What Leaders Get Wrong About Listening

ADI IGNATIUS: I’m Adi Ignatius.

ALISON BEARD: I’m Alison Beard, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.

ADI IGNATIUS: All right, Alison, here’s today’s question: Do you consider yourself a good listener?

ALISON BEARD: Okay. I think that I am, especially when I’m hosting this show. I think my friends would definitely say yes. I hope that my colleagues would say I am. Adi, you can probably answer that better than I can. And then I think my husband and kids might say no because I’m often very distracted when I’m at home. What about you, Adi?

ADI IGNATIUS: Sorry, what?

Yeah, am I a good listener? I mean, I’m trying to learn to be a good listener. I’ve been a boss for a lot of my career and I know it’s really true that if in my position I come in and just say, “Look, here’s what I think about an issue,” it kind of shuts down discussion. So I’ve learned that part of good listening is to create a context where people feel empowered to speak. So yeah, I’m working at it.

Listen, the reason we’re talking about that is our IdeaCast interview today is with Jeff Yip, who is an assistant professor at the Beedle School of Business at Simon Fraser University.

ALISON BEARD: And I am excited that you’re talking to Jeff because I actually worked with him and his coauthor, Colin Fisher of the University College London, on this piece. They talk about the five main types of mistakes that leaders make when listening and I think it’s such an important skill for everyone to learn, and as you said, particularly managers, because we all know what it feels like to have a boss who isn’t hearing our ideas and isn’t implementing them, and how frustrating that can be.

ADI IGNATIUS: Well, so that’s certainly part of it, that we want to be heard, we want to be respected, but more importantly, what comes out of this, I think, is that if you’re a good listener, you actually extract information that is vital to running the company. So if you set up a situation where people are empowered to speak and you’re actively listening, it’s not only good for morale, it’s not only good for the culture, but you really learn things that you wouldn’t learn otherwise. So we get into all of this in my conversation with Jeff Yip, coauthor of the HPR article, Are You Really a Good Listener?

So Jeff, thank you very much for joining us on IdeaCast.

JEFF YIP: Thanks for having me.

ADI IGNATIUS: Your premise is that listening is important and that we’re probably not as good at it as we think we are. So to ground the conversation, just basically, why is listening important for managers?

JEFF YIP: Well, I see listening as the first discipline of leadership, really. It’s the discipline on which everything else is built. Without listening, there is no insight. Without listening, there is no connection. And without listening, leaders are only speaking to themselves and to avoid. So listening’s really like a gateway skill. It opens the door for influence. It’s a gateway for learning, and it brings people along when leading change.

ADI IGNATIUS: You know the concept that we need to be good listeners is probably common sense, but again, your article seems to make the case it’s hard for us to be good listeners. Why is it so hard? Why are we not better at this?

JEFF YIP: Yeah, I think to understand that, perhaps we can get into what listening means for the listener and the speaker. And so my coauthor, Colin Fisher and I, we reviewed 117 studies across three fields, on management, psychology and communication studies, and we found that there are three important elements to listening, that listening involves attention. So it requires being present. It involves comprehension. So it’s about understanding what’s being said.

But more importantly, it also involves response, and this is most critical for leaders and managers. When managers are not following up on what they heard, they’re perceived to be not listening, and the listener doesn’t really decide whether they’re an effective listener. It’s the recipient that decides that. And so to be effective, the recipient needs to feel that they’re attended, they’re understood, and that the listener follows through on what they heard.

ADI IGNATIUS: Now, there’s something about this very 21st century. I mean, the sort of great business leaders of a generation or two earlier probably didn’t talk about soft skills like listening before. What has changed? Are we more sophisticated in understanding what makes good management or is it that the expectations of the staff, the employees, are more important when we think about what a healthy, functioning company looks like?

