In the age of knowledge, ideas are the foundation of success in almost every field. You can have the greatest idea in the world, but if you can’t persuade anyone else to follow your vision, your influence and impact will be greatly diminished. And that’s why communication is no longer considered a “soft skill” among the world’s top business leaders. Leaders who reach the top do not simply pay lip service to the importance of effective communication. Instead, they study the art in all its forms — writing, speaking, presenting — and constantly strive to improve on those skills.

For example, while Jeff Bezos was building Amazon, he put a premium on writing skills. In the summer of 2004, he surprised his leadership team and banned PowerPoint. He replaced slides with “narratively structured memos” that contained titles and full sentences with verbs and nouns.

Bezos is not alone among top leaders. “You cannot over-invest in communication skills — written and oral skills,” says former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, who now serves on Amazon’s board. “If you cannot simplify a message and communicate it compellingly, believe me, you cannot get the masses to follow you.”

During my research for The Bezos Blueprint, I found a number of common tactics top leaders use when communicating with their teams. Here are four to try:

1. Use short words to talk about hard things.

Long, complicated sentences make written ideas hard to understand — they’re mentally draining and demand more concentration. You’ll win more fans if you replace long words and sentences with short ones.

“If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do,” writes Nobel prize–winning economist Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow. He argues that persuasive speakers and writers do everything they can to reduce “cognitive strain.”

Software tools like Grammarly assess writing quality by generating a numerical readability score. The score assigns a grade level to writing samples. For example, a document written for a person with at least an eighth-grade education (the average 13-year-old in the U.S.) is considered “very easy to read.” It does not imply that your writing sounds like an eighth grader wrote it. It simply means that your sophisticated arguments are easy to grasp — and ideas that are easy to understand are more persuasive.

Since writing is a skill, you can sharpen it with practice. Bezos improved as a writer over time. His first Amazon shareholder letter in 1997 registered at a tenth-grade level (comparable to The New York Times). Over the next decade, 85% of his letters were written for an eighth- or ninth-grade level.

For example, in 2007, Bezos explained the benefits of Amazon’s newly introduced Kindle in a paragraph a seventh grader could understand:

If you come across a word you don’t recognize, you can look it up easily. You can search your books. Your margin notes and underlinings are stored on the server-side in the “cloud,” where they can’t be lost. Kindle keeps your place in each of the books you’re reading, automatically. If your eyes are tired, you can change the font size. Our vision for Kindle is every book ever printed in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds.

Bezos chose short words to talk about hard things. When you make things simple, you’re not dumbing down the content. You’re outsmarting the competition.

2. Choose sticky metaphors to reinforce key concepts. 

A metaphor is a powerful tool that compares abstract ideas to familiar concepts. Metaphors bring people on a journey without ever leaving their seats. Chris Hadfield, a famous Canadian astronaut, is a talented speaker and TED Talks star who tapped into the power of metaphor to describe an indescribable event:

Six seconds before launch, suddenly, this beast starts roaring like a dragon starting to breathe fire. You’re like a little leaf in a hurricane…As those engines light, you feel like you’re in the jaws of an enormous dog that is shaking you and physically pummeling you with power.

Roaring beasts, leaves in a hurricane, the jaws of a dog — these are all concrete ideas to describe an event that few of us will ever experience.

In business, metaphors are shortcuts to communicating complex information in short, catchy phrases. Warren Buffett understands the power of metaphor. If you watch business news or follow the stock market, you’ve no doubt heard the phrase “moats and castles” attributed to companies that dominate an industry that’s difficult for competitors to enter. Buffett popularized the phrase at a 1995 Berkshire Hathaway meeting when he said, “The most important thing we do is to find a business with a wide and long-lasting moat around it, protecting a terrific economic castle with an honest lord in charge of the castle.”

The castle metaphor is a concise shortcut, a vivid explanation for a complex system of data and information that Buffett and his team use to evaluate potential investments.

