Active Listening is a Management Superpower
Tactics to improve your listening and build trust with your team
Key Tactics
- Prepare for your 1:1’s with daily breathing exercises and specific grounding questions
- Paraphrase the speaker’s points to show you’re listening and to clarify ideas
- Embrace silence and avoid scrambling to respond while your counterpart is speaking
- Reserve a few minutes after the 1:1 to schedule followups while they’re fresh in your mind
As 1:1’s have grown to dominate my calendar I’ve reckoned with the shortcomings of my ingrained listening habits. Here I’ll step through how I’ve adapted to improve my verbal communication. I’ve organized these tactics into three phases — preparation, execution, and followthrough.
Preparation
“When the pressure is on, you don’t rise to the occasion — you fall to your highest level of preparation.”— Chris Voss
Even for routine discussions, preparation is the foundation to an effective conversation.
Grounding Questions
Before any 1:1 I take a few minutes and write down a handful of questions. These are always tailored to the particular person I’m meeting. Some examples are “How do you think your collaboration with the new data scientist is going?” or “I’m worried we’re falling behind on project X, what are your thoughts?”
These grounding questions serve two functions.
Drafting them in advance contextually situates my mind. The act of creating them forces me to consider what’s important for my teammate and how they might respond. In this way it’s a useful warmup.
Grounding questions also provide bearing when the discussion falters or even falls off the rails. In the same way that pilots use landmarks to stay oriented, these questions help keep my bearing. By drafting these landmarks I spend less time improvising and more time focused on critical discussions.
Meditation and breathing exercises
I often get excited during 1:1's. Maybe there’s an idea I want to explore or a comment that sends me on a tangent. My breath quickens, my concentration degrades, and my ability to thoughtfully process what I’m hearing evaporates.
Through a daily meditation practice I’ve developed a greater awareness of my breath. When I notice it quickening I take some deep breaths and slow down. As a result I’m less impulsive, less inclined to provide quick reflexive answers, and more comfortable with the occasional silence that is critical to deep thinking.
I spend about 20 minutes meditating each morning but the particulars don’t matter. Practice at any time will improve this awareness.
Execution
Pay attention to non-verbal signals
Non-verbal signals provide a map to deep issues that are harder to articulate. These difficult problems are precisely where I can leverage the most impact as a leader.
As an example, perhaps my report raises their pitch and tempo while discussing a new PM. The non-verbal (paralinguistic) signal is that there may be anxiety about this new relationship. As an active listener, I note this signal and try to understand if there’s a deeper challenge present.
It’s important to qualify that in isolation these clues are never definitive, merely hints. I shouldn’t assume anyone’s state of mind or idea without explicit confirmation. Kendra Cherry’s Types of Nonverbal Communcation provides a survey of this topic to get started.
Avoid rehearsing your response and embrace the silence
One of my worst listening habits is “rehearsing.” When somebody makes a point I begin formulating my response even while they’re talking. I want to be helpful and a quick response feels like an easy way to signal this. Unfortunately this rehearsal disrupts conversational flow and encourages impulsive responses over more thoughtful problem solving.
This is where those breathing exercises really come in handy. When I feel the urge to answer quickly, I take a deep breath. If the speaker has more to say, they won’t be cut off and I’ll preserve the conversational rhythm. If they are finished, there will be a short pause where I begin formulating my response.
Embracing the silence feels awkward at first. Over time you and your teammate will adjust to the slower pace of the conversation and it won’t feel strange. When you’re thinking, broadcast some non-verbal signals back to the speaker to show that you aren’t just spaced out. We’ll touch on this next.
Paraphrase, mirror, and clarify
Nobody likes to feel like they’re talking to a wall. While your teammate is speaking, be sure to signal that you’re following along. There are a few easy ways to do this and none of them are disruptive if properly employed:
- Non-verbal affirmations: Even something simple like nodding your head or stroking your chin lets your teammate know you’re present in the conversation and formulating your thoughts. These are particularly useful when you’re formulating your response in silence.
- Paraphrasing and mirroring: Here you’re repeating the key ideas back to the speaker. I prefer paraphrasing, i.e. summarizing their idea using my own words. For me mirroring feels a bit too algorithmic, but to each their own.
- Clarifying Questions: This is obvious, but if you’re unsure about something that was just said, ask! It’s better to ask quickly rather than wait until the conversation has drifted elsewhere.
Followthrough
The easiest way to degrade trust is to not deliver. It’s inevitable that verbal commitments disappear into the ether, but our job is to minimize these errors and ensure we stay true to our word.
After each meeting, set aside five minutes to handle any followup work. This could be creating a tracking task, scheduling a meeting, or sending a message to a 3rd party. The tricky part is to keep this five minute gap, especially when you’ve got back to back meetings. In my experience, jumping from one meeting to the next is when I’m most likely to forget something.
To implement this I reserve 5 minutes of free space on my calendar after each meeting, so often my meetings are usually 25 minutes instead of 30.
Listening is a skill we can practice and improve. Becoming a better listener builds stronger relationships with your teammates. What tactics have you incorporated to up-level your listening abilities? Share below!
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