Listening is hard when you don’t feel heard.
As a manager, you probably dedicate the majority of your time to making sure that your employees have exactly what they need to be effective at their jobs. You’re spending a lot of mental real estate trying to create a better functioning business—always looking for new ways to refine certain practices, and make the workflow that much easier for everyone.
But what happens when you don’t do enough listening?
The reality is, we get very caught up in ourselves.
We trick ourselves into thinking that we’re the most important people in the room when in reality, you have to value your employees as much as anyone else.
When all you’re doing is, well, doing, you start to miss the little things. You get such a bee in your bonnet about how the business is supposed to be run, that you forget about the people who are working so tirelessly to make sure it runs. You stop considering personalities and start to see everything as numbers and room for improvement.
That’s why managers should spend a lot more time listening than doing. Below you’ll find four more reasons why it’s not such a bad idea. If you can consider these principles for yourself, you’ll be surprised about how much it transforms the way that you manage.
Challenge yourself this week to do some more listening.
Get out and talk to your employees.
Prompt them with tough questions and dig at the roots of their answers. Give them a safe place to create some genuine honesty, and you’ll find that people at every level have something to say. The trick will be turning it all into positives.
You Shouldn’t Put Your Needs In Front Of Your Employees’
The first step in listening is recognising some of the fear you have in doing it.
It may sound silly to admit that you’re afraid to listen, but a major part of why you might not do it is because you’re afraid of answers. You worry that employees may criticise your hard work, or they might not like you as much as you thought.
It’s totally valid and human of you to have some fears, but they will stop you from being a good manager. When you can get past that fear and create safe environment for your employees to talk, you’re communicating a very strong message that your employees matter. You’re showing that you value their opinion, and that’s going to create heaps of mutual respect. That breeds better business for sure.
Check The Log Before The Speck
There’s an old proverb in the Bible that says something to the effect of: Check the log in your own eye before removing the speck from someone else’s. It essentially means that we all have the tendency to criticise others, when the biggest flaws are right in front of (or on) our own faces.
When we do a lot of talking, it can get us in a fairly critical mode that’s exceptionally dangerous to have as a manager. You start to walk around, power-tripping, telling others what’s wrong with them, when in reality you’ve got a major problem of being hyper-critical to deal with yourself.
Worse yet, you’re shutting people up, because they won’t want to be criticised.
That’s the opposite of creating opportunities for growth in your business. When you stifle people with your criticism, you show them that you don’t value them. When you stop correcting other people’s specks, and look at your own log-jammed eye, you’ll find that you create a humility people really respect.
You’ll Be More Engaged
When you’re doing a lot of listening, you’re tuning in to your employees.
You’re actually teaching yourself, as you go, to become a better listener. In fact, good listening will get you into a rhythm where you can start to communicate with your employees on a non-verbal level. They already do it all the time in their frustrations or joys. They don’t always share them out loud, but like a good parent, you can tell when your kid is happy or sad.
When you’re doing a great job of listening to your employees, you’ll be more sensitive to what’s going on in their lives. Rather than confining them to your pre-conceived definition, it will help you to engage with problems in their most basic and raw ways—helping to empower them to be their best selves.
It Will Make You A Smarter Manager
When you’re putting your ears to the ground, you’re getting the best sense of what’s coming next. You’ll learn things about employees you may have never considered before, and you’ll be getting field experiences relayed first hand—rather than trying to spend months figuring out why a problem occurred that all the employees had seen coming.
Listening is an amazing tool because it helps you to get a sense for the inner workings of your business. People identify the listeners in any situation, and they’ll be drawn to you as a listener when they know they can confide.
Down the road, good listening is going to have given you unparalleled experience as a manager. You’ll understand people, the inner workings of a business, and ultimately how to handle the sticky situations that few people are ever talking about—all because you were the one who listened.