Lead With Your Ears
When my son was 3 years old, his preschool teacher asked all the kids to share what kind of work their parents did. He told them his dad “traveled.” “And what does your mom do?” she asked. Without hesitation, he replied: “She talks.”
Like many members of my immediate and extended family, I was born with strong opinions and with little fear of expressing them. And yes, you might say I earned my living for many years by talking—not just from the pulpit on Sunday morning or in teaching a study, but by having advice or an opinion for almost any situation. I was just trying to be helpful! Isn’t this what it means to be a leader?
The first 30 years of my adult life were focused on speaking; for the last decade I have been trying to learn how to listen. And on this journey, I have come to believe that deep listening is the most important leadership skill we can practice.
What makes deep listening so challenging for leaders? Recently a woman who wants to be a coach confessed: “I think I am listening. I am trying to listen. And then I realized I haven’t really heard a word they said.” In coach training, we describe levels of listening. In the first level, we may seem to be listening, but our focus is on what the other person is thinking of us, our own performance as a coach, our personal agenda, or whatever emotions or worries are bubbling up. It takes awareness and disciplined practice to shift our listening focus intentionally to the other person. Richard Rohr suggests: “We have to have three spaces opened up within us—our opinionated head, our closed-down heart, and our defensive and defended body.”
I believe that deep, other-focused listening is an essential skill for all those who seek to lead in a world full of uncertainty and division. And I invite you to join me on this life-long journey of learning to open our ears, heads, hearts, and bodies to listen—to our brothers and sisters as well as to the whispers of the Spirit. Our ears can change the world!
“Post this at all the intersections, dear friends: Lead with your ears, follow up with your tongue…Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you are a listener when you are anything but, letting the Word go in one ear and out the other. Act on what you hear! Those who hear and don’t act are like those who glance in the mirror, walk away, and two minutes later have no idea who they are, what they look like.” James 1: 19-24, The Message