#6 - Knowing me, Knowing you - Communication issue 1
The importance of active listening, part 1
Over the last two weeks I’ve focused on issues around remote working and hybrid working. In the course of discussing those issues I touched on the key importance of active listening, and suggested that it is a core skill for managers and leaders in order to be responsive to their team members and their needs.
This week’s email to me comes from Anastasia, who is a relatively junior in-house lawyer in Government Legal in Australia. Her email to me expresses frustration at her line manager’s failure to listen to, and respond to her particular needs. As I commented in last week’s issue, lawyers aren’t universally renowned for their listening skills (as an ex-lawyer, I take the Fifth myself) – and I am devoting this issue and next week’s issue of Practical Counsel to the importance of active listening, and what active listening actually means.
‘Active listening’ is an expression often chucked around in discussion, but rarely dissected and still less often exemplified through expressed behaviours. This week I’m going to try to define what active listening is, and why it is important. Next week I am going to suggest some ways to practise active listening and to improve your skills.
Enjoy reading, and please comment and contribute to the debate by posting direct on Practical Counsel. Also, please write in with your unique people issues to me (jonathan@middleburghassociates.com) - I unequivocally undertake never to reveal your identity and will change key details of your situation so as to preserve your confidentiality and anonymity (unless you don’t want this). I also undertake to write to you personally with my own thoughts and comments on your situation and am always happy to follow up with a call on Zoom or similar.
‘Dear Jonathan’ …. and Jonathan’s Reply
Dear Jonathan,
I enjoyed reading the last two issues of Practical Counsel, both your reply to Siobhan, as a 7 year PQE, and also your reply to Steve, as DGC of a multinational corporate. Both replies resonated with me.
I am in a different workplace situation to both Siobhan and Steve, in that I work for Government Legal in Australia. I’ve been in post for 2 years and this is my first in-house position. I went straight into Government Legal after a brief spell in private practice. I realised that some of the pressures of private practice weren’t for me, although I never expected Government Legal to be easy work.
During the pandemic I’ve been working remotely and juggling the demands of my role with looking after a toddler. Childcare has not been available periodically during the pandemic and my partner also works full-time, and was also working from home during the pandemic. Our home is a relatively small apartment.
We’ve been luckier than many, but it’s still been tough. Superficially my line manager has been supportive and has said ‘all of the right things’. But he’s still piled on the work and has never really seemed fully to understand my situation. He’s asked how it’s going, asked questions about my home set-up … but I haven’t felt he’s really understood what’s been going on for me and how difficult it has been.
What are your thoughts on my situation? I’m aware that I might not have communicated my situation as clearly as I could have done (I’ve often been stressed, tired and semi-incoherent when we’ve had calls); but I don’t think my line manager has been blameless either.
Looking forward to your response.
Anastasia (she / her)
Dear Anastasia,
I was thinking about how to respond to your email when I saw a wonderful video (shared on LinkedIn by my friend and colleague, Joella Bruckshaw. She filmed it at Tate Modern, which is an art gallery / museum in London, the city where both Joella and I live. Here’s a still clip from Joella’s video, which you can find on her LinkedIn feed.
What Joella filmed is a modern art ‘installation’ – a tall tower, looking like a telecoms tower, full of speakers, all blaring out different sounds and different messages.
I instantly shared the post with my followers on LinkedIn.
What a metaphor for this week’s topic of discussion, active listening! For me it is an image capturing how often many of us are in ‘broadcast’ mode, and how rarely many people are in ‘receive’ mode. This is true now more than ever with the proliferation of social media - each individual, and each company, reinventing themselves as a mini-broadcaster, constantly looking for new followers, new people to broadcast their message to.
Lawyers, in my experience, aren’t great listeners. I say this as an ex-Barrister, and having encountered a myriad of Barristers for who one-way communication is the norm, broadcasting largely one-way traffic to their clients and to judges; but not so great at picking up signals coming the other way, and responding to them skillfully. The best Barristers, of course, tend to be highly skillful listeners and this is a key part of their repertoire of skills, for example listening incredibly carefully to a witness they are cross-examining, before asking the next question.
