What is Active Listening?

Active listening is a vital tool to promote cohesion in teams, as well as making them more productive and efficient. While it is the responsibility of all team members to be good listeners, it goes much further than simply being attentive to what others are saying. Every team member - especially those in leadership - needs to be an active listener. Let us consider what this means, why it is so important, and how it can be learned.

What is Active Listening?

While good listening is itself a rare skill that must be carefully nurtured, active listening is even rarer. It is the act of listening, not only to what someone is saying but also to the unspoken thoughts and feelings that are more subtly expressed through what they say. Active listening increases empathy and understanding, deepens communications, and makes for a balanced, two-way interaction that is non-competitive and constructive.

Two experts from Harvard Business School, Robin Abrahams and Boris Groysberg, claim that active listening has three aspects: cognitive, emotional and behavioural. The cognitive level is about paying attention to all information being presented by the speaker. This includes what they say explicitly, as well as what their words imply. The emotional aspect is not about the emotions the speaker is expressing. It refers to a listener’s ability to remain calm, attentive and compassionate during a conversation - essentially the listener’s ability to control their own emotions while listening to their colleagues, clients or collaborators. The behavioural aspect refers to the listener’s methods of showing that they are engaged, expressing interest and understanding both verbally and nonverbally.

Why is Active Listening Important?

Active listening is a difficult skill to master, but doing so can be very rewarding. If each member of a team becomes a good active listener, they will all become more effective in their roles, and will increase trust and cohesion in the team. The benefits of active listening include:

• Building stronger relationships: Active listening builds trust, which is the basis for excellent working, interpersonal relationships. Team members who feel heard by their colleagues and leaders are more likely to be active contributors and feel that they are valued by the rest of the team.
• Resolving conflict: Conflict is bound to arise from time to time, and active listening is one of the best tools for resolving it. When conflict happens, it is generally because someone in the team feels unheard or misunderstood. Active listening helps people on all sides of the conflict to see issues from different viewpoints, recognise others’ feelings, and show appreciation. It thus enables the full discussion and resolution of a contentious issue, and helps to bring all team members into agreement.
• Getting the full story: Active listening enables everyone to pay full attention to the entire message being presented, without missing important details or projecting their preconceived ideas and opinions onto it.?
• Identifying and anticipating problems: As you seek clarification and consider the details, you create opportunities to assess any looming problems in what you are being told. You can then use this information to create a proactive solution that can head the problem off before it arises.
• Empowerment and cohesion: Active listening is empowering to everyone on the team. As a leader, it helps you to build confidence and to communicate more effectively with your team. As a confident leader who can communicate, you are bound to see positive results in your team’s work. This triggers a positive feedback loop: the team members all understand and trust one another, so they work well together, which produces excellent results, which further deepens trust and cohesion.

How to Learn Active Listening

Active listening can be taught, but it requires more than just a single course or seminar. It will require a lot of time and practice to master, but an excellent course will give you a head start. It is just one of the vital soft skills that you and your team can learn through Dyna accredited and? behavioural Leadership Interventions. To find out more about our training programmes and their benefits, please feel free to reach out to us today.