When you introduce a new or abstract idea, your audience will automatically search for something familiar to help them make sense of it. Introduce a novel metaphor and beat them to the punch.

3. Humanize data to create value.

The trick to reducing cognitive load and making any data point interesting is to humanize it by placing the number in perspective. Showing them PowerPoint slides with statistics and charts only adds cognitive weight, draining their mental energy.

Any time you introduce numbers, take the extra step to make them engaging, memorable, and, ultimately, persuasive.

For example, by 2025 scientists expect humans to produce 175 zettabytes of data annually, or one trillion gigabytes. It’s simply too big a number for most people to wrap their minds around. But what if I said that if you could store 175 zettabytes of data on DVDs, the disks would circle the earth 222 times? It’s still a big number, but the description is more engaging because it paints a vivid image in your mind’s eye.

Famed astrophysicist and science educator Neil deGrasse Tyson once told me that the secret to science communication is to “embed the concept in familiar ground.” In other words, turn data into language mere humans can understand.

One of Tyson’s famous examples of humanizing data occurred in 1997 when NASA launched the Cassini space probe to explore Saturn. Skeptics questioned its $3 billion price tag, and so Tyson appeared on television talk shows to educate the public on the benefits of the mission. But first, he had to deal with the price shock, so he pulled a data comparison out of his rhetorical toolbelt. He explained that the $3 billion would be spread over eight years. He added that Americans spend more on lip balm every year than NASA would spend on the mission over that timeline.

To demonstrate the value of your idea, humanize data and make it relevant to your listeners.

4. Make mission your mantra to align teams.

In 1957, a power outage knocked out electricity to large parts of Wisconsin and Minnesota. Earl Bakken, a medical device repairman working in his garage, saw an opportunity to create innovations in the field. So he built the first battery-powered pacemaker that kept working even when the power went out.

At that moment, Bakken’s life took on a purpose beyond just fixing things. He was on a mission to “alleviate pain, restore health, and extend life.”

Bakken passed away in 2018, more than 50 years after founding Medtronic. The company has changed considerably since then. Its 90,000 employees work across 150 countries and its therapies touch the lives of two patients every second. But while much has changed, one thing has stayed the same: Medtronic’s employees are driven by the same six words that inspired Bakken: alleviate pain, restore health, extend life.

Bakken was a “repeater in chief,” constantly keeping the company’s mission front and center. Shortly before Bakken passed away at the age of 94, he recorded a video for employees. He repeated the company’s mission and made one request: “I ask you to live by it every day.”

A mission statement that’s tucked in a drawer and largely forgotten does little to align teams around a common purpose. Harvard Business School professor John Kotter found that most leaders under-communicate their vision by a factor of 10. “Transformation is impossible unless hundreds or thousands of people are willing to help, often to the point of making short-term sacrifices,” Kotter writes.

Transformational leaders overcommunicate. They repeat the mission so often, it becomes a mantra. A mantra is a statement or slogan that builds in strength as it’s repeated. Overcommunication fuels its impact. Your mission should take center stage. Shine a spotlight on your company’s purpose across communication channels: memos, emails, presentations, social media, and marketing material. If your mission stands for something, then stand up for it.

. . .

Anything worth accomplishing takes the work of a team, a group of people dedicated to the passionate pursuit of a dream, a common vision. While some teams follow leaders who are granted power through sheer title alone, the most successful teams follow leaders because they are inspired to do so.

In the team sport of innovation, the quality of interaction between teammates regulates the speed of discovery. If a team is healthy, the pattern of exchange will be free-flowing, candid, and energized. If it’s unhealthy, the team will retreat into silence, superficial niceness, or some combination of the two.

Much of the know-how required for innovation comes from the bottom of the organization — in other words, from local knowledge. Yet many non-management employees consider innovation outside the scope of their jobs. Even when they want to participate, they don’t because the organization’s tacit norms discourage it. The pressure to execute and remove variance overwhelms the motivation to innovate and introduce variance.

