Can you hear me now?
As a leader, you are barraged by the latest management fads, high-tech “solutions” and cutting-edge techniques for achieving results in your company. Did you know that you’re sitting on a mother lode of untapped human wisdom? Mine it by making use of one of your natural-born powers: Listening.The ability to listen is one of the most priceless tools in the 21st Century Leader tool kit. By genuinely listening - paying attention, actively perceiving and receiving information, and hearing what’s said, and better yet, what’s unsaid - you can tap into untold wealth and well-being (or “wellth”) in the organization. Cultivate this skill to identify the latent potential in people to find and nourish previously hidden seeds of creativity and innovation. Listening is as important a talent as strategic planning, managing crises, making decisions and other leadership prerogatives.

This skill is particularly powerful for building vital, high-performance teams and enterprises. Listening helps you…

• Foster rapport and mutual respect with colleagues, clients and vendors
• Discover the unspoken assumptions driving human behavior
• Cultivate a common understanding between people
• Co-create shared purpose, visions and values that inspire collaboration
• Gain valuable feedback for growing yourself and your organization

Becoming a deeper listener gives you the leverage needed for taking your leadership to a higher level.

Listening: a leveling act
Without genuine listening, we experience poverty in relationships and communications.

You probably think that you do listen, and you do. Unless trained otherwise, however, the extent and depth of your listening most likely leaves room for improvement.

The work of Laura Whitworth (author of Co-Active Coaching, 1998), combined with Wisdom Works’ experiences in training senior executives and leaders at all levels, highlight at least four levels to listening. Each succeeding level expands your attention and sensitivity to what is present, as well as what might become:

Level 1) Internal Listening - at Level 1, listening is autobiographical.
While you hear the words of others, you’re primarily interested in what
the content means to you personally. Your purpose at Level 1 is to meet your needs.

Level 2) Focused Listening - at Level 2, your target is the person speaking. Like a laser, you tune in to words, rhythm, pitch, emotion and body language, which help you better understand the overall message. (What does she seem to be feeling? What seems to be motivating her?) You aren’t focused on yourself, your agenda or your thoughts, or what to say next. When it’s time to speak, like a mirror, you reflect back what you understood so that the speaker feels fully heard and valued.

Level 3) Global Listening - Level 3 is “gestalt,” or whole, listening. You listen to the speaker, as well as attend to the surrounding environment, and you notice the impact you’re having on others. Level 3 listening brings to play your ears, your eyes, body, feelings, intuitions and a receptive mind. You are open, softly focused and sensitive to the slightest changes in the conversation, which may give subtle hints as to what to do next.

Level 4) Generative Listening - Level 4 is quite refined - it is listening as a creative act. You become a finely tuned receiver that picks up what currently is, and also what wants to be. Through the power of generative listening you discover that something wholly different is elicited: a new idea (perhaps a radical product design), a new awareness (such as grasping with fresh clarity the nuances of a client relationship), or a higher-level understanding of an issue or crisis. Strategic questions and solutions that you hadn’t considered before emerge without you forcing them to. They come to bear, in part, because willfulness and ego have temporarily taken a back seat. You fully let go of preconceptions and biases; you sit patiently in the “not knowing,” unthreatened by differences of opinion and worldview; and, you allow the act of listening to birth something truly original and worthwhile.

People are hardwired to listen through their personal history and experience. This means that, as leaders, many of us get stuck at Level 1 because our ability to simply be curious - to seek another perspective - often becomes blocked by old mental models and routine listening approaches we’ve used in the past. We automatically assume that we know what others will say when faced with a familiar situation, or we believe that what has worked for us will work for them. We’re full of “what we know,” leaving little room for fresh perspective. We forget: every person is dynamic, every situation in a state of flux. There is always more than initially meets the ear.

Amp up your listening
You’re flooded with information 24/7, subject to your unexamined beliefs and conditioned to hear things in a habitual, often selective, way. So, you may be asking: is it even possible to build the listening muscle? Absolutely! Here are three steps you can take.

Step 1: Identify Your Level of Listening in the Moment.
Distinguish which level of listening is currently in action. When meeting with others, ask, “Am I listening from Level 1, 2, 3 or 4 right now?”

Step 2: Examine What You Naturally Hear.
Ask yourself: To what is my listening attuned? Do you naturally hear…

• Questions or Answers?
• Problems or Opportunities?
• Emotions? Words? Gestures?
• What’s said? What’s not said?
• What’s present? What’s missing?
• The past? The present? The future?
• Solutions that fit your mind-set or take you out-of-the-box?
• The details or events or the patterns driving the events to unfold?
• What’s emerging on the political scene, in the marketplace or in your organization?

The content of what you hear can clue you in to what you miss. So, once you become aware of the channels you readily tune in to, experiment with new frequencies up and down the dial.

Plus, take note of any blocks in your ability to listen. Understanding what you listen for and noticing the blocks that get in your way give you a great launch pad from which to expand your listening repertoire.

Step 3: Practice New Listening Skills.
To move to Level 2 listening, experiment with new skills at this level, which involve reflecting back to speakers what you saw or heard or understood from them. Here are some examples:

Bystanding
“I notice that you’ve remarked on Bob’s latest decision
three times…”

Paraphrasing
“What I hear you say is…”

Clarifying
“I’m still unclear. Can you tell me more about…?”

At this stage you make it plain to others that you are sincerely striving to hear them. Verify whether you’ve understood what they’re conveying, and use this feedback to refine your Level 2 skills.

To shift your listening to Level 3,

• Heighten your awareness of language, body and emotional cues (I notice that my jaw is tightening as we talk about this issue…)
• Pay close attention to your intuitions (My gut tells me that we’re going in the right direction, even though we don’t have all of the information we want…)
• Notice the background of the conversation (It seems as though the whole room just settled down during this dialogue.)

Now you are using your whole being as an instrument of highly
aware listing.

Up for the challenge of listening at Level 4?

• Practice remaining open to what’s possible, unattached to particular outcomes and patiently trusting of the process.
• Notice when entirely new questions and ideas emerge, as if your listening is somehow attracting them.

Remember: Level 4 listening is akin to being a midwife; the act of profound listening can literally bring forth a new quality of thinking, conversation, and most importantly, results.

Great leadership relies on listening
Great leaders foster greatness in people and organizations. They also usher in new views, value systems, inventions and solutions to improve quality of life overall. They create inviting, fertile environments where healthy relations are built, accomplish incredible work and produce meaningful ways of doing business.

These 21^st Century Leaders inherently know what author Brenda Ueland underscores: Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. When we really listen to people there is an alternating current, and this recharges us so that we never get tired of each other. We are constantly being re-created.

Simply by committing to a deeper kind of listening, you too can serve as the generative force in your life and your organization, moving beyond leadership as usual to leadership as unlimited possibility.

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