Changes over the decades have seen internal communication shift from top-down messaging to more circular two-way dialogue – a move from broadcast to conversations. But for that to work, we need to create spaces for conversations, and we must listen to people – really listen.
In this episode, Jenni lifts the lid on the chaos that comes from not listening and the risks of listening too much to the wrong people. She also shares five things to do differently to create calm when listening to employees.
Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:
Leaders are responsible for psychological safety podcast by the Calm Edged Rebels
Blog: Psychological safety and trust are not the same things
Deep Listening: impact beyond words by Oscar Trimboli
Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together by Alison Goldsworthy, Laura Osborne & Alexandra Chesterfield
Blog: How to avoid team friction – from poles apart to pulling together
Do words really matter? By Beth Collier via LinkedIn
Messengers: Who We Listen To, Who We Don’t, and Why by Stephen Martin & Joseph Marks
Influential Internal Communication by Jenni Field
You can continue the conversation with Jenni on Twitter and LinkedIn
Transcript for this podcast:
Welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with me, Jenni Field. Today, I’m going to be talking about listening. Now, listening is a topic that comes up a lot in internal communication and employee engagement. The changes to internal communication over the decades has led to communication shifting from being top down to more circular. So it’s gone from being more broadcast to being more about conversations. But for that to work, we have to have spaces for conversation and we have to listen to people.
Now, as I’m preparing for this episode, and I’ve been reading and researching and doing all the things I always do when it comes to taking on a broad topic, it’s got me thinking that this is a really broad topic and actually feels quite woolly when you just think I’m going to talk about listening.
So, I want to break this down a little bit more. And I want us to think about really listening. So, if we just take a moment and listen, and I mean, you know, really listen. So, right now, you’re listening to me on a podcast. But if you put that on pause, you might hear the birds singing if you’re out for a walk, you might hear the noise of the heating or air conditioning in your home. You know, to really listen, we have to slow down. And we have to focus in on the quiet to hear what’s really there.
So, when it comes to listening to employees, this is the same. You know, we have to focus, we have to pay attention, and we have to be intentional. So, in the next 15 minutes, I’m going to talk about the chaos that comes from not listening, and also the chaos that can come from listening too much. And then I’m going to share five things for you to think about or do differently to shift from chaos to calm when it comes to listening to employees.
Can chaos come from listening too much?
So, let’s start by talking about the chaos of listening too much. Now, this is something that we have to be mindful of, and we have to be clear about why we’re listening in the first place. You know, if I listened to every opinion from everyone around me, I think I would be paralysed into inaction.
Now, this is important, because whenever we talk about listening or not listening, we don’t often talk about the risk of listening to too many people, and quite possibly the wrong people. And that’s where things can get a little bit risky or a little bit dangerous.
So when I’m working with business leaders, we often discuss who they seek counsel from and why. You know, we’ll talk about how helpful and constructive that is, and how it adds value. Now, this isn’t about only listening to the people who agree with us, but it’s about making sure that the people we are listening to are aligned to the direction of travel and the purpose and what we’re trying to do. Because if they aren’t, the risks of listening to them and having time with them and taking on their advice is really high. Now, alongside this, we have sort of listening too much in general.
You know, we can seek opinions and views from everyone, but it doesn’t always help us achieve a decision. If anything, it can be used as a bit of a procrastination technique. I’m just going to keep asking, just going to keep listening, because it stops us from being able to make decisions.
Now, I’ll always remember a CEO talking to me about the value and impact of internal communication. And they said to me, “You know, Jenni, this isn’t a social club. I can’t ask everyone everything all of the time, as we would just get nothing done.” And that conversation has stayed with me for, you know, nearly 10 years. It was a long time ago, that conversation. But it stayed with me because it’s often important for us to be clear with people when something’s a discussion or when something is a decision that’s being shared.
And sometimes we can confuse those two and think we have to listen when actually a decision’s already been made. And that gets us into all types of tricky situations where we’re sort of listening for the sake of listening or pretending to listen when decisions have been made. So, not a great route to go down.
Can chaos also come from not listening at all?
Now, there is a chaos of not listening, you know, and it’s easy to not listen. It’s really easy to just get cracking with the plans, you know, plough forwards, do what you want to do. Listening means you have to take action. And sometimes that’s quite uncomfortable. And when we don’t listen, the chaos that can follow can create symptoms like people that aren’t engaged with the change or with the organisation, people not feeling valued, people could be actively pursuing other goals that aren’t aligned to the broader organisational goals, people can leave the organisation, you know, that’s a big one. And also we can have what I call a silent veto. So, we can have people agreeing with things in a room and then disagreeing outside the room. But because they don’t feel listened to, they don’t speak up. And that gets us into all sorts of areas around psychological safety as well.
How can we go from chaos to calm by listening?Â
Well, these are the five things to consider when it comes to listening.
