Active Listening Tips to Start Using Today

Great supervisors don’t just manage, they listen, and that means more than smiling and nodding along. Your team needs to know you’re an active listener and take their feedback, concerns, and comments seriously.

Our latest Supervisors Community of Practice session welcomed Camille Carboneau Roberts, CC Career Solutions, LLC, who shared easy-to-use active listening techniques you can use every day. Check out a few of her top tips below and watch the session in its entirety for even more ways you can become a better listener.

1. How do you personally distinguish between hearing and active listening? Roberts explained that “Hearing is the passive receipt of sound. It’s involuntary, so you don’t have to try to hear something where active listening is intentional. It requires your full presence, attention, and letting what somebody actually says to you land before you respond.”
   She added an analogy to explain further. “Think about the last time that you drove somewhere with the music on. You were listening the whole time, but about halfway through the drive, you probably couldn’t tell somebody which 3 songs had just played. That’s passive. Active listening is more like a concert experience, where you’re in the room, you’re present, you’re paying attention, and you’re noticing the details. You’re immersed in the experience, so your level of engagement is completely different.”
2. Where do leaders fall short with these two ways of listening? Where are people getting stuck? She said she believes the biggest place that leaders fall short is “the fix-it reflex.” An employee brings a concern, and the supervisor immediately jumps to a solution before the employee can even finish, because they just want to fix it and move on. Roberts remarked, “That response is really what shuts the dialogue down, and you’ve solved the surface problem, but you missed the real one.” By jumping into remediation mode, you’re not allowing the employee to share with you how they experienced the problem, and you’re also blocking them from a learning moment.
3. How can supervisors create space for honest dialogue during regular check-ins, especially when the time is limited, or conversations are uncomfortable? “In my opinion, a 15-minute check-in that’s done well beats an hour-long meeting anytime,” Roberts stated. “The structure is more important than the length. Share the agenda in advance. When someone knows what’s going to be covered, they can prepare to contribute. That really changes the energy of the conversation. Then, I think you should open up with a question that invites substance, not just status, like ‘what’s something that went well this week that I should know about?’ Or ‘what’s one thing that you need from me?'”
   Lastly, she encouraged supervisors to just name discomfort when it’s there. “Supervisors who can say this might be a hard conversation, but I want us to have it anyway, signal psychological safety faster than a policy.”

Want more helpful tips to become a better supervisor? Join us next month on Monday, April 27, at 4 p.m. ET/1 p.m. PT for “How to Stay Productive in the Digital Age.”