With our rather prominent ears, it seems humans are built to listen. But we don’t. In fact, research shows we’re really bad at it, forgetting a lot of what we hear right after we hear it. But it’s not our fault. Our brains can listen to about 400 words a minute, but even the fastest talkers only hit 125. That leaves three-quarters of your brain to wander off and do something else and that’s why we get distracted and forget to listen. And to make matters worse, most of us also vastly overestimate how well we listen, so we don’t try to get any better.
Listening is much more than merely hearing. And listening with humility is the highest form. It happens with an open mind and open heart, with curiosity and without an agenda. It’s listening to learn, not just waiting for your turn to speak.
It takes real work to train your brain to listen this way. It’s a cognitive skill that takes intention and practice to build. When you think about it, we spend years in school learning to read and virtually no time at all learning to listen. It’s truly an underrated and underused workplace skill.
The good news is, anyone can learn to get better at it and the best way to do that is to focus and practice.
And when you do, there are a host of benefits. People see you as a better employee and a better leader. Being a good listener is so powerful it can
even help you work better with your colleagues, enabling connection and enhancing collaboration and productivity. When we truly hear each other,
only then can we fully understand each other—and the ideas, perspectives, and wisdom we bring.
“Listening to others express their thoughts and ideas has enabled me to have a better understanding as to why people may see things differently than I do.”
—Reflection Point Participant
We spend more time listening than we do reading and speaking combined. It’s the biggest part of successful communication and the most overlooked. Active listening (and its three key elements: cognitive, emotional, and behavioral) promotes a stronger connection between teammates and it’s an essential element of leadership. In fact, the ability to listen well is so important, it accounts for 40% of the variance between effective and ineffective leaders. Simply put—if you don’t listen, you can never be a good leader.
Alex “Sandy” Pentland, the director of MIT’s Connection Science and Human Dynamics labs, has coined the term “charismatic connectors” for team members who engage many people in short, high-energy conversations and “listen as much as or more than they talk and are usually very engaged with whomever they’re listening to.” Research suggests that the greater the number of these super listeners an organization has, the more successful it will be.
10 Tips to Better Listening
1. Actively avoid composing your response while listening.
2. Minimize distractions.
3. Physically show you’re engaged with eye contact, head nods and whatever gestures come naturally.
4. Watch and learn from the speaker’s nonverbal cues.
5. Monitor your own nonverbal reactions such as facial expressions and breathing.
6. Don’t interrupt.
7. Visualize what the other person is saying.
8. Don’t judge or criticize in your head. Hear them out fully first.
9. Repeat their last few words back to them to show you are listening and understand.
10. Ask clarifying questions.
Reflection Point’s approach works because it’s grounded in science and the latest research on organizational learning.
Listening is a skill that can be learned.
Listening is not a personality trait that you’re born with or not, it’s a cognitive skill that can be learned. Decades of research demonstrate that focused, attentive, and empathetic listening is a teachable skill. By far, the most effective way to become a better listener is by regimented practice and experience.
Listening with humility will change the way people see you and react to you.
Research strikingly found that when someone listens intently – with no agenda – it actually makes the speaker believe the listener has humility. In other words, good listeners are quickly believed to possess a strong sense of humility – considered to be one of the most positive human attributes. Humility is core to empathy, trust, respect, and likeability. So, if you want to cultivate all these things, cultivate humility. And do that by being a better listener.
Being a skilled listener makes you a much more valuable employee.
Research shows that employers actively look for good listeners when they make hiring decisions. In one study it was even described as an ‘indispensable attribute’ that is clearly linked to being an effective problem solver. Bottom line? If you’re a skilled listener, it enhances your employability.
In November 2014, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was tragically murdered by a Cleveland police officer. Still reeling from his death and the deep rifts it caused, the Cleveland Police Department sought ways to rebuild its relationship with the Cleveland community and to redefine community policing. In that context, Reflection Point brought officers of the Cleveland Police Department together with residents to promote mutual understanding, improve communications and open paths to generative dialogue.