For example, an employee at a large health care organization said to me, “If you’re new in this organization, you have to listen for a year before the organization will listen to you.” That’s a cultural barrier to entry that silences a team and chokes innovation. If that norm is perpetuated, the entire organization will be hobbled in its creative output.

In my research with hundreds of teams during the past decade, I’ve identified a cultural barrier that — perhaps more than any other — stifles innovation in its earliest stage: authority bias. Authority bias is the tendency to overvalue opinions from the top of the hierarchy and undervalue opinions from the bottom, and it eventually turns into exaggerated deference to the chain of command. Organizations tend to give the most credibility to ideas, suggestions, or points of view based on source rather than substance. In fact, source becomes a proxy for substance because we reasonably expect more competency as we move up the hierarchy. But this creates natural disincentives for those at the bottom to raise their voices. The greater the power distance, the higher the perceived risk of speaking up. Thus, the grander the perch, the rarer the feedback.

Unleashing bottom-up innovation is largely a matter of neutralizing this side effect of hierarchy. But how can organizations create a true idea-meritocracy in which they become more agnostic to title, position, and authority and truly debate issues on their merits? How do they achieve cultural flatness: a condition in which power distance or structure does not restrict collaboration or the flow of information?

Here are three practical steps leaders can take to neutralize authority bias, embrace cultural flatness, and unleash bottom-up innovation.

Grant irrevocable participation rights.

First, understand the distinction between participation rights and decision rights. Participation rights refer to a person’s opportunity to participate in discussion, analysis, and advocacy concerning ideas, issues, and questions. Decision rights, on the other hand, refer to the authority of a group or individual to make a decision about an idea, issue, or question. Make it clear to both new and existing team members that participation rights are embedded in every role.

Here’s how: First, clarify the difference between participation rights and decision rights. Second, acknowledge that in the past, participation rights were often granted based on criteria such as seniority, time-in-grade, title, experience, and formal status. Explain that your team doesn’t subscribe to this norm and that all employees are granted irrevocable participation rights — provided they demonstrate respect, basic contextual understanding, and good faith. Third, provide opportunities for team members to exercise their participation rights based on relevant issues, questions, or potential courses of action, and then explicitly invite all team members to weigh in.

This of course is easier said than done. Many organizations are dripping with implicit bias, which curtails the participation rights of new and/or underrepresented and marginalized employees. In practical terms, this means that employees in these groups may require reassurance and additional efforts to create psychological safety in the process. They may be slow to respond, but when they see that equal access to participate in the process is fair and consistent, they will gradually opt in.

Finally, cultivate the expectation that innovation is embedded in every job description. Reinforce that innovation is primarily a social process that relies on collaboration.

Practice exploratory inquiry.

The status quo becomes ingrained over time as our thoughts about it harden into dogma and we become attached to it. But the homogenization of thought is the enemy of innovation.

Innovation by its very nature is disruptive of the status quo, so challenging it is a highly vulnerable behavior. Because it carries a high degree of personal risk, most employees conduct careful threat detection before engaging in exploratory inquiry and potentially deviating from the status quo. Also, keep in mind that, for most people, evaluating performance based on data feels more secure than exploring possibilities based on assumptions and predictions. So how do you get over the discomfort associated with exploration?

Practice the disruptive question sequence. This three-step process is a quick and effective way to get the ball rolling and accelerate bottom-up innovation:

• First, ask, “Why?” Why do we do it this way?
• Second, ask, “What if?” What if we tried this instead?
• Third, ask, “How?” How might we do it differently?

Ensure that the process is non-judgmental. Generate and ideate without editing, critiquing, limiting, or censoring.

