I don’t think anyone would describe me as a bad listener. I make my living teaching communication, and I’m generally a pretty polite, if not sincerely curious person. So it might surprise you to learn that my most abiding professional concern this year, my Alejo New Year’s Resolution, is to deepen my understanding of both the art and science of good listening. And, of course, to share what I learn with as many leaders as possible. I think of good listening as having three layers.
LAYER ONE: Technical Listening
Beginning at the surface, there’s the first layer: the “technique” of good listening, i.e. what someone who’s watching a listener on a camera might see. This includes all the nonverbals, the eye contact, the physical adjustments, the verbal encouragement, and so on. It also includes the rhythm of listening, knowing how long to let what’s been shared breathe, how to use silence, but also when and how to volley it back across the conversational net, with some sharing of one’s own. You might call this layer, the Choreography of Conversation. Many business leaders’ interests begin and end here. In a world of distracted listeners glancing at their screens, or steamrolling egos who don’t let you get a word in edgewise, being a good conversational dance partner seems like more than enough. And in many ways, it is.
LAYER TWO: Facilitative Listening
I call the next layer down facilitative listening, or what a colleague of mine once described as the ability to “listen someone into speech.” This is the sort of listening that establishes safety, invites risk, draws someone out. Have you ever met someone who, after only a few minutes of knowing them, you’re suddenly telling your life story to? What made you feel like you could do such a thing? To be fair, you might be an over-sharer. (I’m thinking of you, airplane neighbor!) Or just as likely, you might have been face-to-face with an expert in facilitative listening. Now there’s a technical aspect to this layer as well. At Alejo, we teach micro-affirmations, how to encourage someone along, how to demonstrate genuine curiosity without judgment. We’re also students of great questions. In the same way so many have lately become obsessed with A.I. prompts, we know the answers one receives depend on the specific prompts one gives. So we examine open and closed questions, we study Schein’s work on Diagnostic, Confrontive and Process-Oriented Questions, we fold in concepts from Applied Improvisation, and so on. Although I’ve come to believe there is such a thing as a “facilitative disposition” — indeed, most expert facilitators I know were facilitating within their families and friend groups long before they stepped into any boardrooms — still, part of our offering at Alejo is to help leaders with the learnable pieces of this layer. Leaders who learn how to listen their team members into more and better disclosure are already in rare air.
LAYER THREE: Transformative Listening
There is still one layer deeper. It’s the one I’ve only recently started to bring language to, and it’s what I’m currently calling “transformative listening.” Now you may think this refers to listening to transform the speaker, as great coaches often do. Indeed, the art of coaching is predicated on listening and responding in a way that alchemizes change in the coachee. And you’d be right. But I’d argue that this sort of goal-oriented listening still falls within layers 1 and 2. It’s powerful, it serves an extraordinary purpose, but it’s not precisely what I’m pointing at. What I’m talking about is the kind of listening that the world’s best actors know how to do, as well as, the rare leaders who make you feel like you’re the only person on the planet when you’re talking to them. It’s listening with a willingness to be changed oneself. Listening with a depth and focus that you’re willing to surrender your preconceived notions, your expectations and associations, and be truly whisked away into whatever world the speaker is inviting you into. Risking transformation. It takes a tremendous amount of courage and self-assurance to listen that deeply. Most of us, most of the time, want to emerge unscathed from our day-to-day interactions. We don’t want every conversation to become some sort of portal we emerge from differently than when we entered. That’s why I sometimes call this layer of listening virtuosic or Olympic listening. It is not everyday stuff.
I know for a fact, however, that this willingness is what makes your favorite actor so compelling to watch on camera. The depth of their listening, their willingness to be affected by what they’re hearing. It creates a temporary pop-up universe for both the listener and speaker, as if they’re being enveloped by the completeness of the listening. If you’ve ever walked away from a conversation and felt almost emotionally altered by your partner’s attention, chances are they were standing in front of you willing to be moved themselves.
I’m still exploring, alongside our most trusted clients, when and where this sort of listening is appropriate in a business context. As I mentioned above, not every jog around the block is an Olympic trial. Still, having the capacity to risk being changed by what you hear not only facilitates deeper connections and richer relationships, it sets you up for a life that’s more surprising, more adventurous, and more meaningful than it would be if you exited every single conversation you ever had the exact same person you were when you started.
My first year at Juilliard, I was struggling with a scene in acting class. I thought I had prepared well, I knew all my lines and my character’s POV, but in performance the scene was static. It didn’t move because I wasn’t being moved within it. During a work session, my acting teaching used a metaphor I haven’t forgotten since. He said, “Alejando, I’m afraid to tell you: you’re going to have to hand your scene partner the thread of your sweater, and let him unravel it slowly in front of us all.”
He was talking about my heart’s sweater, of course.
And I’ve been working on the courage to be that brave a listener ever since.