How to Teach Your Managers the Art of Active Listening

Active listening is one of the most valuable skills any manager can possess. Understanding this practice and being able to apply it in the workplace can unlock a range of benefits, including:

• More effective and constructive communication
• Stronger relationships between managers and their direct reports
• Better management of challenging situations, such as people experiencing mental health difficulties or conflicts between co-workers

In the long term, making active listening a fundamental part of how your business communicates can lead to commercial and wellbeing advantages such as a more engaged, productive workforce and a more rewarding company culture.

So what can you do to raise awareness of this concept and ensure managers are promoting its adoption throughout the organization?

Start with understanding

To begin with, it's crucial that managers have a good grasp of what active listening is and how it differs from passive listening.

Work towards building a strong understanding of the key characteristics of active listening. These include listeners using body language and eye contact to engage with the speaker, and providing feedback and timely responses to show they've truly absorbed what has been said.

It's important for managers to appreciate that active listening is about not just hearing another person speak, but understanding the sentiment behind their words. This is why it's often necessary for the listener to demonstrate and refine their understanding by repeating back what they've heard and by asking relevant questions.

If you feel awareness of some of these basic elements is lacking, consider investing in dedicated training activities that will help your managers get to grips with active listening and apply it in the most productive way.

Run group exercises

Exercises that bring together groups of people to practice active listening can prove highly beneficial for all involved.

When fulfilling the listener role, participants can become more familiar with the techniques involved in the process and how to apply them in real conversations. As the speaker, they can gain insights into how active listening contributes to feelings of people's views being taken on board and individual experiences being valued by the business as a whole.

There are various exercises that can help to boost understanding and acceptance of active listening. One interesting activity is to divide groups into pairs and designate one person as the speaker and the other as the listener. The speaker is then asked to tell a story from their life - which could be anything from a particularly difficult challenge they overcame to an account of someone who has influenced or inspired them - while the listener has to listen in total silence, engaging only through non-verbal communication.

Afterwards, invite both participants to talk about what the experience was like for them, prompting them with questions such as:

• How did it feel for the speaker to talk without any interruption or spoken contributions from the listener?
• Did they find that non-verbal signals affected how they felt or conveyed their thoughts while speaking?
• How did it feel for the listener to simply take in what was being said without feeling a responsibility to contribute?
• Was the silence uncomfortable or liberating?

Take your lead from the workforce

When it comes to questions of workplace communication and connections between managers and their team members, the most valuable source of guidance will often be the most obvious: your employees.

Make sure you're taking every opportunity to engage and collect views from workers about standards of communication in your company and whether they feel truly 'heard' and understood by their managers.

If the responses you receive show clear scope for improvement in how leaders listen to their employees, try to learn as much as you can about where standards are lacking and how this could be addressed.

This feedback could prove invaluable in your efforts to promote active listening. If people tell you they're constantly raising the same issues but seeing little action to address them, for example, manager training could focus on using active listening to understand the deeper meaning behind people's words.