Finally, once you teach the disruptive question sequence, don’t expect the process to run itself. Your team needs practice. The best way to develop the skill is to run a series of disruptive question sequence sessions with your team with assigned topics. For example, I worked with a marketing team recently that held a session to address its lead-generating process. The leader was careful to model the three-step process and remove every incentive that might motivate her team members to be silent or superficially nice. The dialogue was hard-hitting, yet honest and respectful.

Normalize constructive dissent.

Finally, for employees to develop skills across the companion disciplines of execution and innovation and seamlessly toggle back and forth between them, normalize constructive dissent. Team members must be given explicit permission, and even the obligation, to disagree.

The thinking that causes employees to stay away from innovation goes something like this: “Innovation requires exploration, exploration leads to failure, failure leads to punishment. I’ll keep quiet.” Remember, silence is expensive for organizations. It drives out excellence and ushers in mediocrity. When it’s not safe, people play it safe. So how do you normalize dissent?

Criticize your own ideas and decisions in public.

Think out loud with your team and publicly poke holes in your own thinking and behavior. Invite others to join you. For example, one leader said to her team, “As you know, my fingerprints are all over this decision. I own that, but here we are six months later and it looks like I made the wrong decision. I need your help to think this through.”

Celebrate dissent and invite more.

The most significant moments of truth in culture formation happen when a team member takes an interpersonal risk “on stage.” In one team I observed, a team member voiced the unpopular opinion that a proposed decision was a bad idea. Creating a wave of cultural flatness, the team leader responded, “That’s fantastic. I’m excited to learn why you feel that way.” Then he listened carefully and solicited more dissenting views.

Inject empathy.

Never a purely intellectual process, dissent is frequently charged with emotion. At its root, dissent is most often an intellectual clash. On the other end of an opinion, though, is a human being coming to the table with some mixture of confidence and fear. People draw different conclusions from the same data sets all the time, and that’s why it’s hard. You can tell people to hold their opinions lightly, but it rarely works until they come to understand alternative viewpoints with empathy. Empathy is compassionate curiosity about another person’s journey from data to conclusions. What data do they have? What assumptions did they make? What do they care about and why? Finally, how did they reach their conclusions? Injecting empathy into the discussion can turn confrontation into fruitful collaboration.

. . .

Remember, bottom-up innovation relies on the circulation of local knowledge, and the circulation of local knowledge relies on cultural flatness. Too much deference to the chain of command will bottleneck that circulation. To create cultural flatness and unleash bottom-up innovation, grant irrevocable participation rights, practice exploratory inquiry, and normalize constructive dissent.

Leaders face rising pressure to include more voices in day-to-day decision making. Soliciting diverse perspectives across the organizational hierarchy makes good business sense: It’s been shown to improve innovation and help employees feel valued and avoid burnout. But have these pressures resulted in more ideas reaching fruition for the average team? Not really.

In our work as researchers, consultants, and teachers, we’ve seen that “good intentions” aren’t enough when it comes to implementing employees’ ideas. Leaders have plenty of stories and tactics to encourage people to share their ideas — and as many reasons for rejecting them. Research shows that asking people to speak up without listening to what they say can be counterproductive. Energetic star employees can become discouraged and even quit when they’re invited to share ideas that don’t go anywhere compared to when they’re not invited at all.

Many leaders feel stuck. They know that employee perspectives are crucial for retention and innovation, but they struggle to single-handedly create a culture where employees are empowered both to speak up with ideas and to see them through — where it’s the good idea that matters, rather than the role or status of the person who initially raises it. Based on our research on “voice cultivation,” we’ve identified several tactics leaders and their teams can use to help ensure good ideas make it to implementation.

Voice cultivation can overcome initial rejection

To understand how good ideas come to fruition or die on the vine, we spent two years in a health care organization tracking instances of “upward voice” — that is, employees’ constructive ideas for improving organizational or team functioning. We witnessed many rejections, but we also found that around a quarter of the hundreds of ideas we followed were ultimately implemented.

