How to listen better at work
Improve your influencing skills
This week I had the pleasure of being on my good friend Roy Bahat’s twice-weekly livestream, ThisIsNotAdvice, in which we discussed how to listen better at work.
Listening is one of the most important skills in business because it’s the foundation for persuasion. You can’t influence someone without first understanding what they care about.
Listening is also a skill that applies universally across roles:
In Sales—the #1 gripe buyers have with salespeople is that they rush into presentations and demos without first listening and understanding the buyer’s problems.
In Marketing—the #1 way to build compelling messaging is to listen to how your current customers describe your product and the outcomes it delivers.
In HR—the #1 way to retain employees is to show that you understand the challenges they face in their day-to-day roles.
In Product Development—the #1 way to build great products is to identify the challenges customers face in running their businesses and understand what is possible from a technology standpoint.
I’ve found there are six techniques improve your listening skills:
Think less about what you want to say and more about how to build on what the other person is saying. As someone who thinks deeply about topics and has a fair amount of technical expertise that I’ve historically been eager to get across, I’ve found that adopting this mindset is a very effective way to prevent myself from dominating the conversation.
Use an agenda to guide the conversation. When a conversation gets going it can be very easy to go off topic, especially when you are focused on building on what the other person is saying. Having an agenda of topics to get through and allocating a fixed amount of time for each topic is an effective way to put constraints around this.
Take notes. One of the silver linings of the shift to remote work has been the ability to take copious notes while maintaining eye contact on Zoom. It makes it easier to find opportunities to build on what the other person is saying, and easier to recall what happened afterwards.
Listen for cues and say “you mentioned”. This is one of the most effective ways to probe for more information. For example, “You mentioned your boss. Curious, what is important to them?”, or “You mentioned a customer wants feature X. Curious, how did that come up in the conversation?”, or “You mentioned having trouble working with a colleague. Curious, when was the last time you felt that?”.
Share relevant insights to build credibility. People are more open to change when they realize a) they are not alone and b) you have the expertise to help them and insights are the #1 way achieve this. For example, when I’m coaching founders who are new to sales, they often tell me their win rate is too low. When I tell them that theirs is a common problem, share benchmarks for their business and show them a framework for improving it, I’m able to instantly establish credibility and build rapport.
Review your “game tape”. The other huge silver lining of the shift to remote work is that it’s become normal to record meetings. In fact with apps like Chorus that can join your meeting automatically, you don’t even need to press record anymore. This opens up a huge opportunity to review your own performance. It’s amazing how few people make the time to do this but its the #1 way to identify the cues that you missed.
Here’s the livestream I did with Roy. I’d love to hear how else you are improving your listening skills!
Thanks for reading! If you found this email useful, please share it and if you got forwarded it, please consider subscribing! I write weekly about the common sales, marketing and leadership issues holding back startups from growing faster.
Grateful we got to do that. Was meta because a perfect chance for me to practice, live, the skill we were talking about.