JEFF YIP: Yeah, it’s interesting you talk about the span of time. I remember when we were writing this paper as well as our article, we read this 1950s HBR article by Carl Rogers and Roethlisberger, and they said that listening was the key barrier to effective communication, and here we are now, 70 years later, and still the struggle with listening goes on. Listening, it’s taken-for-granted skill, and in our business schools, and that’s where I am, we often train managers to lead from a speaking perspective. So we have courses on persuasive speaking, but rarely do I find a course on intentional or strategic listening.

And we celebrate speaking, we have TED Talks and keynote speakers, but there’s no real main stage for keynote listeners. We are in a culture still that glorifies speaking, but if we think of two modalities of listening and speaking, the quality of our speech, to be able to connect with our speech is dependent on the quality of our listening, and so I would argue that listening is even more foundational than effective speaking.

ADI IGNATIUS: Okay, I want to be a keynote listener, so I am all ears. Let’s talk about what makes great listening. Is it innate? Some people can do it, some people can, or is this something that can be learned?

JEFF YIP: I see listening as a learned skill, but often we take it for granted because we are hearing all the time, but there’s a difference between listening and hearing. So hearing is just audible, that our ears are taking in a message, but when you think about listening, there are really three key parts. It’s about attention, it’s about comprehension, understanding the message, and more importantly, it’s about communicating how we respond to what is heard, and this is where managers often miss, where managers often maybe hearing, but they’re not comprehending and they’re not following up.

And I see this often with town halls. Town halls is a great exercise for listening, but often when I ask people about their experiences with town halls, it’s often a negative experience. It’s often an experience of, well, there’s a lot of listening, but there’s no real action, and we don’t think that our leaders are really hearing what we say. And so we can see this correlation between action and listening that when there’s no follow-up action following the listening, there’s a perception that listening didn’t really occur.

I think what managers can do is at least affirm what they’ve heard, and that itself is a form of follow-up, to validate what they heard and just to realistically offer to the speaker, “This is what I can do, or this is what will be done.” But often that is not done, and so the speaker perceives that there’s no real authentic listening happen when their perspectives are not validated or followed up.

ADI IGNATIUS: We haven’t really talked about what’s the benefit. If a manager is a good listener and if the manager is perceived to be a good listener, so what? What’s the value then within the company?

JEFF YIP: Yeah, I think first is listening offers information. So a manager who listens to their customers, listens to their employees, are able to get information that they need, are able to see things or hear things that might be in their blind spot. Number two is listening builds connection. So often when we teach change or leading change, listening is a core process in leading change, which is it builds the connection and builds the relationships and coalitions that is needed to lead change. So listening is information, it offers connection. It also releases resistance. So oftentimes in conflict scenarios, listening helps to release some of the tensions in conflict. Oftentimes people are in conflict because they don’t feel heard and their perspectives are listened to. And so it’s these three things, it’s information, connection as well as change.

ADI IGNATIUS: So is part of the problem with poor listening that that managers are arrogant, whether they would articulate it this way or not even to themselves, “I’m the boss, I don’t really need to listen. I am meant to inspire, I am busy.”? And I mean, is it narcissism and egotism, or is there something else going on?

JEFF YIP: I think of there are two deceptions that often people have, universal deceptions is, one, people always think that they’re a better driver than they are, and second is they think that they’re a better listener. If there is a curve, a bell curve, with driving and listening, well, 50% of us need to be better at listening. But we often take listening for granted, and we associate listening with hearing, and so we think that if we’re just listening to the message, we’re really being effective listeners, but listening is a really complex skill and we can start to break it down with some of the mistakes that we’ve seen around listening, and maybe I think that would help illustrate the real challenges with listening.

ADI IGNATIUS: Yeah. Well, all right, let’s break it down. Now in the article you and your coauthor identify, I think, it’s five causes of poor listening that can be damaging and it’s haste, defensiveness, what you call invisibility, exhaustion, and inaction, which you’ve talked about a little bit. Why don’t we break down some of those? You argue that listening with haste can almost be worse than not listening at all. Give an example of what you mean by listening with haste and what’s the problem there.

