The Power of Listening: Transforming Business and Relationships

Everybody is using COVID-19 as their excuse or their reasoning for the advice they give, but my advice is the same advice I’ve been giving for years.

Listening, I mean really listening, is a superpower that many people don’t have. I would go so far as to say it’s one of the most important leadership skills that a person could and should have, especially in business. It is also a very important sales, counselling, and relationship skill.

Throughout this article, I will give examples of listening skills by using similar examples that I give to my clients. Regardless of whether it’s leadership coaching, executive mentoring, when I’m consulting with membership organisations, or when I’m giving sales training.

I shall outline them separately, yet the purpose of listening remains the same: good listeners become trusted advisors.

Relationship

How often do you assume what your partner says and then jump in with the answer? Even if you answer only sometimes, jumping in is still too often! Respect and trust are the foundations of every relationship you have, yes, ALL OF THEM! So, what are the foundations of respect and trust? One of them is truly listening, not just waiting for your turn to speak.

Listening to the words, the tone, and the subtle inflections all help get to the crux of any situation. For instance, if your partner asks, ‘Would you like to order in tonight?’, they may be trying to say, ‘I don’t want to cook’ or ‘I feel like going out’. By truly listening, you can respond appropriately to the real meaning by saying, ‘Great, what did you want?’ or ‘Great, where do you want to eat out?’. You could also be more direct in saying, ‘Do you want to go out or just want me to cook tonight? I am up for either’ or ‘What sort of food do you want? I’ll either order it or cook it for you.’

Responding to what they are asking builds that respect and trust, and to find out what they really want, you need to JUST SHUT UP AND LISTEN!

Counselling

Picture yourself; you’re your ideal company’s CEO and meet with your executive team. Are you the first to speak? Are you the only one to speak? Are you the one whose voice is heard the most? If the answer is yes to most of those, then you most likely have a disengaged team, or at least you are well on your way to achieving that result.

Whilst you might need to be the first person to speak, maybe to set the tone of the meeting or to let people know what the meeting is for, you should not be the majority voice heard. The best leaders introduce the topics and ask the questions, then get the perspective of their entire team BEFORE sharing theirs. This way, before we speak, we know what our team genuinely think, and we minimise the potential of creating a ‘yes’ mentality within the team.

Like all leaders, every single one of my ideas is brilliant; nothing could ever go wrong with them (this was hard to type whilst laughing and scoffing so hard!). In truth, as a leader, my biggest fear has always been that my team don’t feel secure enough to share their true thoughts and feelings. I worry they don’t understand that my ego is not attached to my position and that I thrive on respectful challenge and investigation of ideas.

Not being challenged is the biggest risk your organisation has. This includes a healthy amount of your decisions being challenged by your employees’ ideas. Innovation comes from someone, somewhere, being positively disruptive to the status quo. As a leader, you must ensure your team feels safe sharing their ideas, so JUST SHUT UP AND LISTEN!

Working Example – Membership Organisation

I was working with a professional membership body that noticed memberships were dropping. New memberships were doing fine, but renewals weren’t. New memberships weren’t enough to replace the amount leaving.

In speaking with the CEO and Board, I encouraged them to do three things:

1. Communicate with their new members and find out what attracted them to join (a simple survey would suffice),
2. Communicate with their leaving members and ask why they were not renewing. This had to be a phone call, and the caller had to be a senior person (I suggested the CEO themselves, but the numbers were too high and the CEO a bit too unwilling). The caller had to request full and frank answers without trying to convince them to return, but instead wanting to make an organisation they would want to return to! and
3. Communicate with members who are always late in renewing their membership. These members were on the cusp of leaving but were wondering if there was still value in the company’s original proposition.

In doing this, many lessons were learned; the organisation discovered that their initial marketing was effective, but their follow-up wasn’t. They did not deliver on their promises; they portrayed one image and provided something else. One answer stood out distinctly; one leaving member stated: ‘I thought I was buying a Mercedes, and you gave me a Lada’.

For those who don’t know, Lada is a Russian car brand not overly known for its reliability, quality, or anything else for that matter.

The exercise resulted in the organisation making the appropriate changes, delivering on its promises, creating membership value, and discovering innovation.

Why? Well, they finally SHUT UP AND LISTENED!

Sales Skill

Unlike others, I don’t teach ‘scripted selling, ‘ especially not ‘hard close statement’ scripts. This methodology is fine to get a sale today, but it won’t bring them back tomorrow. Much evidence indicates that buyers under these circumstances will speak poorly of your organisation, regardless of what they feel about the product or service.

For example, if you sold a car using this technique, and the client just loved it, they are extremely likely to recommend it to their friends and state they used a different dealer to buy it.

Selling is a simple thing; it is just solving a problem. There are many adages, such as ‘you don’t buy a razor, you buy a smooth chin’ or ‘you don’t buy plumbing, you buy sanitation’. To create a lasting relationship with someone, you need to ask them what their problem is and help them solve it. The main fault of most people trying to sell is that they decide what they will sell you and don’t even listen to what you are trying to achieve.

The ‘get the sale at any cost’ methodology comes at a great cost. A well-known fact in business is that finding a new client is vastly more expensive than selling to a previous client. The method above creates the requirement always to be looking for new clients. If you can understand the customer’s problem and truly understand it, you can solve it. This is vital as a consultant because many of my clients are unaware of their problems. They describe the symptoms and what they believe is the cause.

Listening, then asking questions (solely based on what they have said), then listening again and repeating, has afforded me the insight to assist many clients by determining and solving the actual issue.

So, JUST SHUT UP AND LISTEN!