The ideas that made it shared a process we came to call “voice cultivation”: the collective, social process through which employees help lower-power team members’ voiced ideas reach implementation. There were five specific tactics we saw team members engage in to resuscitate initially rejected ideas and then keep them alive over time: amplifying, developing, legitimizing, exemplifying, and issue raising. Team members in most work settings can adapt and apply these tactics strategically.

Amplifying

Publicly repeating someone else’s good idea, especially at later times and through multiple communication channels, can help push an idea forward. This is particularly true for those trying to influence authority figures. In the clinic, we observed many instances of this. For example, a nurse shared how overwhelmed she was with clinic calls that limited her in-clinic nursing work and proposed different strategies for handling calls. The doctor thanked her but rejected her idea because the problem was huge and “[couldn’t] be fixed.” However, the idea lingered, and other team members brought up the nurse’s idea again even while she was out on maternity leave. By the time she returned, the team was experimenting with different call-routing strategies.

Similar amplification tactics were evident among women staffers in the Obama administration. According to the Washington Post, “When a woman made a key point, other women would repeat it, giving credit to its author. This forced the men in the room to recognize the contribution — and denied them the chance to claim the idea as their own.” And during a recent conversation at NYU Law, Justice Sonia Sotomayor described how she and the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg overcame constant interruptions and appropriation of their ideas by amplifying each other’s ideas. In our latest executive workshop at Harvard, Dr. April Camilla Roslani, a surgeon and university dean, shared that she encouraged her team “to repeat or echo good ideas in the event that they are missed or not valued and to recognize the person who brought them up originally.” Amplifying allows anyone who hears a good idea to ensure that it’s not lost.

Developing

Sometimes giving an idea the benefit of the doubt is sufficient. We saw team members keep rejected ideas alive by asking clarifying questions that helped them and others better understand them. This strategy is particularly helpful in interdisciplinary teams, where people from different professions and genders often speak past each other, using different jargon and linguistic patterns. The difficulties and opportunities posed by an idea that are salient to some team members may be invisible to others. Developing one another’s ideas helps make them legible across the team.

Legitimizing

Vouching for ideas that you believe in is critical for their success. We saw team members keep ideas alive by sharing examples of a similar personal experience or of how a similar idea worked at a competitor or admired peer institution, or by describing how the idea could be beneficial and doable at their organization. It prevented ideas from lower-power members from being dismissed.

We’ve seen the importance of this tactic even outside organizations. For example, La Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, an organization of farmworker women, wrote an open letter in which they legitimized the workplace sexual harassment experiences of their “sisters” in Hollywood, helping prompt the creation of the Time’s Up legal defense fund.

Exemplifying

Researchers who study innovation and conflict highlight the importance of discussing ideas that are tangible rather than amorphous. Finding a way to show preliminary evidence that a previously rejected idea is feasible and important can help revive it. In keeping with the saying that it is sometimes better to beg forgiveness than ask permission, if you’re lower in the organizational hierarchy, taking the initiative to demonstrate in small ways how an idea can actually work in practice or to collect data as part of your day-to-day work can prompt discussions that help keep an idea alive.

Allies can exemplify, but the idea holder can also engage in this work. For example, we observed a receptionist propose that staff should have a seat in leadership team meetings — an idea that was rejected when the team leader explained that a similar proposal didn’t receive enough support a few years back. Though the idea was rejected several more times, the receptionist volunteered to liaise between the team and leadership, making herself indispensable to both and earning a seat at the leadership table.

Issue-raising

Supporting an idea does not mean unconditional support. Publicly calling out the weaknesses associated with an idea can keep it alive by providing allies the chance to openly generate solutions and address concerns directly. In fact, we found the best way to “kill” an idea was to not raise issues or name specific weaknesses, preventing allies from having an opening to address concerns. Acknowledging all the barriers an idea would face helped the idea holder prepare and helped allies engage in joint problem solving. Issue-raising is not about silencing but rather acknowledging that it might take time and work for an idea to find its footing.

