I have been a talker my whole life. (I know you find that SHOCKING.) My mother used to say, “Lauren Ann, stop talking just to hear the sound of your own voice.” When I moved into a management role, The Colonel put it this way: “Stop talking. Listen. You don’t learn anything from talking. But – if you listen, one way or another, your team will tell you what you need to know about them and what they need.”
Those of us with the “gift of gab” are, for some irrational reason, afraid of silence—and so we tend to fill it with words ourselves. This is an area wherein I have consistently had to work on disciplining myself. I still have to work at it – every day.
St. Francis of Assisi, and later Dr. Stephen Covey, advised that we should “seek first to understand.” It’s very difficult to do this if your mouth is working harder than your ears. If you are always the one talking, your team eventually stops trying to communicate with you – and they also stop listening. It becomes a monologue rather than a dialogue—and often a monologue to a brick wall.
Try to stop talking and listen for a while instead. Furthermore, when you listen, turn off your internal dialogue—you know, the one that’s always interrupting with, “Yes, but…” Listen with the intention of listening, not with the intention of responding. This, more often than not, allows you to hear the message behind the words. When you do this, your team will begin to share more about their projects, their struggles, their joys, their frustrations, and their aspirations. They will begin, in subtle ways, to express how they need to be led, when and how they need encouragement, and when they need to be left alone to figure it out on their own.
They will tell you what they need from you—but only if you are listening more than you are talking.
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