Is your team feeling heard? – Listening may not be enough!

“Listening can be a leader’s superpower (or their kryptonite) – why it’s not always enough to make your team feel heard” 

Listening is one of the fundamental skills of a leader. If you look at the research on listening, you can start to appreciate the powerful impact it can have on teams. The evidence shows that high-quality listening brings a range of benefits for teams and organizations: superior job performance, better leadership, trust, wellbeing, and reduced burnout. Who doesn’t want that?

At YES Psychology, active listening forms the backbone of many of our programs including crucial conversations; effective workplace coaching; mental health leadership and our peer support programs, to name a few. Our experience is that high-quality listening helps individuals and teams to feel heard and understood. And we’ve seen the benefits that brings – increased trust, a greater sense of agency and engagement, a greater willingness to open up and share new ideas, ultimately enabling high performance.

We’ve also seen that listening is not always enough to make your team feel heard, and the research backs this up.

In this month’s blog, we explore what good listening looks like and what to avoid, when listening is enough, and when listening alone might not hit the mark.

We offer practical steps leaders can take to help their teams feel heard, and to avoid listening becoming their kryptonite.

What does good listening look like?

A friend of ours, who now lives in Sweden, recently returned to Australia for a few months so he could renovate and sell his Brisbane house. Not being familiar with the area, we recommended an estate agent to him, and suggested he visit one of her open houses to get a better understanding of how she sells.

During the visit, he chatted with her about his situation. At the end of the visit, he shared his thoughts. The one thing that stood out to him? She really listened to him. How did he gauge this? She asked good questions that showed she was truly listening. Good listening skills are powerful – if we feel heard, it can help us develop a greater sense of confidence and trust in the other person. It’s important for every aspect of our lives.

According to the research (Kluger and Itzchakov, 2022), effective listening includes:

• paraphrasing
• reflecting (back) feelings
• asking relevant open-ended questions
• asking for clarification where needed
• being nonjudgemental
• pausing for a moment after the speaker finishes (not rushing in with a response)

What does poor listening look like?

Signs of a poor listener can include changing the topic, showing impatience, offering unsolicited advice, doing another task at the same time (e.g., looking at your phone), raising an eyebrow, superficial listening, or focusing on what you’re going to say next (rather than what the speaker is saying).

As leaders, it’s important to be aware of what can get in the way of listening, so we can overcome those barriers.  Barriers can include having something else on your mind, noise or distraction in the environment around you, or feeling anxious about how the conversation might go.

By intentionally deploying tactics to address those barriers, we can set ourselves up for success.  

How to be a better listener

In practice, we have found that listening with curiosity and without judgement can help your team members feel free to express their emotions and ideas.  It also helps to create a sense of psychological safety in the team (check out our blog on psychological safety to learn more).
Following the ABCDE of active listening is also a great tactic for leaders:

• A is for Attention: Stop what you’re doing and give your full attention to the other person. Listen out for the key message or need underlying what they are saying.
• B is for Body Language: Keep your body relaxed and turned towards them. Make eye contact and relax the muscles in your face, looking curious. Show you’re listening by nodding at appropriate times and using small verbal encouragers such as ‘I see’, ‘ok’, ‘uh ha’.
• C is for Checking: Check that you’ve heard their message or key point by paraphrasing (repeating in your own words) back to them what you’ve heard.
• D is for Don’t: Don’t interrupt, talk over them, look at your watch, finish their sentences, assume an aggressive posture or become argumentative or defensive before you’ve heard the full picture. Don’t judge what they are saying. Don’t second guess what their answer will be.
• E is for Encouragement: Encourage them to keep talking, especially if they are struggling to convey their information (or seem emotional at the time). Do this by asking some more relevant questions and say things such as ‘keep going, take your time, this is interesting/important’.

When is listening enough to feel heard?

A recent research study with US bankers found that sometimes employees felt heard through conversation alone, but at other times action was required.
When employees felt heard through the conversation alone, it tended to be conversations that supported that individual’s growth. For example:

• helping the speaker expand or build an idea, or expand their capabilities or insights
• providing coaching
• being with the speaker through engaging with a difficult topic (one that might be more comfortably avoided)
• showing interest when it was unexpected

Our experience shows that listening, on its own, can be a powerful tool for leaders.

