“I wish he would just listen to me.”

Listening deeply is harder than most of us think. But getting better at it is essential to leadership — especially right now.

Earlier this year, I shared our new research report on how tech and design folks’ relationships to their work have shifted over the past two years (if you missed it, grab it here — it’s a fascinating read, based on responses from 236 people). The longer I spend immersed in that research, the more I keep coming back to one simple idea:

We all need to listen more.

Especially those of us in leadership roles. Especially right now.

Here’s why: In our survey, we asked respondents how supportive their managers had been over the past two years on a scale of 1 to 5. And then we asked two open-ended follow-ups:

What’s the most valuable thing your direct manager has done to support your needs in the past year?

What do you wish your manager would do differently to better support you at work?

When we assessed the data, I noticed something: those who’d rated their managers’ support over the past year highly — a 4 or 5 — tended to say that the most helpful thing their manager had done was just listen to them. It was far and away the most common theme we saw. We heard things like:

• “Listen and cultivate a relationship where I feel safe and understood. Oh my god the value of this…cannot even express how much it means to me.”
• “Creating space to vent, ask for support (and then follow up on them). I can’t say enough about how much psychological safety my current director has built, she’s a gem.”
• “Genuinely listening to me, and not making assumptions, or making me feel like I’ve failed, when I’ve been struggling.”
• “Listened. She has never tried to sugarcoat any feedback or dismissed concerns. She’s always put the ‘human’ side of work first and seems to be very invested in my success as more than just an employee.”

We also looked at those who had rated their managers’ support poorly — a 1 or 2. When asked what they wished their managers would do differently, they said things like:

• “We never actually have a conversation about me, my professional development, my goals… Every conversation is about project health and profitability.”
• “I wish he would just listen to me. When I say I’m overworked and need more time to finish something, I want him to hear me and do something. I don’t need compliments… I don’t have imposter syndrome, I have unrealistic deadlines.”
• “Work with me instead of at me.”

The longer I compared these answers, the clearer it became: the managers who listen deeply — who go beyond checking in on tasks and instead create the space and safety for their direct reports to share their experiences — are the ones people want to stick with.

The ones who don’t are driving their people out.

So, like I said: We all need to listen more. It’s a simple idea — but that doesn’t make it easy to practice.

I used to think I was pretty good at listening. And in some ways, I was. When I was consulting on content strategy and product design, I could interview stakeholders or users for a day or two, and come out the other end with a perspective on the problem space and our approach to it. I could ask questions that would get underneath the surface-level issues. I knew how to pay attention to people’s word choice, body language, and energy.

That was great as a consultant working on business problems — after all, problem-solving was my job. Whether the problems we were solving were strategic, structural, or editorial, my job was to diagnose the situation, and come up with answers. And so all my listening was oriented in that direction: assessing and fixing.

I bet the same is true for a lot of you. In fields like design or engineering, much of the work is about assessing problems, and then solving them. We hone skills like critique and analysis. We brainstorm solutions. We align stakeholders. We fix things.

Those are all great skills to have. But what I’ve learned over the past few years — often the hard way — it’s that when we only listen through a lens of assessing or fixing, we miss so much.

Especially when what the other party needs to share is their experience.

Especially when what they most want is to feel understood — to feel seen and heard and important.

And those are exactly the kinds of conversations people need right now — which means it’s time for all of us who manage or lead people in any way to get better at listening. Not just listening to judge, or to respond, or to evaluate. But listening deeply, holistically, and non-judgmentally.

So what does deep listening look like? Look back at those quotes above, from the people describing highly supportive managers. Deep listening is about letting go of your own agenda, and allowing yourself to be fully present for the other party.

The challenge is, when you’re listening to someone on your team, you almost certainly do have your own agenda. You might be feeling pressure from your boss to move faster and get more done. You might be worried about hitting OKRs or concerned about your own performance review. You might have a vision for the team’s growth, and be excited about implementing it.

None of those things is wrong or bad. But each of those agendas will get in the way of listening deeply — because as soon as we’re focused on ourselves, we stop being truly open to someone else. Instead of listening with compassion, we start thinking about all the ways their experience conflicts with our own. We start making assumptions about why they feel the way they do. We start justifying our way of seeing things, trying to convince them that it’s right. We get defensive.

None of those will make our people feel heard.

What will? Simply pausing our own agenda — for the moment — and getting curious about their experience. What has work felt like for them lately? What’s hard for them right now? Rather than judging whether those things should be hard for them, deep listening is about simply accepting and acknowledging what you’re hearing. You might say something like, “I hear how hard this has been for you,” or “Thank you for trusting me with this.”

This is also a great time to have some open, compassionate questions in your back pocket — questions that encourage the other party to share more fully. These might be things like “What kinds of support would be most helpful to you?” or “What’s draining you most right now?”

If this kind of listening feels uncomfortable, you’re not alone. Most of us learned to listen for three reasons: to judge (Are they right or wrong?), to respond (What will I say back?), or to understand the facts (What really happened?). But what we’ve heard loud and clear in our research is that people need something deeper right now. They need support, compassion, and safety. And the better you get at deep listening, the more you can offer those things to them.

To help you out, I’m sharing a couple tools for deeper listening and better conversations: a handout on listening and acknowledging, and a set of open questions for more compassionate 1:1s. While I made them with managers in mind, I know that every single one of us, in any role, can benefit from these skills.

Happy listening.

This post originally appeared in the April 21, 2022, edition of our newsletter, Nice Work. Subscribe here.