Does your team trust the leadership?
How active listening can strengthen trust and improve team culture.
It has been said there are grave dangers for humanity as we lose the skill to listen. While such a deep perspective is for a different newsletter, poor listening damages trust with product leaders and technology leaders. With minimal listening, leaders will quickly find themselves out of touch with reality, unempathetic to their teams' concerns or desires, weaker relationships, and shrink their influence. True listening is a skill high-performance leaders practice and make habitual. The outcome of listening more is to strengthen relationships, learn and inspire collaboration. This week's Confident Product Leader focuses on active listening at work, meaning regularly and attentively listening to staff, peers and your boss.
Avoid a “them and us” culture
The board of directors or CEOs of companies often invite me to help with their struggling product engineering functions. Whenever I work with a department struggling, the product managers and engineers share their need for more trust in leadership. This feeling of lack of trust is damaging, it erodes any commitment to the purpose, stifles ambition, encourages jobsworth behaviour with little empowerment, and creates a “them and us” culture.
Working with product leaders or technology leaders in such environments, they will tell me their message is not resonating with teams and individuals simply don’t care. They start to question if they have hired the right people. They find themselves restricted by an overwhelming workload managing issues and putting out fires. The leader loses trust in their teams, and the teams lose trust in them.
At its worst, there is a communication breakdown, where people stop talking to the leader. On multiple occasions, I have seen teams sit in quarterly planning meetings with a product leader, agreeing to the deadlines the leader hopes to achieve. Then, immediately after they privately say that the deadline is impossible and will never be achieved, these team members have told me, “It is easier not to bother speaking up. We are not listened to anyway”. The fallout of such an environment is project costs spiralling out of control, disappointed customers, loss of revenue, staff churn, missed targets, and the C-suite finding itself in a difficult position.
Inspire collaboration
Outcome leaders say they want to inspire collaboration, support individuals to succeed, and demonstrate value for their teams. This requires empathy with individuals, solid relationships, and being approachable.
However, you likely feel overworked and time-poor with a never-ending to-do list, right? This makes it very difficult to focus your attention on one thing. You may feel you are juggling many things, and if you take your eye off the ball, everything will collapse. Guess what? It won’t, I promise! All these things will wait for you, and giving an individual your undivided attention for 15 to 20 minutes will only help them and you.
How quickly you’ll see a positive impact from active listening might surprise you. In many cases, after only a few weeks, you will have a deeper insight into problems, new perspectives on team members, and improved communication.
Real-world example
Last year, I was coaching Rob (not his real name), a CPTO (Chief Product Technical Officer), in a UK-based series A b2b startup offering automation tools. Rob's department comprised four product engineering squads, a head of engineering and two designers. He had eight direct reports. The company served 800+ customers and was starting a fundraising journey.
Rob was very busy, with enormous demands on his time. He and the CEO knew the culture in product engineering was turning sour. Before they scaled up, Rob was involved at a code level and worked closer with everyone, but now he needed to regain the trust of the old guard and foster trust with newer engineers he barely knew.
As I worked with Rob, we evaluated several leadership areas and agreed on a plan to focus on three specific changes he could make. One of these outcome habits was to listen to people in his department more, both his direct reports and skipping to the staff engineers.
Rob introduced at least 15 minutes of active listening into his 1:1s with his DRs. He set up 30-minute sessions with other staff members, predominantly for him to listen. After each meeting, he spent a few minutes reflecting on his learning and making appropriate notes.
Within days of starting this new practice, he had gleaned insights which could inform improvements. After a couple of weeks, he could see improved communication with his DRs and broadly increased feedback in meetings. A small sample of his learnings and actions is below:
Two of his DRs were highly reflective and struggled with demands for immediate decisions without obtaining a fuller context. He changed his DRs meeting, so there was always some pre-read on critical decisions. While most of his DRs never read it, the two that needed it did. They started inputting into the conversation, and their influence had positive implications.
He learned about outside-of-work stress that an individual whose performance had dropped was struggling with. He empathised and created flexibility in working hours, showing support and relieving unnecessary pressure.
Multiple conversations highlighted flaws in the estimation process, which he coached the head of engineering to improve.
It became clear some of his decisions intending to help teams and increase productivity were the root cause of wasted development time. He had accidentally fallen into the HiPPO (Highest Paid Persons Opinion) trap. This insight led to a concentrated effort on his part to avoid command control and ask better questions to challenge and support his product managers.
Rob made active listening a habit. He learned to embrace active listening beyond planned meetings, and when people reached out for an ad-hoc meeting with the invite “we need to talk”, or a conversation started “I have a problem”, he switched into listening mode.
This habit contributed towards culture improvements in his department and strengthened trust between his team and himself.
How to actively listen
There is quite a lot written about actively listening. When I coach leaders to listen, we focus on these 4 key steps.
Undivided attention.
Demonstrate listening.
Playback.
Question curiously.