JEFF YIP: Yeah, this is one of the biggest challenge I see with leaders and listening, and listening with haste is when a listener prioritizes speed over understanding. Now, there’s certainly times where we need to listen fast, but there are other times when we are leading a complex change or we’re trying to build relationships where we need to listen with understanding and not with haste, and let me give you an example of this. Oftentimes, one of the big mistakes in listening is this approach of listening to fix. Leaders are great problem-solvers. People are often promoted into leadership positions because they’re great problem-solvers, but we develop this great skill at solving problems that oftentimes when we listen, we’re often just trying to listen to solve and to fix, and not truly trying to listen to the context or the situation of where a person is coming from.

A practical example is a manager may hear an employee say, “I’m feeling overwhelmed with the number of projects on my plate,” a hasty listening would say, “Well, let’s delegate that to someone else.” So it’s a problem-solving approach. It’s listening for information and responding quickly to solve the problem. A slower approach to listening may be trying to understand the context that employee is going through. It’s trying to – listening with curiosity and listening with understanding. Going beyond surface level information to understand really what are the felt concerns that employee is going through in that situation, and that helps to build connection.

ADI IGNATIUS: I want to step back for a second. I mean, there are various forms of listening. There are various platforms for listening. There’s the one-on-one meeting, there’s a small group meeting, there are town halls. What are we talking about here? And do you have an opinion as to… Do you bring a different set of ears, different listening skills to these sort of different platforms or is listening, listening, and you just have to learn the skill?

JEFF YIP: As leaders scale in responsibility, there’s this saying that leaders need to have a voice to one and a voice to many. The same with listening. When one has a larger scope, it’s not possible to have one-on-ones with every single direct report. And so we need to think about strategic and organizational listening to complement interpersonal one-to-one listening, and this is what we call in our article listening structures. So in addition to interpersonal one-to-one listening, leaders can create structures where which listening occurs.

You know, a town hall. A town hall is not just about active listening, it’s how do you structure a town hall in order for different voices to be surfaced, in order to find convergence and divergence among these perspectives, and that there’s accountability to follow up in terms of what was heard.

And so one can create a listening structure like a town hall to be effective, or without a proper structure, a town hall can be ineffective. Other examples of listening structures could be, in this age of AI, we can use machine learning for sentiment analysis. We can use technology to augment our individual capacity for listening to process information, to feed that information back, and then to act on that and then to communicate how we’ve acted on that information. Again, it goes to the very definition of listening. If listening is attention, understanding and a response, it doesn’t necessarily have to be from an individual human. One can use technology to augment that capacity for listening.

ADI IGNATIUS: You mentioned town halls. In the article you talk about Google that initially certainly wanted to regularly have town halls where employees could bring up anything and they could bring up sensitive topics, and there was a sense that that was building the culture that they wanted to build, and then over time it becomes sort of a less effective forum. Talk about that. I mean, what specifically at Google. It started with such promise it was very effective and yet kind of ran out of gas, because there’s probably some learning in what happened at Google.

JEFF YIP: Yeah. So in Google, what happened was they had a regular practice of TGIFs and having town halls where employees could bring up any and every issue to be discussed, but if you can imagine in a large organization, that could range from the food in the cafeteria to really serious issues around discrimination and harassment, and what they found was… They stopped it over time, and observers say it’s because just the inability to manage these different and sometimes contentious views that come up in this town halls.

Listening is not just about problem solving. Listening is about also connection. It’s about being able to hear and to validate the perspectives that come up in meetings such as these. The mental model of we have to solve these problems at a town hall immediately or to give the right answer is not an adequate one.

The purpose of these listening structures is really to allow these perspectives to be heard, and for leadership to validate and to realistically offer, “Well, this is what we can act on and what we cannot act on.” Leaders often feel the pressure of, “Well, if I’m listening to these concerns, then I’m enabling these perspectives, I’m supporting these perspectives that I don’t agree with,” and I often tell leaders that listening is not agreement.

When you’re listening to someone of a very different perspective or maybe an opposing perspective, and you’re validating that, it doesn’t mean that you are agreeing with that perspective, but at least that person feels heard. And that is a starting point for a dialogue, and that’s a starting point for change.

