If your competency framework is anything like the average framework, then probably not.
However, in this paper by Avraham Kluger and colleagues, they argue that listening is a core leadership activity. For example, surveys have shown that employees and managers spend between 42% and 63% of their workday listening. Poor listening is highlighted as one of the biggest challenges leaders face in training employees and many scholars have suggested that listening is the most critical communication skill affecting organizational behaviour, including performance.
Despite this, listening has received surprisingly little attention in the academic literature as a predictor of performance at work.
In this paper, the authors meta-analysed 122 research papers to understand the association between perceived listening and job outcomes. Meta-analysis is a statistical technique which enables researchers to aggregate findings from multiple studies, providing insights which cannot be garnered from the individual papers alone.
The authors focus on perceived listening, which they defined as the speaker’s evaluation of the listener’s interest in and reaction to their (i.e., the speaker’s) utterances. They found strong associations between perceived listening and job outcomes, with the relationship between perceived listening and relationship quality being the strongest.
There are a number of important perspectives which can help us to understand the role listening plays in relationship quality:
• When a speaker who perceives that the listener has grasped their frame of reference, or way of seeing the world, this satisfies the speaker’s needs by contributing to the speaker’s self-insight, clarity, self-knowledge, and humility. These gains in clarity and knowledge are rewards that reinforce an attachment between the listener and speaker.
• Perceived listening satisfies the three basic needs specified in self-determination theory (autonomy, competence and relatedness) as listening carries three meta-messages: You [the speaker] have control (autonomy), you are competent (you have something worth listening to), and you belong (you are important enough to listen to). The satisfaction of these basic needs by being listening to is a reward. The reward reinforces an attachment between the speaker and listener, thus creating or strengthening a relationship.
• Listening strengthens belonging. When we are listened to, we experience positive regard, trust, and engagement, strengthening a sense of openness to others, competence, and psychological safety. Critically, speakers form a perception of the listener’s positive regard for them, when the listener is non-judgmental towards their self-disclosures. These feelings satisfy the speaker’s need for belonging and foster a high-quality relationship between the listener and speaker.
Given the criticality of listening in work relationships, these results suggest that listening may be an underutilized job-performance predictor and a cause of superior performance.
Inclusive leaders are excellent listeners. They recognise the important role listening plays in getting to know what makes their people unique and in building belonging between their team members. Listening is a foundational skill for every other people-based competency. To learn more about how we integrate the science of listening to our work with building inclusive leader capability, get in touch at enquiries@inclusiveleadershipcompany.com.
You can access the research article here.