In-house lawyers are no different than other lawyers. Many of them are also poor listeners. They think that they listen well, but that’s not the experience of their team members. Team members often tell me (when I am their external coach / consultant), that their manager doesn’t really hear what they have to say, that their manager is often distracted, sometimes demonstrably dealing with emails or other business while ostensibly giving them ‘full attention’.
So in direct answer to your question, I doubt that it is you who aren’t communicating well. It’s possible, of course, that you aren’t, but I’m going to assume for purposes of this response that you are. And even if you aren’t, it sounds to me like there are some obvious cues that a skilful manager would pick up on, and explore, in order to respond to you and your needs as effectively as possible.
‘Active listening’ is often bandied around as a phrase, but I’m not sure how many people actually understand what it means – and still less practice active listening.
Active listening means listening fully and with entire concentration – listening not just to the words that are being said, but also listening for the content of what it is being said; listening in order to tune into the feelings of the speaker; and listening in order to be able to respond to the intent of the speaker. It means attending to both the speaker’s verbal and non-verbal cues – not so easy if listening by phone; and not as easy when listening on a video call as listening when face-to-face.
Active listening is important – and effective – because it helps the listener to move beyond what the speaker is saying (at the ‘expressed’ or behavioural level), and to tune into the speaker’s underlying meaning (at the ‘thoughts’ or ‘feelings’ level).
Active listening matters because it leads to greater influence and effectiveness. Active listeners hear and understand both the message and the speaker’s intention – which improves communication. It is moreover a skill that can be learned and mastered through practice.
By engaging in active listening, Anastasia, your line manager would for sure have been more likely to understand your situation – and thereby more likely to have been able to respond to your particular needs. The following schematic captures some of the benefits of active listening:
The expression ‘two ears, one mouth’ (‘We have two ears and one mouth’ so that we can listen twice as much as we speak’) is apparently attributed to the Greek philosopher, Epictetus. History doesn’t record whether he followed his own advice.
The good news is that listening is a skill and, like any skill, can be improved through focused practice.
In next week’s issue I’m going to be talking more about how to develop your active listening and providing you, and Practical Counsel’s other readers, with some exercises for them to practise their active listening skills.
Sadly I doubt that you’ll be able to pass these exercises on subtly to your line manager – but perhaps you’ll encourage him to read Practical Counsel and, you never know, maybe he’ll start to develop some of the active listening skills that it sounds he needs to acquire.
For now, you might want to have a go at the following listening exercise, which you’ll need to do with someone else. This was first given to me by my friend and colleague, Hannah Azizollah. I don’t know where she herself first obtained it, so apologies for the lack of attribution. The instructions are included. You’ll need to print out both Exercise ‘a’ and Exercise ‘b’, keep one exercise for yourself and give the other to whoever you are doing the exercise with.
As always, I encourage members of the Practical Counsel community to write in to me at jonathan@middleburghassociates.com with your people problems and issues that are currently concerning you, or that come up for you regularly. And, as always, I will anonymise your observations / issues and preserve confidentiality and write to you individually in response to any scenario that I use in this newsletter.
Best wishes
Jonathan
GC Expert’s Insight of the Week
Preeti Balwani is General Counsel of The Coca Cola Company’s wholly owned bottling operations in India.. She was formerly General Counsel, India, and Executive Director of the Kraft Heinz Company and has worked in-house since 2016, prior to which she practised at several law firms in India.
Dear Jonathan,
Good listening is typically characterised by not talking when others are speaking, being able to repeat what the other person is saying word for word and responding encouragingly with nods or “mmm-hmms”.
But I believe active listening goes a little bit further.
In my experience, active listening is much more than being silent while the other person talks.
Active is listening is an “active” two-way dialogue where the listener promotes discovery and insights in a safe space by asking questions and gently challenging old assumptions in a constructive way.
The best listeners make the conversation a positive experience for the speaker which can’t be achieved by being passive.
Creating a safe space encourages an environment where issues and differences can be discussed openly.
