How Do I Become a Better Listener at Work?

For about four months, the labels kept falling off one of our machines. We tried a different adhesive. We tried different label stock. We tried wiping the panel down first. Then somebody finally asked the technician who stood next to that machine all day, and in one sentence he told us the washdown hose hit that panel every single night. He had known the whole time. He had even said it once. Nobody heard him. If you want to become a better listener at work, you give up the few seconds you spend building your reply while the other person is still talking, and you spend them on the last thing they actually said.

That is the whole move. Not a personality. Seconds of airtime you are currently spending on yourself.

Why Am I Such a Bad Listener at Work?

Here is the uncomfortable part. Most of us are not bad listeners because we do not care. We are bad listeners because we are useful.

Think about what gets rewarded at work. Fast answers. Having the fix. Being the one who already knows. So your brain runs two tracks at once. Track one takes in what the person is saying. Track two writes your reply, and track two is louder, because track two is where you look competent.

By the time they stop talking, you are not responding to them. You are reading your own notes out loud.

I did this for twenty years and called it being prepared. If you had asked me, I would have told you I was a good listener. I would have meant it. What I actually was, was patient. I waited. There is a difference, and everybody around me could feel it even though none of us had a word for it.

The other reason is simpler. Listening is slow and the day is not. Somebody catches you in the hallway with fourteen minutes before your next meeting, and you are not going to hear that person. You are going to get past that person. Do it enough times and your crew stops bringing you things. That feels like peace. It is the start of a very expensive silence.

Three Seconds Is the Whole Technique

Here is the one thing I would hand somebody who wanted to improve by Friday.

When the other person stops talking, count three seconds before you say anything. That is it.

Three seconds does two things at once. First, it kills track two, because you cannot rehearse a reply and hold a silence at the same time. Second, and this is the part nobody tells you, about one time in three the other person keeps talking. And what comes out in those next few seconds is almost always the real thing. The first version is the safe version. The second version is why they came to you.

Try it tomorrow in one conversation. Not all of them, one. Three seconds of quiet feels like thirty when you are the one not talking, and nobody else notices. I have tested this on people who love me and people who report to me. Not one has ever asked why I paused.

How Do I Listen Better in Meetings?

Meetings are the hardest room to listen in, because a meeting is a scoreboard. Everybody is watching to see who contributes. So twelve people spend an hour waiting for a gap to say the thing they walked in planning to say, and we call it a discussion.

Two things that work in a real meeting, not in a book.

Earn your turn with a question. Before you add your point, ask one question about the point in front of you. "When you say the line is unstable, do you mean it stops, or does it run and the output is bad?" That is the Law of Curiosity doing its job out loud.

Watch who has not spoken. In almost every meeting I have run, the person with the most useful information was quiet. Not shy. Quiet, and usually because of rank. If you are running the meeting, ask that person by name, late, once the loud people have run out of material.

If You Did Not Write It Down, You Did Not Listen

This part sounds like clerical work and is actually the whole thing.

I used to walk out of a conversation holding four things in my head, and by the second phone call I was holding one. Two weeks later I would see that person and have no idea what they had told me. From where they stood, that is not a memory problem. That is a message, and the message is that what they told me was not worth keeping.

So carry something. A notebook, the back of a work order, your phone. Write the thing and write their name. Then do the part most people skip: go back later and tell them what you did with it.

"You told me the hose was hitting that panel. We moved the panel. It has been three weeks and no labels have come off."

That sentence is worth more to your crew than any speech you will ever give them, because it proves the channel works. People keep telling you things only when they see something happen on the other end.

What If I Already Know the Answer?

Sometimes you do, and most writing about listening skirts that. Nineteen years in, somebody is three minutes into a problem and you already know what it is. Two reasons to let them finish.

The first is that you are right about the fix and wrong about the cause more often than you think. I was right that the labels were a label problem. Adhesive, stock, surface prep, all reasonable. I was wrong by about ninety degrees, and no amount of experience was going to get me to a washdown hose. Only the man standing next to it had that.

