What is Active Listening
Related Posts
People hearing without listening
This phrase comes from the song 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘚𝘪𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 by 𝘚𝘪𝘮𝘰𝘯 & 𝘎𝘢𝘳𝘧𝘶𝘯𝘬𝘦𝘭, which appeared on their 1966 album 𝘚𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘚𝘪𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦. Interestingly, its message may be even more relevant today. A few years ago, I came across a social media post making the point that many conflicts arise…
Psychological Safety: What happens After the Debrief.
I’ve been in meetings with genuinely good facilitation: clear agendas, everyone invited to speak, where the real disagreement still surfaced afterwards, at someone’s desk. Amy Edmondson’s research is a useful check here: the teams that outperform aren’t the ones with the least friction. They’re the ones where people say the…
The Pace Problem: A Process Nobody Redesigned
I’ve been in process improvement reviews where the team identified the same problem three years running. Not because no one cared. Not because the analysis was wrong. But because the redesign stopped at the policy layer, and the habits underneath it stayed exactly as they were. Pace is one of…
On Mattering
There is a word that is almost entirely absent from business education, and it predicts more of what we say we care about than any of the words we use instead. The word is mattering. Engagement, retention, performance, even leadership effectiveness — the research has been quietly converging for a…
The Room Test
There is a test I do whenever I walk into an organisation for the first time. I do not look at the values on the wall. I do not read the wellbeing strategy. I do not ask about the engagement scores. I watch the first meeting. Who speaks first. Who…
On Respect
When I studied Astrophysics between 1989 and 1995, I occasionally had lunch with my professor, sitting at the same table in the university canteen. When I told my father, he was both surprised and amazed. He could hardly believe that his son was sharing a table with a professor. To…
