Are You Listening?

Last month we discussed the critical role that clear, effective feedback plays in building trust and ultimately cultivating a culture where people feel deeply connected to each other and to their work. We believe that leaders build trust by encouraging honest, high-candor feedback, especially when performance doesn’t meet expectations, as was demonstrated by the story of Coach Popovich and the Spurs in our previous blog.

Why Shared Understanding Is So Hard

At the crux of providing this type of feedback is the ability to engage in direct two-way conversation where both parties can generate a collective and more comprehensive understanding based on the sharing of their own (potentially diverse) perspectives. As generally accepted within the psychology, communication, and relationship counseling communities, the foundation of communication involves processing the exchanging of information, ideas, thoughts, etc. between entities to create shared meaning and understanding.

The Communication Challenge for Leaders

The challenge for leaders (and all humans in any type of relationship) is that communication is hard! And achieving shared understanding through communication? Even harder!

The Human Desire to Be Understood

At the core of this ‘hard’ is our innate human desire to be understood by the other person when we are communicating. We will often fully state our perspective and then pause our communication only long enough to ensure that the other party acknowledges receipt and validates their understanding (through their words, tone, and body language) of what we shared. This results in us actively listening and looking for cues from the other party to confirm or deny that our original thoughts have been processed in a way that we deem satisfactory. If we determine that the other person is ‘lacking’ understanding in any way, then we will attempt to say the same thing again in a different way or say it ‘louder’ in an effort to increase their understanding. Our desire to be understood can be so great that it ‘blinds’ us in our ability to also see and acknowledge that the OTHER person desires to be understood as well!

Listening to Respond vs. Listening to Understand

This one-way execution at two-way communication is commonly referred to as listening to respond instead of listening to understand.

Research within the psychology professional counseling community differentiates listening to respond and listening to understand as follows:

• When we listen to respond, our attention turns inward—we start forming our response while the other person is still speaking. This often leads to distraction, misinterpretation, and missed nonverbal cues, making shared understanding harder to achieve. As a result, the speaker may feel unheard or dismissed, raising even more barriers to already challenging communication.
• In contrast, listening to understand is a form of active listening rooted in the desire to comprehend the fundamental message of what is being shared. This type of listening requires each of us to suspend judgment during receipt of the communication and promotes the asking of intentional, insightful questions to gain understanding, and paraphrase what we’ve heard to ensure clarity. This approach fosters trust, deepens connection, and is particularly effective in resolving conflict.

How Listening Builds Trust and Performance

Models such as the Gottman Method emphasize that the skill of Listening to Understand is foundational to healthy relationships and is built through the practice of effective communication. And, as we learned with Coach Popovich, giving feedback in a manner where there is both shared understanding and meaning (communication), is the very thing that builds the trust required for organizations to operate at the highest of levels. We should all strive to listen to understand, especially when it is hard, as the end results increase our overall organizational ability to win! And who does not want to listen to the celebrations that occur when we all cross the finish line together?