ADI IGNATIUS: I mean, I think town halls can also be a cacophony where there are a lot of voices and they can disagree with one another. And I guess there’s a question whether the town hall is an effective mechanism or not. When you think about how leaders can best listen to what their company needs, what their employers needs, how they find other perspectives, are town hall meetings actually a good way to do this, or are there more effective ways of communicating?

JEFF YIP: I’ve seen effective ways of running town halls. So if we think of town halls as a listening structure, the skills required to run an effective town hall is more than an effective one-to-one. So there needs to be ways to think about how do we structure a town hall in order to be effective, and having designed some town halls, I go to this thing called the participation diamond. So basically an effective town hall is one that… The first part of the diamond is processes that allow divergent perspectives to emerge in the town hall, and then we need a process of convergence, which is what are some processes we can put in the town hall that we can converge on some insights and actions that we can follow up on. So oftentimes when town halls are badly run, there’s not a real clear structure. There’s a lot of divergence without well-thought-out processes of convergence and action.

ADI IGNATIUS: I want to get back to… We were ticking off the causes of poor listening that can be damaging, and we talked about haste. Another one is defensiveness, and I think we all know what that looks like, and we’ve probably all been guilty of being defensive when somebody challenged us. But I mean, the defensiveness is so natural. How do we guard against it? How do we become leaders who can listen without being defensive when somebody else challenges what we’re doing?

JEFF YIP: Defensiveness is a really hard one and even more so for managers who feel the pressure of having the answers and being able to solve problems, and where I see it often come up is if an employee gives some feedback of something that’s not working well, not necessarily a direct attack. An employee may say, “Sometimes I’m not clear what success on this project looks like,” and the general response for manager is often to feel defensive, like something’s going wrong here. Now, let me clarify how we can make this right. And a manager response might be, “Well, I’ve shared clear expectations in every meeting,” but that itself is a defensive response because the manager’s not really hearing what’s being said, but quickly trying to solve the problem. And so the manager in that situation hears the comment, but really doesn’t explore the real concern behind the comment.

So one way to address defensiveness is in situations where there’s not a straightforward answer to a problem, it’s not like fixing a technical problem. When an employee says, “I’m not clear what success looks like in a project,” perhaps instead of jumping straight to a solution, the manager could first explore what that problem looks like for the employee.

The three words I often advise people that helps to mitigate defensiveness is tell me more. So instead of jumping to a response, just pausing to ask the question, “Tell me more,” creates a space for learning, creates a space for conversation instead of immediately jumping to a defense or response.

ADI IGNATIUS: Tell me more.

JEFF YIP: Yeah, thanks, Adi.

ADI IGNATIUS: Okay, you also talk about invisibility, and I’m interested, what do you mean exactly by that as a pitfall?

JEFF YIP: Leaders are often listening. We all are often listening in the hallways, by the water cooler, and having conversations, but oftentimes with particularly for leading at scale is employees don’t know that their leaders are listening. So the listening happens, but it’s invisible. It’s out of sight to most of the people in the organizations. Visible listening is for a leader to communicate what they heard, be that through a regular update, like a weekly update like, “This is what I heard from the conversations that I’ve been in the past week.” Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, is a really good example of a visible listener. You often see him in his speeches communicating what he’s heard from customers, from employees. So that’s at the organizational level.

ADI IGNATIUS: So Jeffrey, you also talk about exhaustion as a pitfall, and I think I know what that means. I mean, we’re all sort of burned out and overworked, and it’s hard to be kind of present in our best selves and our exhaustion probably short circuits of our listening ability. Is that what you’re getting at? What do you mean by exhaustion exactly?

JEFF YIP: Yeah, so listening is really hard work then. When we think about exhaustion and listening, it does take a lot of energy out of us to pay attention, to comprehend and to respond, and our managers are exhausted, going through a lot of disruptive change. And they’re also expected to listen more, and so that’s a huge ask that we have of managers to be good listeners all the time.

