Being a good listener isn’t innate, it’s a meta-skill we can learn and practice

Next time you’re listening to someone pitch or someone present an idea, ask yourself this: are you awarding points for content or style? Is your vote won by the presenter or lost by the presentation? What are you actually listening to and being influenced by?

It’s a question I think about often, with a working life that frequently involves deciding who will and won’t get grant funding. I know I’ve been guilty of prizing surface-level over substance in the past. And I’ve definitely seen lots of others do the same. “The tech is great, but they need a charismatic CEO” is the sort of thing I’m used to hearing in decision meetings.?

It’s not just that judging panels can be too easily swayed by a confident pitch. Its own members can have the same effect, anchoring the conclusion of hours worth of discussion with their initial, often entirely instinctive, response. Like returning to the first shop you visited to buy something, it’s often hard to stop a group reverting to where it started as it reaches an important decision.?

These are two sides of the same problem: our collective inability to listen – to ourselves, to other people, and to what is really being said.

Listening is something everyone tends to think they can do well, because we have always done it, and because we spend so much of our time doing it (or at least we think we do). Telling someone they need to learn how to listen invites the same response as if you had suggested they were walking wrong, or could be tying their shoelaces more efficiently.?

But it is the ubiquity of our need to listen, at work and at home, that makes it a skill that cannot be treated so lightly. HBR wrote about this back in 1957, after top executives of a major manufacturing plant in Chicago were asked the role that listening plays in their work “I had never thought of listening as an important subject by itself,” said one participant. “But now that I am aware of it, I think that perhaps 80% of my work depends on my listening to someone, or on someone else listening to me.”

If only more people had heard this.?

Over six decades later, our working lives remain full of miscommunication, misunderstanding and disagreements that arise from the straightforward inability of small groups of people to listen to each other. A project fails if its team has not collectively understood and agreed what they are trying to achieve. A customer is lost if their real needs have not been listened to, interpreted and acted upon. Problems arise when people leave a meeting believing others have agreed to something without checking that they did. We’re good at hearing what we want or expect to; less so at actually listening to what is happening around us.?

Becoming a better listener

We may believe ourselves to be natural-born listeners, but listening properly is deeply counter-cultural, especially at work. We are hard-wired to believe that the rewards flow to those who can elegantly articulate an argument, win a debate and carry the room with them. None of which, you might notice, actually involves any listening.?

These biases encourage us to over-index style and gloss over substance: averting difficult issues rather than digging into them. Outside the meeting room, the same tendency to embrace the superficial encourages an emphasis on tangible outputs (the need to deliver a report by such-and-such deadline) over complex intangibles – the knotty problems whose resolution is key to success, and which require good listeners to solve.

Listening is a skill, one that has to be learned before it can be used effectively.?

One particularly helpful approach is the three ‘levels of listening’:?

1. Listen with the intention to respond, mostly to the voice inside your own head, preparing your part?
2. Listen with focus on the person speaking, taking them in, absorbing what you’re hearing and being attentive in your bid to understand them fully
3. Listen with close attention to the circumstances and context of the conversation – hearing what isn’t being said. If that feels fuzzy, think about walking into a room where the people in it have just had an argument. Without being there, somehow you know.?

Of course in practice we use a combination of all three levels most of the time. Their importance is to make us examine how we are listening so we can be more deliberate about it. There are times where an interjection is called for, others when it is better to listen intently to what someone else is saying, and still more when a conversation requires someone to point to the bigger picture and refocus a flagging discussion.?

In other words, the levels tell us to get over ourselves: we can never be a good listener and an effective team-player when stuck at Level 1, constantly thinking about how to put forward our next pearl of wisdom, or shoot down someone else’s argument. A proper listener is someone who has learned to sand down their ego and recognise what the situation calls for.

An innovation meta-skill

Better listening is not just about more harmonious working environments. It is also a critical foundation of success in any business or innovation project.?

The success of the innovation projects we work with depends on those who lead them being excellent listeners. While a problem may be clear – such as trying to provide education during a pandemic to children in Uganda – the solution rarely is. It requires an iterative approach that involves listening to people’s needs, adapting to their behaviour and ensuring that you have understood the requirements and limitations of a given situation.?

In Ugandan, during COVID we worked with Mango Tree to keep children learning when schools were closed. Aside from the pandemic, access to technology was another key issue, which Mango Tree overcame by using a medium that everyone could access: radio. Then there were other, non-tech issues, like parents inability to support their children’s learning due to their own illiteracy.?

Each time we listened, we corrected the course corrected together. When parents couldn’t supervise, we worked with older siblings, then the radio shows were accompanied by workbooks, which were then iterated in line with what we heard. And so on and so on.?

Listening is both one of the most powerful tools we have as a species, and one of the most under-used soft skills in our professional kitbag. It is not difficult to do, but it is rare to see (and hear).?

Listening properly – with a sophisticated understanding of all three Levels – takes practice. But it is also what allows us to tackle difficult problems: understanding all sides of an issue, hearing hard truths as well as optimistic predictions, and giving room to people with different perspectives. Listening is one of innovation’s meta-skills because it provides the foundation for so many other critical ingredients: team-building, market insight and proposition development. Our ability to listen is what determines our capacity to learn, to work effectively together and to embrace change. Without it, we have only personal experience, instinct and blind luck to fall back on: a bluffer’s charter, not a template for successful innovation.?

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This article is part of a personal project to unpack and share the logic behind Behavioural Innovation, the approach we use at Brink. Behavioural Innovation combines classic innovation methodologies and behavioural sciences. It is a framework for designing a context fit for innovation and cultivating the calm, resilience and grit for human beings to do hard things.

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Read more about…?

• Brink a team of psychologists, strategists, designers, creative thinkers and technology optimists. We use a framework we call behavioural innovation to shape our work and our worldview.
• Behavioural Innovation a methodology that applies classic innovation approaches along with psychological, cognitive, emotional, cultural and social factors. It allows for irrational behaviour and attempts to understand why this may be the case.
• Mango Tree in collaboration with EdTech Hub during COVID
• Three levels of listening from the Co-Active training institute