“Listening well is one of the easiest and most effective ways of making people feel seen and heard.”
Michael Piperno, a Principal and Communications Expert at Comvia, helps organizations understand how to communicate clearly so they can build and maintain healthy business relationships.
Michael shares his insights on effective listening, a skill he calls an underutilized superpower. Check out practices on mastering it along with tips for using body language and tone of voice to make people feel like they’re the only person in the room. Along the way, you’ll learn how to be more intentional when listening, allow for pauses, and avoid judgments.
Truth You Can Act On
1. Make People Feel They Matter
When we don’t listen well as leaders, what happens? We cause communication breakdowns and frustration, we can even damage the culture we’re building and all of that costs time and money. The biggest thing about listening and why I truly believe it’s an underutilized superpower is because it’s probably the easiest way to make people feel that they matter. There are a lot of things you can do to make people feel seen and heard and make them feel that they matter, but listening is something that we really get wrong a lot.
2. What’s Your Body Saying?
Body language is key in communication. Remember, as a listener, you have great power with your non-verbals. So how do we show that we’re listening? We give each other eye contact. We show up with a warm face rather than a cold face. We don’t cross our arms and look defensive. Think about sitting in a park or sitting at a shopping center and people-watching. You can tell the people who like each other and are happy just by their body language, and you can tell the people who aren’t good just by their body language. Think about how powerful that message is just from that.
3. Prepare to be Present
I’m a thinker, and when I hear things, my mind starts to go, and I have to tell my mind to shut down. So that’s the first thing I do when it’s my turn to listen and then get the distractions that you can control away from the situation. Because there are enough distractions in this world, we need to really make sure that we don’t allow the ones that we have control of to interrupt our listening. Sometimes we also simply need to remind ourselves to hear someone out, because the moment you interrupt, or the moment you start finishing someone else’s sentences, that means you’ve stopped listening. Try to turn that off and just be present.
4. Remember the Power of the Pause
We are all afraid of the pause, especially in this hybrid and virtual world where it’s even a smidge more awkward when you’re on a screen and nobody quite knows what to say. But when you’re listening, you don’t have to have an answer or a response immediately. It’s okay to let the person finish talking and then have a beat of silence or two while you formulate what your answer is. We all need to remind ourselves to slow down a little bit and allow for those times because I think that really makes communication richer when we allow each other to finish and listen to each other fully.
5. Summarize What You Hear
Reflect on what you’ve heard and paraphrase or summarize it. That really shows that you’re listening. It’s also a great way to make sure you’ve understood everything correctly. ‘Let me repeat that back to you. I want to make sure I have that right,’ or ‘I think I understand the point of your question, but let me give it to you in my own words so you can tell me if we’re on the same page.’ That type of phrasing shows, ‘Okay, I want to get there with you, but I’m not there yet. It’s a nice way to do it.
6. Lean into Valuable Assessments
I happen to have fallen in love with the Strength Deployment Inventory, SDI for short, because it helps teams communicate better and it helps me facilitate that communication. It assesses a few things, number one, what motivates you at your core? Then it shows what happens when we start to experience conflict. Listening well can help prevent conflict. But a lot of times what we do in our jobs is we avoid healthy debate and healthy opposition and friction because we think it’s conflict. So this assessment allows me to show teams on an individual level when we hit conflict, this is exactly what’s going to happen. Then when we see it, we can work to get ourselves out of it. Then the final piece of it is it shows you really robust information about the strengths that you’re likely to use at work and the ones that you’re less likely to use at work. And those ones you’re less likely to use at work. It shows you how to get yourself motivated to use them when you need them, which is really good stuff.
Book Recommendation:
- Stand Out by Carol Kinsey Goman
- You According to Them by Sara Canaday
Listen to the full episode: Episode 192: Listening is the Underutilized Superpower with Michael Piperno
