Last week I started a discussion about the importance of active listening, making the point that ‘active listening’ is an expression often bandied around in discussion, but rarely dissected and still less often exemplified through expressed behaviours. I attempted to dissect what is meant by active listening, and to explain its importance.
This week’s email to me comes from Rob, a Senior Counsel in the legal department of a multinational professional services firm. He explains how rarely he feels truly heard.
Everything Rob says in his email has resonated with me, as I have seen it so often in my own work consulting to legal departments and coaching senior lawyers.
To move the discussion on from problem identification to solution I am concentrating this week on some practical suggestions as to how to practise active listening. In doing so I say one or two less complimentary things about lawyers – I’m one myself by background, so I hope you’ll forgive me as I’m making these points to try to help readers, not to annoy them!
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,
Thanks for this week’s issue (Issue #6, ‘Knowing me Knowing you’) and its focus on active listening. It struck a real chord for me. Let me explain why.
I am a Senior Counsel in the (very large) legal department of a multinational professional services firm. I won’t say too much about the organisation I work for as I don’t want to identify it. It’s a household name with hundreds of thousands of employees around the world.
I work in a territory with a department of around 65 lawyers. It is a well-structured and well-run department. I don’t have any complaints for the most part; my colleagues are highly professional and committed to the organisation and to the work we do, which is often complex.
But I have a number of colleagues who while superficially collaborative really don’t listen well. A prime example has been over lockdown and during the periods of 100% remote working resulting from the pandemic. My line manager has had regular one-to-ones with me but he’s never really seemed to grasp my personal situation, or if he’s grasped it hasn’t had the language to be helpful.
I have a chronic but manageable illness, which my line manager is aware of. During Covid, regular health appointments have sometimes been cancelled and / or rearranged at short notice. This has caused one or two flare-ups (panics in retrospect) in my underlying condition and the resultant stress has had a knock-on effect on my relationship with my partner, which has been fractious during lockdown. Plus we don’t live in the most spacious accommodation and we have been juggling home-schooling periodically during lockdown.
My line manager has ostensibly listened but most of what has come from his mouth has been platitudes. I’ve come across similar several times with other lawyer colleagues. Is this a lawyer thing? I’m delighted that you’re going to be focusing on the ‘how to’ of better active listening, as well as having explained what active listening actually is (which I had never fully understood, myself).
Best wishes
Rob (he / him)
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Dear Rob,
Thanks for your email and I’m so sorry that you’ve been having a hard time during the pandemic. What you’re describing is something I’ve heard from so many lawyers. My remote working survey, which I’ve referenced in earlier issues (click here for the full results), uncovered that a shockingly high percentage of lawyers (64%) weren’t even having one-to-ones with their line managers. 31% of respondents reported that their line manager hadn’t demonstrated concern for their well-being.
Your e-mail is, of course, suggesting something different. That your line manager (as you’d expect in a well-run multinational organisation) was having one-to-ones with you – but that he wasn’t really hearing what you were saying. Without hearing what someone is really saying, it’s impossible to respond effectively to the needs of the person you are communicating with.
Here’s the thing, Rob. My experience of lawyers – shock horror - is that they often aren’t terribly good listeners. They’re often distracted, they frequently have their mind on other things (how many times have lawyers I’m coaching told me that their line manager is looking at a mobile phone or computer screen during a one-to-one interaction) … and even when they’re concentrating they don’t necessarily have high EQ (emotional quotient) to match their stellar IQ (intelligence quotient).
Now’s not the time for me to focus on EQ and emotional intelligence. If I go down that rabbit hole I won’t get on to my practical suggestions for practicing active listening. All I’m saying here is that the majority of lawyers (in my anecdotal view) need to practice active listening.
Because here’s the other thing. Lawyers grasp leadership concepts very quickly (intellectually), but they don’t necessarily live out those concepts through their expressed behaviour. They’re simply too busy – or too smart – to do the drudge work involved in practising the behaviours that will make them better leaders and managers.
I’m exaggerating here to make a valid point. Many lawyers make excellent leaders and managers, and have worked very had to develop their leadership and managerial skills. But it remains the case that many, many, lawyers never become as good at leadership or management as at lawyering – because they don’t put in the hard work developing the relevant skills.