In one of the sessions, the group read and discussed Man Booker Prize winner Chinua Achebe’s gripping story “Dead Men’s Path.” Published in 1953, the story follows Michael Obi, an eager young headmaster who is tasked with reforming a school in a Nigerian village. A village elder pleads with Obito to re-open an ancestral path through campus that Obi has closed, but he refuses. This leads the villagers to retaliate before Obi’s supervisor visits the school for an evaluation.
The story echoed the loggerheads police often find themselves in with some communities and a lively, frank discussion ensued on many important themes. The cultural tension between young and old and how to bridge the gap. The human tendency to single-mindedly pursue a vision without considering others. The role of compromise both in preserving tradition and progressing into the future. The power of ego in our decision-making. The importance of listening as an antidote to inflexibility.
The session allowed the officers and residents to engage outside their usual roles, creating a valuable opportunity to respectfully explore and share diverse viewpoints—and truly be heard.
“The way people participated in this event truly opened up dialogue and I believe we are better able, on a level playing field, to see one another as human beings,” said one participant.
Members of the group also left with a deeper understanding of each other. “These sessions provided the group the opportunity to discuss the challenges that exist between the community and the police without specifically isolating one group or the other,” commented one individual.
In the story they discussed, the rigid headmaster refuses to listen to why the path is spiritually and traditional significant. As a result, he ignites a terrible feud with the locals—one he pays dearly for.
This struck a chord with participants about the importance of listening to and learning from each other to head off unnecessary and potentially dangerous disputes.
“I wish all police departments and communities were having these discussions. . . there is a lot of fear and mistrust from the community, and it seems that the police sometimes operate under the emotion of fear as well. If bridges and trust were built, then we could collectively work together to meet our shared goal—living in a safe community.”
Listening to each other, participants found common ground and began to build bridges of understanding, keeping the metaphorical path open between the Cleveland Police and the people it serves.
“I learned so many new ways of thinking about people’s experiences and perspectives—the importance of listening, understanding, compromise—and realizing that we’re all humans with good intentions.”
—Reflection Point Participant
Reflection Point uses hundreds of different stories, so we can choose the ones that unearth the right themes and discussions for your organization. Here are three examples:
Are You Listening? By André Aciman
A richly woven and poignant story about the relationship between the author, his mother, and her deafness. As a child he didn’t realize she was deaf. Growing older, he underestimated her and confronted his own assumptions about her capabilities, eventually learning that she could hear more from watching a person’s eyebrows than most people could hear in a full conversation. A powerful metaphorical exploration of listening and the myriad ways we connect to our deepest humanity.
“The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” By Gabriel García Márquez
Published in 1968, this short story tells the tale of a shockingly handsome dead body found on the shore of a small fishing village. The villagers name him Esteban and vow to become a place worthy of him. The drowned man inspires the entire village to start listening to each other and seeing things in entirely new ways—forever changing their lives.
“The Chrysanthemums” By John Steinbeck
Probably John Steinbeck’s best-known and most highly regarded short story is set in Salinas Valley in the depression-era 1930s. A talented and underappreciated wife is brought to life by a travelling salesman’s interest in her garden. Rich in symbolism, the story explores themes of repression, the importance of being seen and heard, and the power dynamics in relationships.
When we bring colleagues together to share perspectives and reflect on powerful stories like these, we start conversations we wouldn’t otherwise have. We melt hierarchies and level the playing field. We kickstart connection, relationships, and, ultimately, collective intelligence.
Remember telephone? One person whispers to another, who whispers to another and so on. Then, what comes out at the end bears zero resemblance to what was originally said. Sadly, the entire world feels like one giant game of telephone these days. And what’s funny at a kid’s birthday party is toxic in life. The combination of misinformation and missed information is damaging our society and disrupting our work.
