Seven ways that listening transforms the art of leadership
This is the first in a three-part blog focusing on the impact of listening on leadership competence. The second in the series highlights ‘the seven leadership listening styles’ and the final offering focuses on ‘seven things that listening reveals about your leadership brand’.
I have ultimate respect for those who have mastered the art of listening. When the orientation of leadership is built on a commitment to listen to others, the benefits are immeasurable. Those who adopt a listening posture can expect to improve their judgement, grow in discernment and significantly enhance their decision-making competencies. That is not to say that listening is easy. On the contrary, it requires patience, confidence, self-denial and no small amount of humility.
So, here are seven ways that listening transforms the art of leadership.
1. Empowers continuous learning
Fundamentally, listening is not just a method of gathering information, but more importantly a posture that facilitates continuous learning. Therefore, when leaders listen, they do so intentionally, out of intellectual curiosity and compulsion. The systematic acquisition of knowledge ensures that leaders can develop both depth and breadth. When knowledge is interrogated, it opens the way to understanding and when understanding is tested it produces realisation. When leaders learn, it is because listening enables them to adopt and maintain, a forward leaning stance.
2. Fine-tunes critical thinking and reasoning capabilities
Listening is the art of harnessing intellectual and analytical competencies. It stands to reason that when leaders are cultured and practiced in listening, they expand the range of tools that are available to them for the purposes of decision-making. Look at it this way, by itself a decision is a product. The inputs that shape and inform that product are reasoning, logic, analysis and judgement. It is the rhythm and routine of listening, that exercises those capabilities and ensures that they can be applied with surgical sharpness. This in turn ensures that leaders can quickly eliminate unnecessary information and prioritise only those facts of the most critical importance.
3. Establishes predictability
At its best, listening builds relationship. When relationships are built on predictable routines, this establishes both confidence and trust. This is because, if a pattern of behaviour shows what someone has done in the past, it is not unreasonable to assume that they will do so again in future. To the extent that leaders listen with intentionality and integrity, their relationships are likely to produce influence. Therefore, listening can create a conducive climate for the establishment of meaningful interactions between those who want to speak and those who need to hear.
4. Enables leaders to operate outside of the echo chamber
One of the most impactful effects of listening is that it removes leaders from the easy comfort and hidden danger of the ‘echo chamber’. When leaders are inclined to associate solely with those who share their predispositions and biases, they insulate themselves from those who do not. By contrast, listening widens access to knowledge, opinion and perspectives. This in turn tests thinking and in the context of decision-making can expose leaders to new information that they may not have previously considered, including that which could contradict as well as corroborate preconceived ideas.
5. Expands leadership vocabulary
Anyone who associates with those they highly esteem, will likely attest that the more time they spend with them, the more they adopt the language, phraseology and even affect, of those individuals. In the same way, when a leader listens to those with greater knowledge or a more varied life experience, the better informed and more rounded their perspectives are likely to be. To that extent, listening helps leaders to widen their vocabulary in a way that will help them to navigate complexity and ambiguity, articulate compelling narratives and communicate more effectively to a wider range of audiences.
6. Increases weight-bearing capability
A decision to listen suggests a willingness to be accountable to others. It shows that even if those who listen are afraid of challenge, scrutiny and examination, they are still prepared to subject themselves to it, no matter how painful it may be. Exposing oneself to the wanton brutality of naysayers, critics and sceptics, is not for the faint-hearted. Yet, there is nothing quite like the experience of being ‘roughed up’, to strengthen and condition the intellectual, psychological and emotional weight bearing capabilities of leadership. This is because, listening is not just a process, it is an act of submission.
7. Promotes objectivity over subjectivity
When people speak about themselves, they project an image, but when they listen to what others say about them, the reality of that ‘image’ will be confirmed or challenged. Therefore, the capacity to listen empowers you to know what others really think of you, separate from what you think of yourself. For leaders, it is this balanced view that mitigates against the dangers of self-deception, where leaders value their subjective view more that the objective opinions of others. No leader can expect to succeed without a healthy dose of reflective feedback, served generously by those encouraged and empowered to speak as they find.
On the grand scale of leadership competencies, you won’t often find listening at or near the top. Yet, without a well-honed capacity for listening, the sensory and reasoning capabilities of a leader are at best significantly impaired and at worst, completely disabled. Once the capability to listen is diminished, so too is the capacity for good judgement and wise decision-making. Remove those critical capabilities from the equation and leadership becomes dysfunctional. The corollary of the above is as follows: to be effective, leaders need to listen more and talk less.