In that HBR article, we point out one study by Christopher Rosen and colleagues, they found that managers who are exhausted when they listen to an employee venting, they’re more likely to engage in more kind of negative or abusive behaviors towards the employee who is venting instead of taking a listening stance. They’re tired and they’re not in the right state for listening.

So I think that it’s important to know that we need to be in the right state for listening, and one of the ways to do that is to manage our boundaries, or a simple practical way is to time box our listening to say that, “okay, I have 20 minutes and I’m going to put my full 20 minutes into this conversation. If we need to have a longer conversation, let’s schedule that,” or, “Is 20 minutes sufficient for this conversation that we’re going to have?” So to have clear expectations both ways around time. Managing those expectations of time and the boundaries of listening can help prevent managers from having that kind of exhausted listening scenario.

ADI IGNATIUS: And then the last pitfall that you identify is inaction, that you may be actively listening, but if there’s no follow up, then the perception is that you’re not listening and that causes frustration. Break that down a little bit, because we started to talk about this earlier that sometimes action isn’t called for, but again, the perception of inaction can be damaging.

JEFF YIP: I think this dynamic of action and inaction is really important for listening the context of leadership. So listening creates an expectation for action. When I hear a feedback, I hear an ask or a request. That creates an expectation on the other person that now that I’ve communicated that and now that you’ve listened, I expect you to follow up and do something. So listening creates an expectation for action. If that expectation can be met and there’s follow up, then listening closes the loop and listening builds trust.

It is a moment where trust can be built. Someone invests in trust in giving a request, and if the manager or leader follows up on that by action, that helps to close the loop and builds trust. The challenge is also listening is a moment where trust can be breached and cynicism comes in. When someone makes a request and a manager acknowledges and conveys that they’re listening, but they don’t follow up or they don’t set realistic expectations on the follow-up, that breaches trust and that creates greater cynicism. So inaction with listening is pretty damaging.

ADI IGNATIUS: I think all of us who are managers realize at a certain point, you can’t please everybody. You think of The Office, Michael Scott wants to be everybody’s best friend, and that ends badly. What seems to be built into this entire discussion is you’re building trust, you’re unlocking information that’s valuable for you, you’re earning trust, but you’re still going to be doing things that are going to be unpopular with some of your employee. There’s just no way around that, and to what extent is that part of the listening, speaking, communicating, inspiring mix that we’re talking about? I mean, how do we handle that reality?

JEFF YIP: Yeah, that’s a good point with thinking about the caricature of listening as just being the nice person who follows up and does everything that people ask. So listening, it’s not about being agreeable, but listening is about taking in the information, validating that, and then offering a realistic purview of what is accepted or what can or cannot be done. And so that is effective listening. And so when ineffective listening happens in organizations is a manager that takes in information and nods their head and says, “Yeah, I’ll do it,” and then ends up not following up or doesn’t really agree, but kind of tries to play nice and agrees.

That leads to what we call as inaction. That breaches trust, that creates greater cynicism, and we’ve seen that in whether it’s one-to-one or in town halls where the perception is the leader is listening, but there’s no follow up. So it’s important for managers to know that listening is not agreement, but listening is offering a realistic feedback loop back to the speaker on what you’ve heard and what can be done and what cannot be done.

ADI IGNATIUS: More positively then, to anyone who’s listening who thinks, “Yeah, I would like to be a more effective listener,” what are some bits of advice you could give or first steps people could take to hone those skills?

JEFF YIP: I teach a practice called listening and build. When I think of leadership, often… I mean, if one of the essences of leadership is about taking information, connecting to the core concerns of others and then responding with action.

So this is what I have leaders in my leadership class do is they identify a core challenge, they identify stakeholders who are connected to the challenge, and they go about having a listening conversations with the stakeholders, and the key to these conversations is not to solve the problem, but rather just to listen and to get inputs in terms of core concerns.