Bearing the above in mind, I’m going to say that the basics of active listening (and what you need to practise doing) can be stated simply and are stated similarly in multiple sources (I’m indebted to Mind Tools for this particular summary):
1. Pay attention. Give the speaker your undivided attention, acknowledge the message. Remember that non-verbal communication is 80% of all communication (this applies slightly less so in video communication, but it still remains very important). Look at the speaker directly, avoid distractions (including distracting thoughts, emails, texts etc), focus on the speaker’s body language and listen rather than devoting part of your bandwidth to preparing your response.
2. Show that you are listening. Deploy verbal cues and body language to show you are listening. Try to show that you are both open and interested. Nod etc to show active engagement – but avoid behaving like the pastiche of a concerned therapist.
3. Summarise and mirror back to test understanding. It is easy to bring our assumptions to bear when listening. What we think we have heard might not be what the speaker was actually intending to communicate. So, without behaving like the pastiche of someone who has just gone on an active listening course, summarise occasionally what you’ve heard to check that you’ve got it right. Or ask questions to make sure you’ve understood (e.g. ‘what I think you’re saying is X, is that right?’)
4. Don’t ignore the emotional content. Let me just put it out there. Managing lawyers isn’t the same as managing newly qualified teachers or social workers. Lawyers usually don’t respond very well to the soft and fuzzy. But this can (a) be somewhat dependent on personality type (something I’ll focus on in future issues) and (b) doesn’t mean that lawyers aren’t human beings (despite what’s sometimes written in the popular press and despite lots of jokes to the contrary). So it’s important to tune in to the emotional content / subtext of a conversation and to probe – but usually in a rational, practical, way. What you’ve described in your email suggests that your own line manager hasn’t tuned into the emotional content of your situation, and hasn’t found the language or range of interpersonal skills to understand your situation or to respond to it effectively.
5. Defer Judgement. Don’t interrupt. Allow the speaker to finish his or her point before you ask questions. It’s not helpful generally to be judgemental. That doesn’t mean that you need to agree with everything that the speaker says (I’m sure I’ll have cause to return to this in future issues).
6. Respond Appropriately. This is entirely situation-driven and the response needs to be situation-appropriate. It doesn’t matter how many active listening or communication skills courses you go on; there’s no substitute for a good dose of common sense and the appropriateness of your response will ultimately depend on whether you have good judgement and wisdom. That said, we get wiser and acquire better judgement by learning from experience.
The other general advice I’d give is that if you want to improve your active listening skills and are conscious that you need to do so there is no shortage of material online explaining what active listening is, how to do it, how to practice it and what the benefits are. As I’ve said above, the general principles are easy to grasp. It’s all about practising and being honest with yourself in terms of whether you are getting better or still have progress to make (we all do).
Just as all writers can benefit from a good editor (providing third party feedback), most of us can benefit from asking others whether we are as good at listening as we think we are – and then taking steps to improve if we receive constructive feedback.
I’ll talk more in other issues about emotional self-awareness, but here’s one exercise you can do on your own that I’ve come across, designed to make you aware of the heightened emotions you can feel during a discussion:
· Think of a recent discussion that triggered strong emotions in you.
· Write those emotions down.
· Ask yourself why you reacted in the way you did. What statement or statements triggered your response? Did the other person’s body (non-verbal) language trigger a response?
· Think about what you could have done to regulate your response. Taking a pause? Stepping away from the conversation until less in the grip of your emotional response? Asking an open-ended question to diffuse the situation? Labelling your emotion and sharing it with the other person?
· Visualise / replay the situation and imagine using whatever technique or techniques you think might have helped. What do you think the outcome would have been?
There’s no right answer when you’re doing an exercise of this kind. None of us ever acquires perfect judgement. We all need to continue learning.
Rob, the advice I’ve given is advice I wish I’d been able to give to your line manager so that he could have been appropriately and effectively responsive to your needs and heard you and your needs more effectively. I hope it’s advice that will help you, too.
I will you all the best.
Jonathan
PS 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.
GC Expert’s Insight of the Week
Doug Curtis is an ex-Deputy General Counsel of WeWork and was, earlier in his career, SVP, Legal and Compliance, of Reuters. He also has many years of experience as a private practice lawyer and is currently a Senior Counsel at Arnold & Peter Kaye Scholer LLP, out of Chicago, USA. He was a partner for 12 years at WilmerHale in New York. He has a JD from Harvard Law School, where he was Treasurer of the Harvard Law Review.
Dear Jonathan,
I’ve been reading your last few issues with great interest. Over the 30+ years of my career, I have been on all sides of lots of discussions -- with effective communicators and active listeners as well as, shall we say, less effective communicators and not-so-active listeners. And with that personal experience under my belt, I have found that much of what you have said really hits home.
