Great Things Happen When Leaders Listen

By Mark Fulton

Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton once flew his personal airplane to Mt. Pleasant, Texas, and instructed his co-pilot to meet him 100 or so miles down the road. Walton then flagged down a Wal-Mart truck and rode along to the next stop in order to “chat with the driver.”

Ben Feldman was the first insurance salesman to pass the goal of $25 million in one year — a figure he later doubled. Feldman was New York Life’s leading salesman for more than two decades. He achieved this distinction while living and working in East Liverpool, a small town of 25,000 on the Ohio River. When asked his secret, he said: Work hard. Think big. Listen very well.

Proctor & Gamble publicized an 800 number in the 1960s to serve its customers. The toll-free number produced an added benefit: information about its customers’ laundry habits. The company discovered that the introduction of new fabrics into the marketplace had caused the average washing temperature to drop 15 degrees. This tidbit led to the development of a new product: All-Temperature Cheer, one of the most popular detergents on the market today.

How well do you listen to your employees, customers and vendors? Do you have an organized approach to chatting with them about their opinions and ideas? Have you purposely sought to develop your listening skills to a higher level? Hearing is one of the body’s five senses, but listening is an art that requires real effort to do well.

In his book Leader Effectiveness Training (L.E.T): The No-Lose Way to Release the Productive Potential of People, author Thomas Gordon makes a case for developing the skill of active listening. According to Gordon, active listening is a technique that allows the listener to assure the message sender that the listener understands what is communicated. This is accomplished through frequent and continuous feedback from the listener in response to what the sender is saying.

“Active Listening is certainly not complex,” Gordon writes. “Listeners need only restate, in their own language, their impression of the expression of the sender. It’s a check: Is my impression acceptable to the sender?”

Sound easy? It isn’t — at least not at first. More than merely repeating or mirroring what the sender has said, active listening involves “decoding” the sender’s message and expressing what you think the sender is feeling or experiencing. By proving that you understand the message and the feelings behind the words, you encourage the sender to keep talking and go deeper into the subject of the discussion.

Here’s an example:

Sender: I can’t believe I worked all night on that report and today they postponed the meeting where I was going to deliver it.

Listener: You’re feeling pretty angry about putting in so much effort and then not having the opportunity to show what you’ve done.

OK, it sounds a little strange, but Gordon argues that mastering active listening will enable you to convey empathy and acceptance and to facilitate problem-solving — important ingredients of enlightened management.

What’s the payoff for being a good listener? People who feel understood and accepted tend to be more likely to say what’s on their mind. And that can lead to creative thinking that might otherwise be smothered. “Our best ideas come from clerks and stockboys,” Sam Walton said. Wal-Mart’s success at giving customers what they want speaks for itself. Somebody was listening to the customers and somebody listened to the listeners.

Another benefit of active listening is that it helps people solve their own problems by keeping the responsibility for coming up with a solution with the one who “owns the problem.”

“Leaders who get subordinates to solve their own problems are making a sound investment that will pay off with many benefits,” writes Gordon. “Their subordinates will become less dependent on their leaders, more self-directing, more self-sufficient and more capable of solving problems on their own.”

Gordon identifies 12 roadblocks to problem- solving, which are listener responses that tend to short-circuit leadership effectiveness. A roadblock response tries to change rather than accept the sender by trying to make the sender think, feel or behave differently. These roadblock responses — commanding, threatening, preaching, arguing, blaming and some others that will surprise you — tend to take responsibility away from the owner and deposit it in the hands of the leader.

As Ben Feldman of New York Life demonstrated, being a good listener is also good business. People tend to trust someone who listens well. And trust is one of the key ingredients in a customer’s decision to buy.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk once said, “One of the best ways to persuade others is with your ears — by listening to them.” This from the guy who sold U.S. political leaders on military involvement in Vietnam. OK, so trust can be misplaced sometimes.

The leader who practices good listening habits and teaches his or her team to do the same will generate a work climate characterized by openness, creativity and loyalty — factors that tend to lead to a fatter bottom line.

If you still aren’t convinced that improving your listening skills is worthwhile, remember this wise saying: It is better to remain quiet and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.

Copyright 1999 © Mark S. Fulton