Another important aspect of active listening is feedback. Active listening should be part of a conversation / dialogue where two-way feedback can flow smoothly and neither party becomes defensive about comments the other person makes.
The role of the listener here is to offer up suggestions and feedback in a way that is acceptable to the speaker and to open up alternative paths to consider.
Instead of thinking of a good listener as a sponge that absorbs everything we say, we can try to think of the role of an active listener as a trampoline, off which you can bounce off ideas.
The good, active, listener can amplify, energise and clarify your thinking.
I hope this helps.
Best wishes
Preeti
Key Takeaways
1. People are often in broadcast mode rather than receive mode. Lawyers’ listening skills, in particular their active listening skills, are often underdeveloped.
2. Active listening means listening fully and with entire concentration – not just to the words but the underlying thoughts, feelings and intent.
3. Active listening leads to greater influence and effectiveness – precisely because the active listener hears and understands the speaker better (both message and intent).
4. Active listening is part of a two-way communication process. This issue of Practical Counsel has concentrated on the listening component.
5. Good active listeners are not just passive recipients – they are active participants in a two-way dialogue that creates a space for honest conversation, discussion, growth and change.
6. Active listening is a skill that can be developed. Like any ‘muscle’ it can be exercised. Exercise will grow the skill.
7. A good, active, listener can amplify, energise and clarify the speaker’s thinking.
And Now …
Contribute to the debate and write in with your comments and observations. Also write to Jonathan with any other people issues you face as an in-house lawyer.
Jonathan can be reached by email at jonathan@middleburghassociates.com
A note for you picky lawyers; and a plea for tolerance
I am a British lawyer by background and went to both school and University in the UK. So my English is British English. I have taken a conscious decision to write this newsletter in British English, but to try to avoid phrases that aren’t common outside the UK. Sometimes, though, I’ll use a phrase that isn’t commonly used outside the UK, without realising that it is a Britishism.
My plea is for you to tolerate the British spellings and grammar and the occasional Britishism. And to focus on the substance of the newsletter rather than the occasional (to you) annoying turn of phrase, bit of grammar of unorthodox spelling.
Thank you and best wishes,
Jonathan Middleburgh
Your article is spot on, Jonathan. There are a couple of things I could add: the first is, you don't need to wait for your boss to take the lead. You can start by demonstrating how you would like to be listened too and in this case, active listening is demonstrated by the very next question you ask or the observation you make about the context of what the speaker has said. This has been suggested in part by the comment from Jeremy Tobias-Tarsh below. I would go one step further and first acknowledge the pressure the boss is under before his suggested approach and perhaps even invite the boss to speak a bit about the competing priorities. That would allow her to pick something that she could focus on, or ask her boss to choose in order to share the responsibility rather than engage with a downward cascading flow of tasks.
I agree about the importance of active listening. But in managers active listening is more than a skill. It is also a disposition. It indicates whether you see your role as enabling the team to get the work done or the team as enabling you to get the work done, typically so you can satisfy your superiors.
Usually the managers who need active listening training fall in to the latter category, but, unfortunately, unless their disposition is tackled, the training falls on deaf ears, or they use it to apply further pressure to get what they want.
It sounds like Anastasia has just such a manager. She needs, therefore, to appeal to the manager’s anxiety about the work not being done and ask for help so that she can achieve the manager’s aim.
There is another key skill to learn here, which is how to ask. It is going to be useful for parenting her toddler (and beyond) and is commonly taught in parenting classes. It is to add the phrase ‘so that’ to the end of your question and then supply the ultimate purpose. This makes it much easier for the person doing the asking to create common cause with the person they are asking something of, and also lowers defences in the receiver. Next time Anastasia speaks to her manager, I would be interested to see if she gets a better response if she says, ‘Boss, so that I can meet your deadlines, I need some help from you prioritising the work you are asking me to do, as I feel I am a bit overwhelmed by it and don’t have time to do it all within the deadlines I think you have in mind. Indeed, please can we go through my workload, assess what time the various elements should take and in what order, so that I can be sure I don’t let you down by taking on more than I can feasibly manage.’