As leaders, we often feel like we need to have all the answers. And we might stop ourselves from having a conversation with our team if we feel like we don’t have the answer.
So it’s important to recognise that sometimes listening (by itself) can help your team feel heard and understood.

By freeing yourself from the expectation of always needing to know the answer, it can actually help you fully engage in discussions with your team, allowing you to listen more deeply, to ask good questions, and focus on understanding their own experiences, ideas and thoughts on an issue.

And when can it become your kryptonite?

In a global survey of 4,000 employees across 11 countries, the Workforce Institute (2021) found that 40% of employees don’t feel their feedback leads to actionable change. Focusing on how we can close the loop—and help employees feel heard—is critical for retaining trust.

If your team provides feedback or puts forward an idea for change – in a 1:1 meeting, a team meeting, or via an employee survey – our experience says that they will look to you to meaningfully act upon it – or to let them know if the idea is a no-go.

It is important to remember that the act of conducting a survey does not necessarily cause employees to feel that their voice is heard (Brown, 2021).

When we do focus groups, support organisations on employee engagement surveys, or psychosocial safety and risk management, employees say that this is important to them. 

In gauging whether to participate in a focus group or survey, or deciding how much they will invest in the process, employees will often carry out a mental ‘should I bother?’ test. That is, if I provide my feedback, is anything likely to change?

In these situations, just listening is not enough.

Research shows that when an employee feels there is insufficient action or no observable action at all (where they expected some), they feel unheard, even if they felt as though they were listened to in the initial conversation.  In this case, listening but not acting can become a leader’s kryptonite.

What practical steps can you take to help your team feel heard?

There are a range of things you can do as a leader to help ensure your teams feel heard, whether as a result of a conversation you’ve had with them, or as a result of an employee survey – particularly where they expect some action to happen as a result of the conversation. Here are a few ideas:

• Let your team know you’ve heard them. Clearly signal to your team that you’ve heard what they’ve said.
• Focus on what’s in your control and seek help when needed. Focus on actions you can take as a leader, things that are in your sphere of control or influence. Spend some time as a leader interpreting the feedback or results, and don’t be afraid to seek support of a practitioner (either internal or external to your organisation) to help you with the process and next steps (Brown, 2021; Huebner & Zacher, 2023).
• Don’t confuse activity with progress. In many organisations, when it comes to employee surveys, a great deal of emphasis is placed on creating the action plan. In reviewing the challenges of action planning following staff surveys, Brown (2021) says there’s a risk that organisations use the action plan as a proxy for demonstrating action. As a leader, make sure you don’t fall into the trap of viewing the action plan itself as ‘job done’. What really matters is making change happen. In our experience, it’s better to focus on a small number of actions that matter to your team than to try and tackle too many.
• Keep track of feedback provided. It’s easy to get busy and lose track of feedback provided by your team (including whether you’ve actioned it).  Make a note of feedback provided or ideas on the table – have a rolling list for yourself, or as a leadership team – and let your team know you’re tracking it and haven’t forgotten.
• Close the loop. When action has been taken as a result of feedback, let your team know. Or if you can’t make it happen, let people know. For example, ‘Unfortunately, it’s a no-go [at this time] for these reasons.’ Teams tell us they’d rather be told something can’t be done, than receive no information at all.

Listening is a powerful skill for any leader to have. And it would be easy to assume that listening well is enough to help your team feel heard. But there are times when it’s simply not enough. We hope this blog sheds light on understanding when listening is not enough, and the practical steps you can take as a leader to help your team feel heard (and avoid it becoming your kryptonite).

We provide a range of services that help leaders and teams harness the power of listening and have helped organisations carry out and respond to a range of employee surveys and feedback. See our website for more detail on Leadership Training, Coaching and Development, Peer Support Programs, Psychosocial Risk Management, and Mental Health Leadership Training.