But I was re-reading Rob’s letter (and Anastasia’s from last week), and thought that while his line supervisor improving his listening/management skills could certainly do much to improve Rob’s circumstances, that is not something that Rob really has any control over in the near term.
So I went back to thinking about the other half of the communication process -- namely, the “effective messaging” side. And this is where we as lawyers should have a leg up: we are trained to be advocates and to communicate with logical and compelling arguments. Dealing with a supervisor is obviously different from negotiating a corporate acquisition or arguing a motion to a judge, but in key respects, it calls for some of the same basic communication skills:
· Organize your thoughts in advance. If there is something specific that you want to achieve during a one-on-one, then don’t leave it to chance whether you will make your pitch effectively. Sort through the various points that might come up, questions that might be posed, concerns that might be expressed, and outline a plan in advance for how you will describe the issue, and what you believe needs to be done about it.
· “Bring solutions, not just problems.” This is a cliché, but for good reason. From a supervisor’s perspective, it can be frustrating for people on their team to identify challenges without taking the time to at least try to come up with suggested ways to overcome the problem. Frankly, the ability to identify problems and solutions has been one of the key hallmarks of successful lawyers in every organization I have ever been associated with. Apply this to your one-on-one conversations about your personal circumstances just as you would in a discussion of a problem being faced in a project you are working on. Do your personal circumstances mean that you will unexpectedly need to miss team meetings, for example? Then let your supervisor know that, but let them also know that you have made arrangements for a colleague to brief you on key issues that come up, and you will be following up on any action items within 24 or 48 hours. Overwhelmed with a project that is causing you to ignore other matters? Alert your supervisor, but outline your plan for enlisting aid to monitor the other projects until you can provide your full attention. In my experience, supervisors would always prefer to ratify your solution, rather than to have to develop one on their own.
· Know your audience, and speak to their concerns and priorities. Try as we might to become perfectly active listeners and paragons of virtue in our workplace interactions, the fact is, all of us -- including, of course, your supervisors -- come to conversations with a measure of self-interest. They have both personal and organizational goals and objectives they need to meet, and there are limits to how much they (and through them, your organization) may be willing to bend. Acknowledge that, and take it into account. If their concerns are budgetary, emphasize how the matter you are discussing might be budget neutral, or actually save money. If they are concerned about productivity and deadlines, address that head-on -- your circumstances may require flexibility on a day-to-day basis, but if the past two years have taught us nothing else, we can find creative ways to do our work out of the office and out of the 9-to-5 straitjacket.
· Don’t be afraid to give “headlines” during a conversation. Until your supervisor has mastered “active listening,” understand that they might not be fully engaged, might be distracted, etc. Spoon feed them your essential points. Let them know in advance what you are addressing and what you will be seeking from them, then describe the issue(s), present alternatives (as appropriate), and make your recommendations.
· Don’t forget to be an active listener yourself! Even when you are presenting to your supervisor, and you want them to really hear you, it is important for you to be an active listener to them at the same time. Pay attention with all your senses -- are you grabbing their attention? Are you addressing the things that concern them? Are you making assumptions that they do not agree with? Are there considerations they are seeing that you have not identified? Stay alert to the signs -- sometimes very subtle -- that your message is not landing, and find a way to get them to engage and express what it is that concerns them.
Nothing here is a panacea for dealing with managers, but applied over time, I think these approaches can help to improve the effectiveness of our interactions.
Best wishes
Doug
Key Takeaways
1. Active listening is a hugely important skill to acquire as a leader and manager in-house.
2. Many lawyers are not naturally good active listeners – even if they believe that they are. They often grasp the concept of active listening well, but are not, in practice, good active listeners.
3. Active listening is a skill that can be practised and that will improve through persistent practice.
4. Key aspects of active listening to concentrate on and practice are: (1) Paying attention; (2) Demonstrating that you are listening; (3) Summarising and mirroring back to clarify and to test understanding; (4) Attending to the emotional content; (5) Deferring judgement while listening; (6) Finding a way to respond appropriately and effectively.
5. Our GC Expert of the Week, Doug Curtis, makes the excellent point that you can’t control whether your manager or supervisor is a good active listener.
6. So it is also important to figure out ways to communicate effectively with your manager or supervisor.
7. Our GC Expert makes some excellent suggestions for ways to communicate effectively.
8. I’ve focused in this issue and last week’s issue on active listening. I will be covering other aspects of effective communication in future issues.
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
Very insightful discussion and observations on active listening.