Promoting voice cultivation

To make sure their employees’ good ideas get a better chance at implementation, leaders should train their teams to engage in voice cultivation. By introducing voice cultivation to their teams, leaders:

• Set the tone that team members can build each other up or at minimum grant each other the benefit of the doubt
• Promote teamwork rather than competition by rewarding team members for developing others’ good ideas
• Provide practical behaviors the team can engage in and recognize
• Create accountability structures outside of the leaders’ own good intentions

That last point can be tricky for leaders since they’re setting up conditions through which their team can wield some collective power in pushing ideas through to implementation — ideas the leader may not always support. However, they might find longer-term benefits in employee morale by modeling voice cultivation in their teams, and they might also find it useful in meetings where they’re the lower-power team member.

Here are two tools leaders can use to promote voice cultivation on their teams.

Choose the right tactics

A vital feature of leadership is to name and give meaning to vital issues that others intuit but may lack the language to articulate or feel they have the permission to address. This is absolutely the case for voice cultivation. By sharing the concept of voice cultivation with their teams and helping team members reflect on opportunities to implement cultivation tactics, leaders can set the stage for active voice cultivation. Doing so may offer leaders the secondary benefit of setting a tone of psychological safety and inclusiveness on their teams, by emphasizing that they believe everyone has important contributions to make in both raising ideas and seeing them through.

To assist leaders in bringing voice cultivation to their teams, the following table presents an overview of the cultivation tactics and offers example reflection questions to help team members reflect on opportunities to implement these tactics in their own work. Leaders can share this information to spark a discussion as part of a launch for a new team or as part of a “relaunch” for a team seeking to reset its norms and work processes. Other teams that are ongoing may already be using voice cultivation tactics, and leaders can further advance progress by recognizing, naming, and encouraging their continued use.

Consider the environment

Voice cultivating tactics are most powerful when they’re responsive to why an idea was initially rejected. For example, if those with the power to greenlight an idea don’t think the idea is important or possible, amplifying is the wrong tactic, but legitimizing it could provide the support needed to push it forward. This is particularly true of ideas that ask those in power to give up or change something that’s important to them. In those instances, engaging in issue-selling is critical to fostering the opportunity for joint problem raising and joint problem solving. In the following table, we suggest some groupings of tactics — allyship, co-crafting, problematizing, and persistence — that can be responsive to specific forms of resistance.

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From our work with leaders across industries, we’ve seen that many are embracing new behaviors to create more inclusive and participative work environments. Voice cultivation can be a helpful addition to their repertoire.

It’s never been more important — or more difficult — for leaders to be good listeners. Job switching is rampant, and remote work means we don’t get the nonverbal cues we’d pick up from an in-person conversation. Employers who fail to listen and thoughtfully respond to their people’s concerns will see greater turnover. And given that the highest rates of turnover are among top performers who can take clients and projects with them, and the frontline employees responsible for the customer experience, the risk is clear.

While listening is a skill universally lauded, it’s rarely, if ever, explicitly taught as such, outside of training for therapists. A 2015 study showed that while 78% of accredited undergraduate business schools list “presenting” as a learning goal, only 11% identified “listening.”

Listening well is the kind of skill that benefits from not just teaching but coaching — ongoing, specialized instruction from someone who knows your personal strengths, weaknesses, and most importantly, habits. Reading this article won’t turn you into a champion listener any more than reading an article on balance will turn you into Simone Biles. Our aims are to increase your understanding of what good listening is, and offer research-backed advice to improve your listening skills.

Becoming a Better Listener

A participant in any conversation has two goals: first, to understand what the other person is communicating (both the overt meaning and the emotion behind it) and second, to convey interest, engagement, and caring to the other person. This second goal is not “merely” for the sake of kindness, which would be reason enough. If people do not feel listened to, they will cease to share information.

