There are dozens of things that come to my mind when I think about what is important to do when you are in a management role. However there is one that stands out. It is hard to say if it is the most important (you’ll see that with management skills you cannot easily rank them), but it is definitely one that is often overlooked: Active Listening.
Let ‘s be frank. Companies today need to grow fast, especially if they are a SaaS business. Companies have a lot of competitors and need investments. Showing good results is crucial to add value to their proposition. And to grow fast usually means hiring a lot of people and developing big marketing initiatives that will enlarge their customers’ list. What does this mean if you’re a manager? You’re always running to keep up with the rhythm your company needs. Lots of meetings, product changes, new processes to follow and in the middle of this you still need to run the operations and make sure your team adapts well to all of this. With so much going on, we tend to focus more on passing the information that these changes require than to take time to listen to our people.
Listening, or Active Listening, is one of the key things you should be doing if you’re a manager, no matter the workload you have or the rhythm you’ve been trying to follow, as it will help you and your team face the challenges that are coming. Active Listening, to be practical, means asking more than talking. We may feel like we know our team really well and we know how they are reacting to each situation, but this leads us to assume things that may not be true and we may be creating bigger problems than the ones we already have.
Active Listening helps us understand the reason behind someone’s behaviour and it can be incredibly useful to find out the best way of improving. It can help you deal with someone that is demotivated, stressed, less productive or under performing. And that is why you constantly need to do it to make sure you have a healthy team working alongside you.
How to put this into practice though? Here are a few things you can try:
- What’s on your mind? This question sounds silly, but it is useful if you notice that someone is not well and you don’t really know the reason why. The advantage of this question is that you won’t influence the way the conversation goes as the person can literally bring anything they want to the table. You can use the information the person shared with you to find out if what is on their mind can be the reason for their recent behaviour.
- Ask the question instead of assuming and implying something which may not be true. This is useful for situations where you think you know what is going on, but you should not assume. Example: if you notice someone reacted badly to a change you announced, instead of saying to the person “I noticed you didn’t receive well the changes I announced”, ask “How do you feel about the changes that I announced?”
- “Why?” is your best friend. It will seem like you are in a session with your therapist, but “Why?” is the most useful question when you want to find the root of the issue and also when you are trying to fix it. “Why” will force the person to put into words what are the reasons behind what they think. What will happen is that you will understand the person better, but they will also understand themselves better. Sometimes we feel something and when we need to justify why we feel that way, we realize that we really shouldn’t feel that way because the reason we express is not strong enough. Or, we actually have a valid reason but it is something else unrelated to what is changing. Maybe the person doesn’t mind the change and what is really upsetting them is the fact that they would like to be trained sooner.
- Make statements based on what you’re hearing. it is important that throughout the conversation you also try to validate what you’re hearing to avoid assuming something again and know what to ask next to dig deeper. However, you should not express your opinion or perspective. Remember, you’re just listening. You can say something like “So, what you are saying is that when you are in a meeting and need to express your views, you hold back because you don’t like to be judged, is that right?” Asking the question this way helps you to be sure that you interpreted things correctly and gives the opportunity to the person to reflect more as maybe they said that was the reason, but now that someone else said it, it doesn’t really make sense.
- Try to lead the conversation to an end, but don’t impose the end. This is the most difficult thing about Active Listening. You want the other person to realize something or understand something, but you can’t tell them. You need to let them come to that conclusion themselves. It is important to let the person be the one owning the actions coming out of that meeting and it is much easier if the actions were proposed by them. So, in order to do this, instead of telling the person what to do, ask them what they want to do about it. Of course, sometimes the person may not know what is best. In these situations you can always give the person some options and ask which one they prefer. This way they are, at least, picking the one they like more and owning that responsibility.
There is a lot more to write about Active Listening, but this post is already long and I am sure I will write about it again. I would just like to end by saying that Active Listening is not useful just for understanding your employees and making them understand themselves. If you take the effort to really listen to them, you’ll earn their trust, they’ll know you got their perspective, they will feel heard and they will listen to you a lot more as well. So, if you want to be listened to, be sure you listen first and always.
André Vidal 