Active listening: 5 tips for better communication

Communication in the company is one of the most important elements in achieving excellence. Information must flow horizontally and vertically throughout the organisation and be followed by feedback. However, without active listening on the part of professionals, this exchange of information may be ineffective., as if it were a game of broken telephone.

Hence, companies must fostering the development of active listening skills among staff for optimal communication, a challenge that becomes essential objective in the case of leaders as responsible for issuing guidelines and evaluating feedback.

What is active listening?

It was the psychologist Carl Rogers, author of Active Listening together with Richard E. Farson, who introduced the concept of active listening in the 1940s, referring to it as an “...active listening", and who also introduced the concept of active listening in the 1940s, referring to it as a "...active listening".“trying to absorb everything the speaker is saying, verbally and non-verbally, without adding, deleting or modifying the message”.

For her part, Kathryn Robertson, in the work Active Listening More Than Just Paying Attention, considers that active listening consists of “offering a free and uninterrupted attention to the speaker”while Susan Knights, in Reflection: Turning Experience Into Learning defines it as “making one's full attention and awareness available to another person, listening with interest and appreciation without interrupting her”.

As Antonio Estanqueiro points out in his book Principles of interpersonal communication: How to deal with people, active listening requires “availability, interest in the person, understanding of the message, a critical spirit and prudence in advice”.”.

It is therefore a matter of focusing all our attention on what the other person is trying to convey with their voice, gestures or position, stripping ourselves of any prejudices or elements that would separate us from the original message. How can we achieve this level of listening?

How to improve active listening

Developing active listening is not easy work, but it is possible and desirable. As Ian McWhinney points out in A Textbook of Family Medicine, «you can learn how to be a better listener, but learning it is not like learning a skill that is added to what we know. It is a detachment of things that interfere with listening, our concerns, our fear, how we might respond to what we hear.

In this regard, the founder of The Sound Agency consultancy, Julian Treasure, proposes that five tips to improve our active listening skills in the TED Talk ‘5 ways to listen better’:

• Concentration on the sender. If we want to listen actively, our interlocutor must be our priority, avoiding falling into external distractions, such as looking at the mobile phone, interrupting to make a comment to someone else or checking documents while talking. It is important to maintain eye contact to perceive as much information as possible and to pay attention, not only to the words, as non-verbal body language contributes 93% of the whole message, according to German psychologist Albert Mehrabian.
• Unprejudiced. The key to listening lies in not jumping to subjective or premature conclusions about what the other person is saying. It is an exercise in objectivity, eliminating prejudices or assumptions and analysing only the data we actually have. If we need more, just ask.
• Take advantage of the silences. The absence of words also contains information that can be very valuable to us. Some people say more by what they are silent than by what they say, and our mission is to tolerate these silences and understand them. Moreover, pauses also allow us to reflect on what is being said.
• Paraphrasing. Freezing while our interlocutor speaks can cause confusion for the sender, who will wonder whether the listener is really listening to what he or she is saying. For this reason, Treasure advises introducing an ‘echo’ into the conversation: repeating the last words, nodding, uttering a few interjections, rephrasing the message... are some techniques to contribute to effective listening.  

Avoid self-centredness. It is common to make the mistake during a conversation of turning the conversation towards us. For example, a colleague tells us about a problem with the boss and our reaction is to tell him or her how we would solve it or to bring up the time when the same thing happened to us. Active listening, on the other hand, promotes the opposite, i.e. to keep asking questions about yourself: What do you plan to do? How do you feel? Do you think it will have negative consequences?