Why become a better listener and how?

Strong listening skills can often mean the difference between success and failure in business ventures and senior executives' performance. Good listeners tend to make better decisions, based on better-informed judgments, than ordinary or poor listeners do—and hence tend to be better leaders.

Here are some tips on how you can develop it.

1. Show respect

Part of being a good listener is simply helping others to draw out critical information and put it in a new light. Let everyone around you know you believe each of them had something unique to contribute. This helps fuel an environment where good ideas routinely come from throughout the organization.

One must fight the urge to “help” more junior colleagues by providing immediate solutions. Leaders should also respect a colleague’s potential to provide insights in areas far afield from his or her job description.

For example, John McLaughlin, the former deputy director of the US CIA, said that when he had to make tough decisions, he often ended his conversations with colleagues by asking, “Is there anything left that you haven’t told me . . . because I don’t want you to leave this room and go down the hall to your buddy’s office and tell him that I just didn’t get it.” By doing that, he communicated the expectation that his colleagues should be prepared; he demanded that everything come out on the table; and he signaled genuine respect for what his colleagues had to say.

2. Keep quiet

McLaughlin advises managers to think consciously about when to interrupt and be as neutral and emotionless as possible when listening, always delaying the rebuttal and withholding the interruption. Still, interrupting with a question can be necessary from time to time to speed up or redirect the conversation. He advises managers not to be in a hurry, though—if a matter gets to your level, he says, it is probably worth spending some of your time on it.

When we remain silent, we also improve the odds that we’ll spot nonverbal cues we might have missed otherwise. 

3. Challenge assumptions

A Zen-like philosophy “It’s What You Learn After You Know It All That Counts”. 

Too many good executives, even exceptional ones, inadvertently act as if they know it all subsequently remain closed to anything that undermines their beliefs. They will have to undergo a deeper mindset shift—toward an embrace of ambiguity and a quest to uncover “what we both need to get from this interaction so that we can come out smarter.” 

One way to do it, make sure that everyone speaks in a meeting and don’t accept silence or complacency from anyone. Make it clear that you are not trying to reach a common viewpoint. The goal is common action, not common thinking, and you expect people on your team to stand up to you whenever they disagree with your ideas.

Another technique is to deliberately alter a single fact or assumption to see how that changes team’s approach to a problem. For example, “We’re assuming a 10 percent attrition rate in our customer base. What if that rate was 20 percent? How would our strategy change? What if it was 50 percent?” Once it’s understood that the discussion has moved into the realm of the hypothetical, where people can challenge any underlying assumptions without risk, the creative juices really begin to flow.

Based on Power Listening: Mastering the Most Critical Business Skill of All (Penguin, March 2012) by Bernard Ferrari is an alumnus of McKinsey’s