Are we taking ‘listening’ for granted?

One day, spending time in the office, we began a conversation about what are the soft skills that helps us when engaging with our colleagues or clients or in our day to day life. As you can imagine we all chipped in with different skills, a list that you can easily find it on any good CV: communications, organisation, critical thinking and so on. At one point, Lisa, our managing director said that for her a very important skill is ‘listening’; ‘active listening’. And although we all agreed with her, we have realised that we rarely talk about listening as a quality as we normally expect people to listen and that often people use listening and hearing interchangeably. This topic was highly discussed, and we even started a brainstorming about how listening helps us. We decided to share this with the intention to spark interesting discussions for you as well.

Listening or Hearing

Firstly, let’s start with making a difference between hearing and listening.

Hearing is an automatic brain response to sound that requires no effort. We are surrounded by sounds everyday (e.g. rattling of pans, cars, airplanes, phones) and unless we have a reason to hear these incidental sounds we train ourselves to ignore them. We filter out the sounds that mean little to us and we choose to hear the ones that are more important.

Listening is part of the communication process, and it is the ability to accurately receive and interpret messages. To actively listen we need to make a conscious effort to hear what people are saying, digest and understand.

Importance of Listening

We have created a list of how active listening has been helping us as a team, delivering successful projects to our clients, and creating prosperous relations with our stakeholders. We felt it good to share;

• Reduces Misunderstandings
• Builds Empathy
• Improves Business Relationships
• Limits Judgements
• Providing Feedback
• Increases Productivity
• Builds Trusts and Strong Relationships
• Helps Eliminating/ Resolving Conflict
• Improves Leadership Skills
• Enables to Identity and Anticipate Problems
• Helps to Build more Knowledge
• Helps with Problem Solving
• Indicates Respect