1. Be present
The first is to be present. Now, interestingly, I was reading a book by Oscar Chamboli, who talks about deep listening, and I’ve popped some links in the show notes to his work. And in his book, he says: we speak between 125 and 175 words a minute, yet we can listen to 400 words per minute.
Now, this means that no matter how fast we speak, and I do speak quite quickly, your mind can process three to four times more words. So this gap between what your mind can process and how many words we can speak is what causes us to drift off and be distracted.
You know, we’re also naturally curious as human beings. So it’s easy for us to have our attention pulled in other directions. So if we’re thinking about how to listen, and being present is the first of the five, you have to remove distractions, you know, take notes, focus on the person speaking, and also make sure that the environment is right for the conversation. You know, if you’re delving into really difficult topics, that’s particularly important to make sure everybody feels comfortable in the space that they’re sharing.
2. Listen to understand, not to respond
The second is that we listen to understand, not to respond. And I’ve referenced a book called Poles Apart in previous podcast episodes, and it’s a great book about how we can bring people together that maybe have been torn apart or polarized, you know, by various different views. And in that book, it talks about how it’s important for us when we’re having conversations to go into that conversation, to understand one another, not go into the conversation to win. And that’s something that we are ingrained into us as human beings is sometimes about winning, whether it’s winning, you know, the argument, whether it’s winning the point, whatever it might be. So, we have to go into conversations and go into listening to understand not to respond, we have to be a friend, you know, not someone that’s judging, we have to understand a point of view, you know, not win by providing advice or getting our point across.
It’s really important to just listen without an agenda or without a need to respond. And that takes practice, but it’s a habit you can really start to build. And that will really demonstrate a more active listening.
3. Listening to everything
The third is about the importance of listening to everything. Now, there’s quite a famous study that talks about the percentage breakdown of communication between words, tone and body language. Now, I’m not going to get into that here because the results of that can be fairly disputed. So, I’m going to pop some links in the show notes to that so you can have a read. But the data tells us that body language is the highest percentage of communication with tone and words following.
So, if we take that as a general premise, for me, what it’s really telling me is that all three elements are really important. And as someone that does a lot of listening in their work, you know, it’s a big part of how we diagnose the root cause of chaos in organisations, it’s important for us to have that rich experience. And we can listen to the words people use, the tone that they use when they say them, and their expressions and their movements while they’re doing that.
All of that combined is a much richer experience. So, making sure that you’re listening to everything is really important. When we tune into the words people use, it really helps us understand how we can engage with them better, how we can influence, how we can persuade if that’s what we’re looking to do.
4. Why are you listening?
Now, the fourth is about being clear why you’re listening. Now, this one feels quite relevant for every aspect of business really. So, whether it’s a conversation or a meeting, you know, when we talk about meetings being more effective or time being more effective, it’s about making sure that we’re being clear about why we’re having the conversation. And this is the same for listening. If someone’s giving you their time and you’re listening to them, or they’re listening to you, there has to be an outcome to that. You know, what’s the point of this? What are you going to do with this information? Why are we sharing this? And that’s important that we all know that so that we’re all clear about why we’re listening.
And importantly, we have to have action that follows that. So, that’s important to remember that the outcome is always about action. We’re not listening for the sake of listening.
5. Build strategies for internal communication
Now, the fifth and final point is around having a strategy and not listening solely if there is a crisis. And I say this because I’ve had experience where organisations have only got people together during a crisis.
And that leads people to thinking they’re only going to have a voice when something bad is happening, or it leads people to feel that the only time they’re brought together something bad is going to happen.
So it’s important to make sure that there is a clear strategy around listening to employees, that there’s a strategy for internal communication that involves conversations, involves two-way dialogue. And that makes sure that people feel valued, they feel listened to, they know that their opinion counts. And that’s incredibly important, whether you’re going through change or not, making sure that’s part of the internal communication strategy is really vital.
Now, I could have doubled this list and talked about lots of different aspects of listening, one of which would be about the person delivering the message.
The person delivering the message is so important, but I’m going to leave that topic to Stephen Martin and Joseph Marks, who wrote the book Messengers: Eight Ways to Get Heard. It’s a book that features in my own book, because it’s so important for us to understand the importance of why we listen to some people and why we don’t listen to others. But I’ve put some links in the show notes for you to have a read of that if that’s a specific area of interest for you as well.
What’s important for us all is that we really truly listen to people and then we take action. You know, it’s easy to tick a box and listen and not do anything with it, but that creates huge issues around trust inside organisations. So, ultimately, if you’re listening, you have to be prepared to do something as a result.
Thank your for listening!
Now, in my next episode, I’m going to be talking about how to manage stakeholders. I want to get into some of the detail around the RASCII model to help you think about decision making, but I also want to explore some other techniques to look at how you might categorise some of your stakeholders and why stakeholder relationships are important. It’s easy to work at pace that we forget about different stakeholders.
So, as always, thank you for listening. You know, I’d love to continue this conversation on Twitter or LinkedIn. So, please connect, ask questions, share your thinking with me, and details are in the show notes on how to stay in touch.
