We often find ourselves in a challenging situation: we want to communicate effectively, but we struggle to truly listen.
There’s a natural tendency to justify ourselves, win arguments, or simply have something to say.
So how do we switch from listening to reply to listening to understand?
When we listen to reply, we miss out on crucial information and opportunities to support our team.
We fail to hear the warning signals that could help us prevent complex failures, and we overlook the success signals that deserve to be celebrated and amplified.
As a leader, one of your primary roles is to listen with curiosity, aiming to understand and then support.
When you hear warning signals, turn up your curiosity and seek to comprehend the situation.
Whether signals are good or bad, ensure they are heard. This is how you create value indirectly, and amplification becomes your superpower.
To create an environment where listening thrives, consider the following:
- Create a safe space: Encourage and praise feedback, making it safer for your team to speak up (TeamMood is the right tool).
- Set the stage: Clarify that your input is just an opinion and should be viewed as less important than the team’s. They typically have more information about the challenges at hand.
- Be clear about your intentions: When you’re exercising a decision versus simply expressing curiosity or coaching, make it explicit to your team.
- Embrace silences and pauses: Give your team the opportunity to speak and be heard, without jumping in to fill the void.
Remember, how you show up is crucial to the environment you set for your teammates.
The environment is the culture, and is the key to team synergy.
We all need to practice listening to understand.
So practice to embrace silences, practice to resist the urge to justify yourself or win arguments.
Then practice amplifying the signals you hear to foster a culture of open communication, trust, and success.
Here are the references that were used to write this post:
- Source for the pie chart about listening
- The right way to amplify
- How to minimize the impact of positional power in hierarchies
Check out TeamMood
- TeamMood increases feedback frequency. Get daily or weekly notifications to everyone in your team in just a few minutes after signing up.
- TeamMood is fun. The only thing your teammates need to do is click on their corresponding mood and they are done. Written comments are optional. It’s perfect to start getting more feedback. And it’s easy and quick enough to keep this habit in the long term.
- TeamMood is anonymous. Your teammates won’t be scared to give honest feedback because their identity is hidden.
- TeamMood helps you transform feedback into action. Our analytics dashboard help you monitor and analyze feedback to uncover actionable insights more easily.
Learn more about TeamMood
and sign up here
Header photo by Wei Fukuyama