This is “active listening.” It has three aspects:

• Cognitive: Paying attention to all the information, both explicit and implicit, that you are receiving from the other person, comprehending, and integrating that information
• Emotional: Staying calm and compassionate during the conversation, including managing any emotional reactions (annoyance, boredom) you might experience
• Behavioral: Conveying interest and comprehension verbally and nonverbally

Getting good at active listening is a lifetime endeavor. However, even minor improvements can make a big difference in your listening effectiveness. Here’s a “cheat sheet” with nine helpful tips:

1. Repeat people’s last few words back to them.

If you remember nothing else, remember this simple practice that does so much. It makes the other person feel listened to, keeps you on track during the conversation, and provides a pause for both of you to gather thoughts or recover from an emotional reaction.

2. Don’t “put it in your own words” unless you need to.

Multiple studies have shown that direct repetition works, even though it may feel unnatural. Rephrasing what your interlocutor has said, however, can increase both emotional friction and the mental load on both parties. Use this tool only when you need to check your own comprehension — and say, explicitly, “I’m going to put this in my own words to make sure I understand.”

3. Offer nonverbal cues that you’re listening — but only if it comes naturally to you.

Eye contact, attentive posture, nodding and other nonverbal cues are important, but it’s hard to pay attention to someone’s words when you’re busy reminding yourself to make regular eye contact. If these sorts of behaviors would require a significant habit change, you can instead, let people know at the beginning of a conversation that you’re on the non-reactive side, and ask for their patience and understanding.

4. Pay attention to nonverbal cues.

Remember that active listening means paying attention to both the explicit and implicit information that you’re receiving in a conversation. Nonverbal cues, such as tone of voice, facial expression, and body language, are usually where the motivation and emotion behind the words is expressed.

5. Ask more questions than you think you need to.

This both improves the other person’s experience of feeling listened to, ensures that you fully understand their message, and can serve as a prompt to make sure important details aren’t overlooked.

6. Minimize distractions as much as possible.

You’ll want to avoid noise, interruptions, and other external distractions, but it’s important to minimize your internal distractions as well. If you are preoccupied with another topic, take time to re-center. If you know a conversation might be upsetting, calm yourself as much as possible before going in.

7. Acknowledge shortcomings.

If you know going into a conversation that you may be a subpar listener — because you’re exhausted from a dozen intense conversations earlier that day, unfamiliar with the topic under discussion, or any other reason — let the other person know right away. If you lose your footing during the conversation — a lapse of attention or comprehension — say you didn’t quite get it, and ask the person to repeat themselves.

8. Don’t rehearse your response while the other person is talking.

Take a brief pause after they finish speaking to compose your thoughts. This will require conscious effort! People think about four times faster than other people talk, so you’ve got spare brainpower when you’re a listener. Use it to stay focused and take in as much information as possible.

9. Monitor your emotions.

If you have an emotional reaction, slow the pace of the conversation. Do more repetition, pay attention to your breathing. You don’t want to respond in a way that will cause the other person to disengage. Nor — and this is a subtler thing to avoid — do you want to fall into the easy defense mechanism of simply tuning out what you don’t want to hear, or rushing to discount or argue it away.

The Skills Involved in Active Listening

Listening is a complex job, with many different subtasks, and it’s possible to be good at some and bad at others. Rather than thinking of yourself as a “good listener” or a “bad listener,” it can be useful to evaluate yourself on the subskills of active listening. Below is a breakdown of these subskills along with recommendations for what to do if you’re struggling with any one of them.

First, let’s start with what we call the “picking-up skills,” the skills that allow you to gather the information you need.

1. Hearing

If you have hearing loss, be honest about it. For whatever reason, people will boast about their poor vision but hide hearing loss. Help break that stigma. Ask for what you need — e.g., for people to face you when talking, or give you written materials in advance. Let others know, so that they will be alert to indications that you may have missed something.

