Four Levels of Listening
12:00 AM
Nowadays,
our professional life seems to revolve around the terms “leadership”. Enormous
effort and investment has been made to create future leaders to make sure the
continuation of a healthy organization within a company, but still some
failures just inevitably happen. Little did we know that most of the time,
leadership failure came from a lack of understanding and low level of listening
skill. Listening skill is a core skill of many disciplines. If you want to
succeed in a mastery of a discipline, you have to master listening skill
beforehand. According to Otto Scharmer, the author of the best-selling books
Theory U, there are four levels of listening which one must learn to become a
great leader. The first one is called downloading.
At this level, a person who listens to someone are listening inside their own
boundary. They filtered all incoming information and reconfirm things that they
already knew. You can take a person who gives presentation in a class room with
all curtains and windows closes as a metaphor. They project only what they
already knew. At this level, a person is unable to help with any advice and can
only reconfirm what the speaker says. The second level is called factual listening where he/she enters
the stage of open mind. The factual listener listens and take note of things
that contradict with their theory or understanding. The outcome on this level,
would be that the person may somehow create innovation to make the
disconfirming fact into confirming fact in order to strengthen and justify
existing theory. This might help if you are working on a scientific field where
you always do some research and observation. But if you are working in a more
complex situation where human interaction is intense, you will need to go
beyond that. The third level would be the emphatic
listening, where as you may already have guessed, listening while putting
our self in the shoes of another person. We try to understand the information
and feel the emotion of the person as if it was our own experience. At this
level, we enter the stage of open heart where we start to create emotional
connection with others. This is enough if the person needs only to be
understood and felt without any judgment towards their feeling, perception and
action, but a great listener is someone who is willing to go beyond that. At
last, the fourth level of listening is generative
listening. In this level, there is a shift of identity in us as a listener.
We listen, understand, being emphatic and our energy is fully connected with
the person we listen to. Our mind then, begin to create a highly possible
future with the best outcome if the person fully capitalized their potentials,
which are visible strength and hidden gem. Based on that foresight, we can give
advice so that they may be guided to the best possible outcome. This is
actually what a great coach does when they enter a stage of mind called open
will. Our energy shift willingly to assist another person on their adversities.
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