What kind of listener are you?

Begin by listening. That’s the mantra I learned in 2008 when starting to help scale Allied Media Projects, a global network of incredible people that cultivate media and emerging tech for a more just and creative world. This is the place where I learned to listen — a practice of holding space for revolutionary technologists who reimagine what data and tech could look like in a better world.

Listening still comes up every day, as I serve a Civic Tech Tour of Duty with the US Federal Government. Last week, a top executive at a health organization I support informed me that everything in her world centers on listening. She cited a recent business course, a Harvard Negotiation Seminar for leaders, a performance improvement framework — the list went on. She pointed out to me that they all come back to listening. I agree.

Listening is important for everyone, everywhere. An experienced leader is highly competent in listening and observing others. Listening isn’t a single transaction. It’s an ongoing practice, a philosophy, a leadership tool, and it is relational. Listening helps us connect, gather information, make better decisions, and make them more personalized actions to help people be their best every day.

Kate Murphy, author of “You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why It Matters,” notes in her book:

“We are encouraged to listen to our hearts, our inner voices and our guts, but rarely are we encouraged to listen carefully and purposefully to other people. Instead, we talk over one another at cocktail parties, work meetings, and even family dinners. Online and in-person, it’s all about defining yourself, shaping the narrative, and staying on message.”

Fundamentally, a leader listens to understand people’s needs — both what they say and what’s underneath. The latent needs. Acts of listening also come in many shapes and sizes. I observe the different ways critical kinds of “listeners” — or listener personas — show up in my daily work. I see them, I hear them, and I also am them! I’m a lifelong listener and not always the same kind of listener.

I invite you to consider these four personas as I see them. What aspects resonate with you? What kind of listener are you? What persona have I missed?

Problem Solver Listener

Purpose: Listening to diagnose and ultimately fix what’s wrong.

5 Key Signals
+ Listens just long enough to assess problems
+ Delivers advice directed towards the problem
+ Prompts action (from speaker or listener)
+ Focuses on the technical
+ Separates problems as individual elements rather than interconnections

Bright side: solving problems, who doesn’t love when a problem is solved?
Dark side: filtering to listen only for problems, leaving other valuable information, interrelated connections, and data on the table. 

Coach Listener

Purpose: Listening to coach and to help the speaker take ownership and source solutions from within themselves.

5 Key Signals
+ Listens to create space for thinking, feeling, and learning
+ Supports relationships and connections
+ Absorbs responses with objectivity
+ Asks essential questions to understand related parts to the whole
+ Regards speaker as resourceful, creative, and whole

Bright side: fosters trust and learning between parties, empowers the speaker.
Dark side: coaching mindsets push traditional leadership comfort boundaries — employees are trained to seek direction and answers from leaders, not deep questions.

Just Because Listener

Purpose: Listening because it’s required, a mandatory appointment.

5 Key Signals
+ Listens to check a box
+ Scans to select the information that may be relevant (but not presented to the listener in an engaged fashion)
+ “Checking out” intensifies in medium to large group meetings that aren’t designed well
+ Shows up distracted, leaves with little
+ Displays low levels of exchange

Bright side: low effort required aside from time investment, easy to hide and multitask.
Darkside: autopiloting through work experiences is unfortunately common. How might we design better work experiences so that people are engaged, listeners?

Critical Listener

Purpose: Listening to assess the accuracy, relevance, validity, and value of the information presented by a speaker.

5 Key Signals
+ Listens to examine data, perspectives, and other vantage points presented by the speaker
+ Offers space to explore innovation in new ways of thinking and working
+ Assesses content through judgment filters (previous personal or professional experiences)
+ Parses content to connect to the right problem or opportunity
+ Evaluates information based on the presentation by the speaker

Bright side: opens the reality that your “truth” and someone else’s “truth” could both be true without one person being right and one person being wrong.

Dark side: typically, the listener curates a set of information that they regard as “true” and leaves other information (valued or not) on the table with the speaker.

How might you try on a new way of listening? Try it on for size?

A gift: leaders can increase their impact by listening to employees — understanding the ground truth — along the employee experience journey. This requires innovation and looking beyond traditional mechanisms and legacy mindsets.

Gone are the days where leaders should expect that they should come to a conversation with all of the answers. I imagine a future where people listen to one another and accept the information as a gift, no matter what the intended outcomes might need to be.


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