It all starts with how we listen (or more pointedly - how we don’t). A recent global survey revealed that 86% of employees feel they’re not heard fairly or equally. And even those who do feel heard don’t feel listened to–reporting that they see no meaningful change, despite speaking up.
We are much worse listeners than we think. Part of this is structural: we listen twice as fast as we can speak, leaving our brains too much time to get bored and wander off. But an even bigger part is behavioral: we mainly listen to wait our turn to speak, or we don’t listen at all, assuming we already know what someone has to say. And lest we blame technology, even before the proliferation of cell phones and other digital gadgets, research showed that we recall only 10% of conversations with others as soon as they are done, dropping to 4% a month later.
It sounds pretty dismal but it can be changed.
“We need to stop assuming that just because we have ears we know how to listen. It’s a real skill that takes knowledge and practice to build. And with soaring levels of workplace disengagement and isolation, listening to no longer nice-to-have, it’s a must-have.”
Research actually shows that active, empathetic listening by a manager is one of the single greatest drivers of employee engagement.
Here are three things you can do to be a better listener at work.
1. Practice With Real People. Good listening is not a personality trait, it’s a cognitive habit. Effective listening takes practice, intention, and the willingness to put yourself out there to be engaged, active and responsive. In fact, research tells us that we perceive others to be listening to us based on the way they respond verbally to what we’ve said: paraphrasing, asking questions and reflecting back their thoughts. It’s an active sport, not a passive one. Learning to listen can’t be a theoretical exercise. Practice with your team. Observe how engaged and effective listening behaviors improve the outcome of your work. Or find another interested person and deepen and broaden the conversations you have (about work and about life). Practice effective listening with them: being present, open to new ideas, non-judgmental and slow to jump in with your own point of view.
2. Drop Your Agenda. Most of us listen with an agenda (to prove a point or solve a problem), when we really need to be listening with learning and understanding in mind. Listening to learn opens us to the ideas of others and drives innovation and collaboration. But it’s probably the hardest kind of listening because it requires cognitive flexibility and humility, forcing us to acknowledge that we don’t have all the answers. Listening to learn—with an open mind and an open heart—extends empathy, builds trust, and invites colleagues to share insights and perspectives. Adopting a learning mindset takes practice. Let go of preconceived ideas, consider new ways of looking at things, ask questions that surface divergent perspectives. It’s about approaching new ideas with a beginner’s mind, resisting the urge to guess what someone will say before they’ve said it. And being open to the white spaces: sometimes we learn most by listening to what people don’t say. By slowing down and being a learner, listening becomes a window into powerful insights that might otherwise be missed.
3. Listen With Your Eyes. Maintaining eye contact with a conversation partner is more than just polite. It signals interest, attention and respect. Looking at a speaker’s eyes also helps us to better listen and understand both their words and their intentions. Eye contact has been shown to promote trust, increase interpersonal connection by increasing oxytocin, deepen empathy and social sensitivity and improve recall in video calls. But we are experiencing a crisis of eye contact: the pandemic, the epidemic of burnout and the overwhelming pull of social media have damaged face-to-face communication skills, including eye contact, especially among younger workers. Look at people when they are talking (some say long enough to register the color of their eyes). And when you are speaking, pause just long enough for others to look at you. Seeing each other’s faces is so critical to listening and being heard that dismissing it is a serious mistake. You wouldn’t go into a meeting room with a bag over your head to obscure your face. Don’t do it on video calls. Turn on your camera. In all contexts, and especially listening, our eyes matter.
Listening isn’t a game. It’s serious business—the currency of collaboration, productivity and innovation. The ability to listen well accounts for 40% of the variance between effective and ineffective leaders. Bluntly put—if you don’t listen, you can’t be a good leader. At all levels and on all teams, engaged listening fosters belonging, learning, and connection. So many people talk about inclusion and don’t know where to start. Start by listening. Here’s the telephone message: if you want to be a better colleague, company, or leader, listen more and listen better. Words well worth passing on, without distortion.
First published on Forbes.com.
