Asking good listening questions Active Listening

This resource first appeared in issue #32 on 10 Jul 2020 and has tags Managing A Team: Other, Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals

Active Listening for Managers - Rachel Hands
Why you Can’t Just Ask Why - Lorin Hochstein

As a manager, learning to be a better active listener - drawing information out of people, helping them reach their own conclusions, digging deeper, restating the speaker’s thoughts in your own words to make sure you understand - is really valuable. It’s a useful skill for talking with your teammates, but also stakeholders and your own manager. And it really helps me to focus on conference calls - when the other person isn’t really there but I’m watching them talk on my own personal distraction box.

The only thing I’d add to Rachel Hands’ article is that digging in with “Why”-type questions is tricky, as Lorin Hochstein points out. If human beings have any superpower, it’s being able to invent completely plausible reasons for things on the fly. Sometimes there’s truth in there, but just as often it’s an unconsciously generated rationalization. What questions — What did you see that makes you say that? What do you think would be a good reason about that? What should I know about this? — helps keep things much more grounded.