Leadership is a Contact Sport: Listen

In her book My Life in Leadership, Frances Hesselbein, former CEO of the Girl Scouts, CEO of The Frances Hesselbein Leadership Institute, and one of the greatest leaders I’ve ever met, wrote one of the best descriptions of listening and leadership I’ve ever read:

“Listening is an art. When people are speaking, they require our undivided attention. We focus on them; we listen very carefully. We listen to the spoken words and the unspoken messages. This means looking directly at the person, eyes connected; we forget we have a watch, just focusing for that moment on that person. It’s called respect, it’s called appreciation — and it’s called leadership.”

Let’s explore this art of listening a bit further. Did you know that 80 percent of our success in learning from other people is based on how well we listen? In other words, our success or failure is determined before we do anything. What escapes most people is they think listening is passive. They think they are supposed to just sit there and “hear someone out.” If you re-read Frances’ description, you’ll notice there is nothing passive about it. It is active and powerful. Good listeners know this. They regard listening as a highly active process.

So what do good (active) listeners do? In essence they do three things: They think before they speak; they listen with respect; and they are always gauging their response by asking themselves, “Is it [responding] worth it?”