And then I ask them to follow up and build next steps or solutions based on these raw materials, the insights, the hopes, the fears, the concerns that they’ve heard. What’s important in terms of this listen and build practice is we really need to slow down to listen first, because we truly learn and change our perspectives when we listen, and then to build the next steps from what we listen. But oftentimes listening is done too fast. We just take in the information and we have a ready response, and that’s not true listening. So I think slowing down to listen allows us to speed up when we build.

ADI IGNATIUS: Are there business leaders that you would identify as clearly that they’ve learned how to be effective listeners and that it has benefits for their business?

JEFF YIP: Yeah, so two that come to mind. One, we’ve briefly spoken about Satya Nadella in his book Hit Refresh. He writes about three principles he leads by with, and two of them are… First is about listening first and being decisive was the second one. I think that’s such a powerful combination for a leader to listen, to understand what’s blind spots, what’s missing, and then to act fast. So listen first and act fast. In fact, Peter Drucker, who in the book, The Effective Executive, said that he has only one rule for leaders: his rule for leaders is to listen first.

The other leader that comes to mind is Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and he’s known to be the last person to speak in meetings, and he’s talked openly about this. His principle is being the last person to speak allows him to take in all the perspectives, because as a leader, if he were to speak first, the meeting would be anchored then on his perspective. So it’s really powerful, again, a listening first approach to leadership, which is by listening, we allow different voices to emerge, it allows us to change our perspectives and see the broader view and then we speak.

ADI IGNATIUS:

Yeah. I mean, look, the Bezos approach is a classic, and it’s when the senior most leaders starts a meeting saying, “I believe in X, what do the rest of you think?” They’ve essentially wiped out the possibility of a open conversation.

So I want stick with the practical takeaways. I think these are good. I think you’ve sort of put your finger on things that people can do. If I want to be a better listener tomorrow, immediately, what can I do?

JEFF YIP: So there are two that come to mind. One is sort of the five-second rule, if you will. Oftentimes we listen… For folks who are very good at problem solving, they listen to information and they respond pretty quickly to solve the problem, but a five-second rule would be, “Well, maybe let’s just take five second to pause,” because sometimes in the silence, I’ve seen this too as a parent that if I hold silence enough, my kids will speak more. I have a teenage son, and sometimes when I ask him what happens in school, he’s pretty quiet, doesn’t say much, but if I hold the silence enough, silence has this gravitational pull. If you’re silent long enough, people tend to speak more. And so in our culture, we tend to speak and respond, speak and respond in pretty quick ways. So maybe extending that a little bit, just find out what’s one threshold for silence and extending that a little bit more, a couple more seconds is a good practice.

And then second is developing some questions that can be a daily habit. Some of the questions that has helped me is we did just one. Tell me more is one. The other is asking, what’s the real challenge here? Some of these questions are laid out in… There’s this great book called The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier, and he has a set of great questions that really invite conversation. And so the two things would be maybe a bit more silence, extending that habit of silence, and second is developing a repertoire of really good generative questions.

ADI IGNATIUS: Yeah, the silence thing is a core tenet for journalists as well, that you ask somebody question and you get an answer, and if you impose that uncomfortable silence, people need to fill the void. Nobody likes a vacuum. So just the silence can prompt people to then get off their talking point and actually speak, and actually speak from the heart. So yeah, it works in various ways. Jeffrey, it’s a great article in HBR. This is a great conversation and I want to thank you for joining us on IdeaCast.

JEFF YIP: Thanks for having me.

ADI IGNATIUS: That was Jeff Yip of the Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University. He’s the coauthor along with Colin Fisher of the HBR article, Are You Really a Good Listener?

Next week, Alison will interview Jacinda Ardern, the former Prime Minister of New Zealand, on how to lead through a crisis. We now have more than a thousand IdeaCast episodes, plus many more HBR podcasts to help you manage your team, your organization, and your career. Find them at hbr.org/podcast or search HBR in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Special thanks to our team, senior producer Mary Dooe; associate producer Hannah Bates; audio product manager Ian Fox; and senior production specialist Rob Eckhardt. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR Ideacast. We’ll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I’m Adi Ignatius.