You're Nodding, but are you Listening?

I've recently spent some time exploring a few dominant personal traits and inclinations, and how they can be perceived as strengths or weaknesses in my professional life. Because of this, I have been easily distracted by articles touting leadership qualities, and debating behaviors that make somebody an effective manager or leader. One characteristic that seems to be a common thread in most of my reading is that to inspire somebody to follow you and help you implement your vision, you must be a good listener.

This is absolutely logical, in that you can't reasonably provide a purpose and direction to an individual or a team unless you understand what is motivating them, as well as what challenges they are struggling with. However, one HBR article highlighted that empathy is what makes this leap from hearing what your team has to say to truly understanding their position and perspective.

Paul Bennett, Chief Creative Officer at IDEO, shared “for most of my twenties I assumed that the world was more interested in me than I was in it, so I spent most of my time talking, usually in a quite uninformed way, about whatever I thought, rushing to be clever, thinking about what I was going to say to someone rather than listening to what they were saying to me.” This struck a chord with me. Not because I could ever qualify myself as clever or even wanting to appear clever - but because I would like to focus on developing a better understanding of how I could be helpful to people around me. The empathy is key to this idea - you have to actually care about what the answer is in order for your questions to be effective. This applies to personal relationships just as much as professional interactions.

It's a solid networking principle that people love to talk about themselves, so asking questions that allow them to open up to you personally tends to engage people on a higher level than simply discussing a common interest. This requires an intention to remove your ego from the conversation and slow down and learn from other perspectives, instead of defensively debating based on your own point of view(which might not always be interesting to other people). My father is an excellent example of this concept - he is always the most interested person in the room, and he asks detailed questions for the sake of genuine curiosity. I don't know whether this is just in his INTJ-engineer nature, or if this is something he has cultivated over the years, but it is definitely a skill I would like to intentionally practice and augment this year.