5 Ways That 'Active Listening' Can Backfire

The Perils of Listening Well

Catch-up service:
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Tickets still available for my choir’s concert at Cadogan Hall, near Sloane Square, on Wednesday night: A Night at the Opera. It’s a brilliant program of selections from different eras, with huge tunes, and amazing soloists. You’re guaranteed to enjoy it. And you can get home in time for the football (well, the second half).

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When you listen to someone talk, what’s going on? The straightforward answer is that you’re receiving information from them. But we all know it’s not as simple as that.

You’re also guessing at what’s on their mind, which may not be the same as what they’re telling you. Not because they’re lying, but because we very often don’t put everything we feel into words - at least not into the words we ‘publish’.

So you’re listening for gaps, for lacunae. You’re also alert to the non-verbal signals they’re sending, like tone and pitch of voice, movements of eyes, face and body. You know that some of these signals are sent intentionally, others unintentionally, though you’re not always sure which is which.

As they speak, and you listen, you’re also processing all this information, explicit and implicit, and placing it in context. You’re fitting it together with what you already know, about this person and about whatever it is they’re talking about.

At the same time as you’re listening and processing, you’re also communicating. You’re using words, non-verbal sounds, movements of face and body, to show that you’re taking on board the information they’re sending and that you’re in tune with whatever it is they’re feeling, or with whatever it is they expect you to be feeling, in response to what they’re telling you.

You’re also anticipating how they are feeling about this conversation, and how they’ll feel about it afterwards. Listening to someone talk is one thing; making them feel heard is another.

I could go on. All I’m saying is, listening is complicated. It’s a complicated operation. It can be hazardous, too. A study of teachers in Israel found that those who rated themselves as excellent listeners were more likely to suffer burnout. It’s a wonder we do it at all (although let’s face it, not all of us do) though most of us think we’re pretty good at it, better than we actually are. A study of everyday conversation found that 71% of respondents rated themselves above-average listeners.

Despite the importance of good listening, in our personal and professional lives, it’s still something of a mystery. Psychologists who have attempted to identify and define it have come up with surprisingly few concrete answers. A new paper presents a survey of the literature to date and it does so in the spirit of humility. Guy Itzchakov and Graham Bodie list ten “puzzles of interpersonal listening”, drawing on multiple studies and papers to show how the field is riven with contradictory theories and conflicting findings.

Despite this, there are endless books and online articles offering confident instruction on ‘active listening’. Lists of behaviours, rules and tips, all ostensibly grounded in science. What Itzchakov and Bodie show is that once you look deeply at the evidence, you find that there is no rule of listening that can’t be fruitfully broken; no ‘do’ that can’t become a ‘don’t.

That doesn’t mean the field offers nothing of value - it’s full of rich findings, even if they don’t resolve themselves into a neat and universally applicable model of good listening. It just means we should be sceptical of any such rules. What the Itzchakov and Bodie paper shows is that even the most earnestly practiced listening techniques can backfire.

Here are 5 ways in which the rules of ‘active listening’ can go wrong.

1. BE SILENT. A popular rule is that the listener should let the speaker do 80% of the talking. This one seems like common sense: if you want to listen well, then you need to stop talking. But the 80:20 rule is arbitrary at best. A study of 250,000 sales conversations found that they went best when the salesperson (the ‘listener’ in this situation) spoke for 43% of the time - that is, over twice as much as the rule suggests.
   
   Managers and employees tend to have different ideas of what constitutes the optimal amount of listening and speaking. Managers believe that employee motivation rises if they (the manager) listen more. They think a conversation has gone well if they listen for 70% of the time. But employees tend to favour a 50:50 balance of speaking and listening. People with depressive tendencies can interpret silence as rejection or indifference. Brief pauses are OK, but long pauses can make the listener doubt the speaker’s competence or to suspect they’re disengaged.
   
   Listeners speak to gain understanding, and refine their own thinking. They might offer stories of their own to demonstrate understanding. As Itzchakov and Bodie put it, ‘speaking can serve listening” by showing how the listener is attuned to the speaker’s mind. It’s not easy, is it? Speak too much, and you dominate a conversation which is meant to be for the listener’s benefit. That’s not good. But speak too little, and they might think you’re not listening.
   

2. ASK QUESTIONS. Questions are useful because they can elicit valuable information, and because they demonstrate interest and curiosity. They show that you actually care about the what the speaker knows, thinks, and feels. Listeners who ask follow-up questions are consistently rated as more likeable.
   
   But a simple “ask questions” rule can lead you astray. Too many questions can sound like an attempt at domination or control. Questioning can become interrogation and put the speaker on defence. Leaders sometimes forget that if you’re going to ask questions, you really have to listen to the answer. (This paper calls that “disrespectful inquiry”).

   
   One of the most annoying use of questions is as a pretext for the question-asker to talk about themselves:
   
   How was your weekend?
   ”It was OK-”
   ”Well, mine was amazing! [Drones on about it for ten minutes]
   
   Behavioural psychologists Alison Wood Brooks and Michael Yeomans have coined the unfortunate neologism “boomerasking” for this habit. Boomeraskers believe they’re great people who have demonstrated curiosity; their interlocutors think they’re insincere and self-obsessed.
   
   Question-asking is not inherently good or bad. It depends on the spirit in which the question is asked, and how the answer is treated.
   

3. DON’T JUDGE. Carl Rogers, one of the founders of modern psychotherapy, introduced the concept of “unconditional positive regard” to the therapeutic relationship. A good listener withholds judgement in order to help speakers feel safe and accepted.
   
   It makes perfect sense. There’s clearly a trade-off between judgement and curiosity. Once you make up your mind about someone, you tend to stop thinking about what they’re saying. And as soon as my interlocutor believes that I think badly of them, they tend to stop talking honestly and freely, so the conversation either comes to an end or becomes a row.
   
   But, as Rogers himself recognised, we can’t help but make judgements.