You Won’t Lead If You Can’t Listen

One way leaders can show care for others is by listening to them. The more you listen to another person, the more they feel valued by you. President Theodore Roosevelt is credited with saying, “No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.” When others believe they have a voice, they feel they have a place. I often say, “A leader that never listens is a leader that will never be listened to.”

It’s been said that God gave us two ears and one mouth for a reason: to listen twice as much as we talk. A person will never gain the respect of others if they cannot listen. Listening is more than just hearing, though. Hearing is the physical act of gathering information through the ears. Listening is the mental processing and emotional understanding of the information we take in. To listen well, you must be fully present in the moment, absorbing both the verbal and nonverbal cues of the person before you. Listening is the awareness of body language, tone, eye contact, and the conceptual context accompanying what is being said. Listening this way, you can truly know the heart of the person speaking to you. Businessman Peter Drucker, said, “The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.”

Here are three quick tips to be a better listener as a leader:

1) Slow Down

Don’t be in a hurry to get your agenda out and move on. Give people an opportunity to express themselves while you engage them. It’s amazing what you can find out when you slow down enough to actually let someone else talk. When dealing with tasks move fast, when dealing with people move slow. And on a side-note, do not knee-jerk react to people’s words and actions. Slow down enough to gather yourself before responding out of emotion, it’s not worth losing your influence over.

2) Ask Questions

Lead with questions. There’s no better way to truly value someone than to ask them their opinions and thoughts. If you find yourself doing all the talking with your team, you’re not leading, you’re blocking engagement. For every moment you are talking someone else is not able to. I am not saying to be silent, I am just saying keep your communication in balance. Remember, communication is about two or more people conversing, not you monologing.

3) Focus On Them

Do not be enticed to weave yourself into people’s stories. I am tempted to do this all of the time in conversations I have with people. Just the other day an individual was telling me a story about their vacation to the beach. Guess what I wanted to do? I wanted to tell them about my vacation at the beach! I cut them off and started to revolve the whole conversation around my trip, and what I did, where I went to eat, how I did this and that, and on and on. I hijacked the conversation by telling them my story rather than listening to their story. No one likes to be cut off or “upped one” as though their topic wasn’t important enough to talk about. To influence others, focus on them, not on yourself. Weaving your stories over the top of someone else’s stories only leads to disconnecting with them.

You won’t lead if you can’t listen. Make sure you become a listening type of leader and you’ll gain more and more influence with others.