Most people especially in busy senior managers of organizations listen with their ears, fewer with their minds, and almost no one with their hearts. But the deep heart’s core is where the purest form of listening occurs, and along with it, foresight, understanding, and compassion. The heart’s companion in this form of listening is an experience of profound silence. A powerful way to retain and invest in your employees is to convey a sense that the organization cares enough to listen to them, and hear them deeply, and even what may appear minor matters. It is a sign of institutional respect, and it will be richly reciprocated.
Listening Practices for Leaders and Change Makers
- Keep Field Notes (see prior links) on Listening Encounters and What You Discovered
- Consider exploring and experimenting with Silence as a deeply nourishing practice to build employee wellbeing—at first for 15 minutes per day, then increase gradually.
- Ask for feedback from your employees.
- See what you discover about clarity of thought when you give your employees and colleagues the respite and refuge of silence.
Here is what Beryl Markham the great African bush pilot wrote about her earliest memories of silence (excerpted from West with the Night when she crossed the Atlantic solo.)
“There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of his sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.”