#listening

#listening

A survey from People Insights found that only 56% of employees believe senior leaders genuinely make an effort to listen, which is down from 65% two years ago. We live in a world where algorithms reward noise. Visibility has become a proxy for value, and airtime is the metric that many use to measure leadership presence. But real influence doesn't come from speaking more. It actually comes from listening better. Influence grows through empathy, trust, and the ability to see and understand people.

In 1968, just months before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. looked out at burning American cities and gave an assessment of what he was really seeing. "In the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard," he said. King wasn't excusing violence. He was diagnosing the problem as something even deeper than disagreement over politics or values. Beneath the unrest, he saw the pain of people who had been speaking for a very long time, and who felt that no one in power was listening.

As our world becomes increasingly clogged with human noise, we must listen to what animals are saying to us. Even the smallest creature, you'll find when you take time to listen, is a somebody with something to say. Key questions include: What are animals saying, how much are we missing, and how can we be better listeners? Nonhuman animals of all varieties must live and thrive in an increasingly human-dominated world.

What happens when a group of people gather in a room and really listen to each other? That may sound like an ordinary enough act, and as you walk into the James Earl Jones Theater, you might find yourself deceived by David Zinn's 1970s basic gym basement of a set, or by Susannah Flood's hand-holding introductory address to the audience-fear not a long running time, she says, standing in for the playwright Bess Wohl, all those six-hour plays are by men who didn't have children.

The most important part of sales is listening. This fact is just as true when you're pitching investors as it is when you're closing a deal.