world as something that is strange and mysterious, and commit to come away from every conversation with something new – a piece of learning from another person that enriches their understanding of the world.

Below are three kinds of listening I recommend you be aware of and observe in yourself and others.

Listening for Agreement

In many of the organisations we work in we find people are merely listening for agreement. This is the most common mode of listening, and the most limiting. It means listening for what confirms your existing views – what you already know. In an environment where this is pervasive, challenges to the status quo are filtered out before they can be considered. Ways of working become entrenched. Meetings are elaborate box ticking exercises rather than conversations for possibility or commitment. Innovation is interpreted as foolhardy, unnecessary, or a threat. The first step in a major transformation often requires us to challenge this kind of listening – to get people in shape to accept that they may be blind to interpretations of the world that can be valuable to them.

Listening for Concerns

We’ve all come across the hackneyed actor’s line – “What’s my character’s motivation?” The reality of the world is that speakers are often unwilling or unable to share their real motivations and worries. Even when a speaker feels they are being clear, differences in culture or background can prevent them from being heard properly – the unfortunate fate of the Mars Climate Orbiter, destroyed as a result of two teams mixing up imperial and metric units, comes to mind.

The example I always draw on to explain listening for concerns comes from a piece of work we did in a call centre supporting an energy provider. We had the team listen to a recording of an elderly lady who had phoned in to check if her bill was correct. The agent responded that it was and closed out the call. He answered her question but totally missed her underlying concern. She was not worried about the accuracy of their billing process. She was worried because the bill was way in excess of what she normally expected to pay. Moreover, she had no idea why the bill was so high, so a similar charge next month seemed likely. If this was her new normal, then she wouldn’t be able to afford the heating on during winter. We called the customer back and arranged for a service engineer to visit her house. The service resolved her issue, turning a moment of real distress for the customer into a moment of appreciation.

Listening for Difference

We all have had moments in a conversation where we have listened to something unexpected, challenging, or bizarre. The temptation often is to discount these moments as irrelevant. Listening for difference means accepting our own biases as a listener, and paying special attention to these moments of dissonance in a conversation that cause us confusion. Exploring what is different about the world of the speaker often points us to a difference in values. When we understand that difference well, we can build a new kind of relationship that would have been hidden to us previously.

We came across this phenomenon on a project for an insurance provider. Underwriters are highly analytical thinkers who took great pride in the detail of their work. Brokers are social networkers who value relationships. As a result of these differences in personality and outlook, two entrenched camps had emerged. Underwriters had formed a view that brokers did not appreciate their work – they just wanted the lowest prices. Brokers thought the underwriters were arrogant and inflexible, and – crucially – had no real interest in helping explain their products to customers. What the underwriters had missed was that it didn’t matter how ingenuous their offer was if the broker could not explain it to the customer.

We put in place a promise that underwriters would call brokers within 24 hours of an enquiry and trained the underwriters to discuss the offers available based on the way friends would talk to each other. The result was extraordinary – a 30% increase in revenue. Not only that, but we saw a dramatic shift from mutual frustration to mutual admiration in the relationship between brokers and underwriters.

Conclusion

Today’s world changes at a faster pace than yesterday’s. It is becoming more polarised, and more entrenched. The network of stakeholders we need to navigate to deliver work is more complicated. In this world, the temptation becomes to listen for agreement. Doing so provides a sense of stability, reduces complexity, and avoids the need to deal with certain challenging questions.

However, by the same token, those people who choose to embrace the challenge and discomfort of listening well will find they develop a stronger network of relationships, a deeper insight into the world around them, and a vision for the future that others can’t see. The reward is more than just a strategic advantage – it is a more meaningful and worthwhile way to engage with the world.