The second is cheaper. Answer inside thirty seconds every time and people stop bringing you the hard ones. You end up the best-informed person in the building about things that do not matter.

When you really do know, try this: "I think I know where this goes, but finish, because I have been wrong about this before." It costs you ninety seconds and it keeps the door open.

Listening Skills for Managers: The Huddle Test

If you run people, here is a test you can apply this week.

Go to your next huddle or stand-up and ask yourself one question at the end: did anything change because of what I heard in that room?

I inherited a morning routine from a manager I will call Steve Peterson, who spent three hours a day on what he called a walkabout. He went everywhere. He talked to everybody. By any normal measure he was visible and available. And at the end of three hours nothing had been decided and nobody's obstacle had been removed. He had gathered updates, and updates are what you collect when you listen for information instead of listening for obstacles.

So I changed the only question I asked. Not "where are you on that." Instead: "what is in your way, and what do you need from me." Same amount of my time. Completely different information coming back, because the question told people what kind of listening was on offer.

A huddle where nothing gets unblocked is a meeting your crew is paying for out of their own day. They will stop bringing you the real list, and they will be right to.

Be Honest About What Listening Costs

Everything I just wrote has a price, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something.

Listening is slower. You will leave conversations without having solved them, and that will itch. If your value at work has been fast answers, there is a stretch where you feel less valuable, because you are quieter in rooms where being loud was your contribution.

You will also hear things you cannot fix. The real problem will be above your pay grade, or it will be you. The washdown hose was a two-hour job and not everything is. Once you open the channel you own the harder conversation: "I heard you, I took it up, the answer was no, and here is why."

I still think it is the best trade available to a person at work. Four months of my team's time is the cheapest tuition I ever paid, and all it bought me was the habit of asking the person closest to the work and then shutting up long enough to hear the answer.

Common Questions About Listening at Work

What is the difference between hearing and listening?

Hearing is automatic and listening costs something. The practical test is not whether you could repeat the words back. It is whether anything on your end changed. If you can repeat what somebody said and nothing happened next, you heard them. If you wrote it down, asked one question about it, and came back later with what you did, you listened. The difference shows up in their behavior, not yours: people keep talking to the second kind of person.

How do I stop interrupting people?

Stop trying to stop interrupting, because that is a willpower plan and willpower loses. Give yourself a physical job instead. Hold a pen and write their last six words. Your mouth is busy being a hand. I was a chronic interrupter and I did not fix it by deciding to be a better person. I fixed most of it by keeping a notebook open, because you cannot cut somebody off mid-sentence and take down what they are saying at the same time.

Is it rude to take notes while somebody is talking to me?

Almost never, and the fix for the small risk is one sentence. Say, "Let me write this down so I have it right." Nobody has ever been offended by that. What people read as rude is a phone they cannot see the screen of, so if you take notes on your phone, say what you are doing. Paper is easier. A notebook in a conversation reads as respect. A phone reads as a coin flip.

How long does it take to get better at listening?

You will notice a difference in yourself in a week and other people will notice in about a month. The week is the three-second pause, which feels strange immediately and ordinary by about day five. The month is the part where you have gone back to two or three people with what you did about what they told you, and word gets around that you are somebody worth telling things to. That reputation is the real return, and it takes a few rounds to build because it is built out of evidence, not intention.

Reflection Questions

1. Who at work has told you the same thing more than once that you still have not acted on?
2. In your last three conversations, were you listening, or were you waiting?
3. Who is closest to the problem you are currently trying to solve, and when did you last ask them a question about it?
4. If your crew were asked privately whether you actually hear them, what would they say?

The Bottom Line

Do one thing this week. Take the problem that has sat on your desk longest, find the person whose hands are on it, ask one question, then count to three and say nothing. Write down what they tell you, and go back inside a week with what you did about it.

Four steps, about twenty minutes. That is the entire method, because listening is not a feeling you have about people. It is a handful of small things you do that they can see from the outside.

Here is my question back to you. If somebody on your crew has been trying to tell you something for four months, would you know it yet?

This ties back to The Law of Curiosity — one of John C. Maxwell's 15 Laws of Growth.