“Are you listening?” If that question has been posed to you lately you are not alone.
Normally there are multiple things happening around us all at once. As hard as we try, it is often difficult to “pay attention”. However, nearly every successful leader has been described as a “great listener”. What exactly does that mean besides just “paying attention”?
Otto Scharmer, senior lecturer at the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and co-founder of the Presencing Institute, believes that listening is “at the root of everything.” He teaches that there are four types of listening,
- Downloading: transferring information that is already largely familiar, people only listen to reconfirm what they already know.
- Factual listening: People only listen attentively when the information is different from what they know. This new information is added to the information that is already known.
- Empathic listening: By empathizing and seeing through someone else’s eyes, people are able to understand and respect the other person.
- Generative listening: People listen to create without their personalities and agendas getting in the way of results. By connecting their own intuition with the environment, they tap into pure thoughts and ideas.”
The first two many of us are already familiar with — listening where “we attend to what we already know” and factual listening, where we learn something new.
But Scharmer states that leaders today need to master empathic listening, where we are able to put ourselves in another’s place, and generative listening, where we see another person in terms of past, present and future possibilities.
Empathic listening requires a deeper level of listening, and needs the individual at hand to have a certain level of emotional intelligence. This is the ability to truly connect with the person to whom they are listening and to see the world, situation, subject or opinion through their eyes. It provides the individual with an emotional connection to the speaker and subsequently with alternative perspectives which can help sculpt and define their decision-making.
Generative listening is the highest, most informative level of listening, and is a very important skill for leaders to learn and coaches to master. It requires the individual to gain a connection with the best future that they can; an emerging and developing future, or possible futures. When one listens at this level, they gain a far broader strategic perspective on a matter, and greater awareness of individuals, situations, and specific points of view.
It is easy to see the important role that Generative listening plays in the role of every successful leader and coach.
