» Listening – the key to all successful leadership

Written by Andrew Mowat on August 23, 2010 in Book, Coaching, Communication, Leadership

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Listening is the most powerfully enabling human behaviour. The thing is, we are rarely taught to listen, we learn to listen. Our default listening styles are usually autobiographically oriented: we tend to listen for ourselves. Listening that engages, enables and that helps create a new future, is focussed on the speaker, for the speaker. Great coaches listen for the coachee, not the coach, for example.

In TheoryU, Otto Scharmer proposes 4 levels of listening (shown from most superficial to most deep):

Downloading – listening by confirming habitual judgements or assumptions
Attentive listening – listening for things different to what you already know
Empathic listening – with the perception of the position or context of the person speaking
Generative (or what we would call Emergent) listening – when new futures or possibilities emerge, and you are no longer the same person as a result.

To get at anything deeper than ‘downloading’, we need to abandon default autobiographical listening for, example, observational listening. Observational listening is listening with the purpose of feeding back what it is that you see and hear. By observing, you starve the brain of attention and energy that drives judgement, assumption and opinion. It is observing key words, key energy, expressions, observed emotion… anything you see and hear in succinct form.

Take this example:

A colleague or friend breaks down in a conversation and cries in front of you. You could nod knowingly, and say “I understand how you feel” (downloading) or you give them all of your attention and say “I can see the feeling you have here…” (empathic listening).

Simple observation has moved what was intended to be empathic (but most often is patronising) to truly being felt by the person as empathic.

Listening can change the world – but only if it is non-autobiographical and observational.