Class Takeaways — How to Build Connection Through Better Listening

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Hi, I’m Christian Wheeler, professor of marketing and Stratacon Professor of Management at Stanford Graduate School of Business. These are five takeaways about listening and rapport from my lead class Leadership Agility. Listening is more than not talking. It’s what you do in your head, but it’s also what you don’t do in your head. When you’re listening carefully to someone, you’re not critiquing their ideas, you’re not formulating counter arguments, you’re not trying to solve their problems or even trying to plan what to say next. When you are listening, all you’re trying to do is to understand the main points, to understand the person’s feelings and the basis for those feelings. So when you listen to people, try to put the thoughts in your head aside and just give this person space and try to understand where they’re coming from.

Many of us had a tendency to reach for our cell phone when we feel bored or anxious, and research shows it can serve a short-term pacifying effect, but it has a negative effect on our conversation partners. It takes you out of the moment and reduces connection with others. It shows that you’re distracted. It then signals that you’re not engaged. Research also shows that taking out your cell phone reduces your cognitive capacity. Simply having your cell phone on the table in front of you, even if it’s turned off, reduces your performance on a cognitive skills task. Remember that your attention is the currency and it’s the best gift that you can give your conversation partner.

Research shows that most people tend to talk about themselves. And as a result, we like people who ask us questions, but not all questions are the same. We particularly like people who ask follow-up questions, questions designed to get us to talk more. Things like, how did that make you feel? Or what was that like? When we ask follow-up questions that signals interest in our conversation partner, it shows that we’re listening, that we seek to understand them, and that we care about the other person. To paraphrase Maya Angelou, people may not remember what you say, but they will remember how you made them feel.

You should think about interactions as opportunities to gain something. I don’t mean this in a Machiavellian sense, but everyone we talk to has information that can benefit us. The psychologist Richard Wiseman showed that lucky people have more social interactions with other people. They have more open body language such as smiling and making more eye contact. As a result, they have more interactions with people and they serve as social magnets, and this creates opportunities for them that can seem like magic. One way to stimulate your curiosity in other people is to think like a thief. You should have a goal to take something from every social interaction, whether it’s gaining knowledge, getting a good story, or simply becoming closer to your conversation partner.

Research shows that positivity and verbal behaviors like agreement and in nonverbal behaviors like nodding or smiling is associated with relationship satisfaction. But when you’re talking to somebody who you think is wrong or simply somebody you disagree with, it could be tempting to be negative, but you should give that a second thought. This is because bad is stronger than you think. John Gottman, who studied close relationships found a surprising ratio. We need a ratio of five to one positive to negative things in a relationship just to be neutral. That is, bad things are significantly stronger than good. So when you’re tempted to express disagreement or be negative with the person, think twice, hedge your disagreements, find areas of agreement with the person and change that negativity to positivity. Research shows frequent social interactions, even if casual or superficial, increase people’s life satisfaction and even their health.

So get out there and have some positive social interactions with others. Really, conversations are a form of improv in the sense that we have a shared goal to have a pleasant interaction, to have fun, but we don’t have a script. We don’t know what’s going to happen. And so we just have to listen to each other and build on what each other gives us.