The first, undivided attention, is the easiest to understand but probably the most difficult to do. You give the other person all your attention by ignoring distractions. The easiest way to achieve this is to remove distractions. A small meeting room has fewer distractions than a coffee shop, making it easier to give your entire attention to the other person. In a world where we are always connected to the Internet, devices are a real challenge for you to ignore. It might be your laptop, smartphone or your smartwatch. At a minimum, put these things on do not disturb. You need to sustain your undivided attention throughout active listening. It's not just at the start.
The second is to demonstrate listening, which may be verbal or non-verbal. Nonverbal cues are great as they do not interfere with the other person's flow. They may look like a nod, a smile or other facial expressions. When they are verbal, make short confirming noises such as a “yep”, “ok, or “umm”. It is also essential to embrace silence, so keep your mouth shut even for longer than might feel comfortable.
Playback is to be carefully sprinkled throughout the conversation. There will be natural pauses to check if you have understood correctly, for example, “It sounds like you are saying… “ or “Just let me paraphrase …. Have I understood?”. If they need to correct you, then do not argue just listen and avoid playback that is judgemental.
Finally, you must question curiously to guide the other person where to go deeper. Typical questions will include “Tell me more?”, “How did that feel?”, or “You said… can you expand?”. They are open-ended questions and simple. Avoid complexity. You are the listener, remember.
Is all this attention and effort needed?
Leaders sometimes dismiss active listening. It requires purposeful behaviour, which does zap energy. They often feel they are listening all the time. Research from as far back as 1954 by Nicholas & Lewis shows we only retain 25% of what we hear. There is more recent research around teaching and training, showing we forget most of what we hear.
We must listen if we want to learn and better understand the situations and people. Julian Treasure articulates this well in his TED talk: "Conscious listening creates understanding. Without listening, you can’t understand.”
We should also consider the opposite: what happens without listening? You would find yourself in a vacuum of information. As an individual, not being heard is very frustrating and can damage personal self-esteem and confidence. This is not how great leaders want others to feel.
Influential leaders need to show empathy
EQ and empathy are vital traits for successful leadership. Empathy is often misunderstood, and the ideal type of empathy for business leadership differs from friendship, parenting, and other relationships. Various models are used to understand empathy. When I coach leaders I use the simple three categories below:
Emotional empathy is where you mirror the other person's emotions and feel the same.
Cognitive empathy is understanding and recognising the other person's emotions.
Compassionate empathy is a hybrid of emotional and cognitive empathy. It captures the desire to immediately act and help the other person.
Leadership types can be mapped to empathy. The 2x2 below has an x-axis of emotional level and a y-axis of cognition level. You will not always be a leader in one square, but you can foster a preference and default. It is generally recognised (see HBR, Forbes, etc) that low emotion and high cognition are more effective for business leaders. I have labelled this “Inspirational Leader” on the diagram.
A best mates leader has high cognitive and high emotional empathy. To illustrate their behaviour, if a team member explains they need a pay rise to get out of debt, they act immediately and tell them they will find a way to give them a pay rise. Despite the fact, they know it’s against policy and there’s no budget.
An emotional leader has high emotional empathy. They might burst into tears when the other person is crying. As a leader, this is not helping the individual.
The manager leader has no empathy and behaves almost robotically with cold replies to people’s struggles.
The inspirational leader has high cognitive empathy. Using the earlier example of a team member asking for a pay rise, an inspirational leader will understand their financial situation and recognise it will cause stress and difficulties. They will, sensitively, create clarity as to what the person needs to achieve to receive a positive pay review at the appropriate time.
An essential tool you can use to achieve cognitive empathy is active listening.
Common mistakes
There is nothing complicated about active listening, but some mistakes might trip you up. The first is to avoid taking copious notes. You are missing the moment, and the person talking can feel they are being ignored by you. When you note take, you lose eye contact, which is crucial for showing you are giving the person all your focus. Note-taking can also make the other person nervous, as they wonder what you are writing down, perhaps is negative.
When questioning curiously, using the word “why” is tempting. Rephrase the question using “how” or “what” instead. “Why” can be interpreted as challenging and judgemental, which breaks the trust and might stop the other person from sharing.
It can be challenging to ignore your devices if you need help with this - do not take your smartphone into the meeting.
Top tips to getting started
It is easier to start practising active listening with your direct reports. You have 1:1s booked with them already. Can you find 15 minutes in each 1:1 to actively listen?
After the 1:1 spend a few minutes and write down what you learned during the listening. This reflection will help you get more from the habit, and it will reinforce how valuable it is.
As the technique feels more comfortable and natural, consider triggers alerting you to switch to active listening mode. It might be a phrase such as “I have a problem.”
When are you going to start practising active listening, tomorrow?
Further learning
I referred to Julian Treasure, and he has a great TED talk on listening in general.
In one of my leadership training programs, I have a module on active listening, below is a video which covers the basics of active listening.
This cheat sheet might come in handy to review just before you go into a planned active listening session.
If you want more help, you can find out about product leader coaching with me at my website www.righttoleft.co.uk.