2. Auditory processing

This refers to how well the brain makes sense of the sound cues. If you’re struggling to understand someone, ask questions to clarify. If it’s helpful, from time to time recap your understanding of both the subject and the other person’s reason for bringing it up — and ask them to validate or refine it. (Make it clear that you are doing this for your own understanding.)

3. Reading body language, tone of voice, or social cues accurately

The advice for auditory processing applies here. Asking a trusted colleague to be your nonverbal communication translator may be helpful in situations where accurate listening is important, but confidentiality is not.

The next two skills involve staying mentally present in the conversational moment.

4. Maintaining attention

If you often find yourself distracted when trying to listen to someone, control your environment as much as possible. Before you begin, set an intention by taking a moment to deliberately focus on this person, in this moment, in a conversation that will be about this topic. If appropriate, use a written agenda or in-the-moment whiteboarding to keep yourself and the other person aligned. If you do have a lapse in attention, admit it, apologize, and ask the person to repeat what they said. (Yes, it’s embarrassing, but it happens to everyone occasionally and to some of us frequently.) Arrive a few minutes early to acclimate yourself if you are having a meeting in a new place.

5. Regulating your emotional response

Meditation has both immediate and short-term benefits for relaxation and emotional control, regardless of the particular practice. The key is to do it twice a day for 10 to 20 minutes, focusing on a mental image or repeating a phrase and dismissing other thoughts as they come.

In the moment, focus on your breathing and do a “grounding exercise” if you feel agitated. These are simple psychological practices that work to pull people back to the present moment by directing attention to the immediate environment. Typical exercises include naming five colored objects that you can see (e.g., green couch, black dog, gold lamp, white door, red rug) or identifying four things that you are hearing, seeing, feeling, and smelling (e.g., hearing birdsong, seeing chair, feeling chenille upholstery, smelling neighbors’ cooking).

Finally, the active listener has to pull the entire package — receiving the message and acknowledging its receipt — together, in the moment. It can be challenging!

6. Integrating multiple sources of information.

At the very least, you are both listening to words and watching body language. You may also be listening to multiple people at once, communicating on multiple platforms simultaneously, or listening while also taking in visual information, such as building plans or sales projections.Figure out what helps you listen best. Do you need information in advance? A “processing break”? A chance to circle back and confirm everyone’s understanding? This is another situation where it can be helpful to have another person taking in the same information, who can fill you in on what you might have missed.

7. “Performing” active listening (e.g., eye contact, nodding, appropriate facial expressions).

If you have a natural poker face, or find it easier to pay attention to people’s words if you don’t make eye contact, share that information with your conversation partner, and thank them for accommodating you. Do extra repetition to make up for the lack of nonverbal communication. You may want to practice better performativity skills, but don’t add that mental burden to important conversations. Ask a five-year-old to tell you about their favorite superhero, then practice acting like you’re listening.

Please note: This list is not intended to be diagnostic instrument, but if any of the skills listed above seem truly difficult to you, you may want to consult your doctor. Scientific understanding of these processes, from the sensory organs to the brain, has expanded greatly in the past years. Many successful adults have discovered mid-career that they have undiagnosed sensory, attention, information-processing, or other disorders than can impair listening ability.

For each of these subskills, there is also a range of natural ability, and your life experience may have enhanced or muted this potential. We know, for example, that music training improves auditory processing skills, and acting or improvisation training improves your ability to “read” people and perform the role of an active listener. Having power, by contrast, decreases your ability to read others and accurately grasp their message — don’t let this happen to you!

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Listening is vitally important, sadly undertaught, physically and mentally taxing, and in the aftermath of Covid-19 has never been more difficult. As we close in on a third year of unprecedented upheaval in work and life, employees and managers alike have more questions than ever — concerns that they may find it difficult to articulate for a variety of reasons, from mental fog to the sheer novelty of the situation.

When this happens, take a moment to listen closely. Consider the questioner, not simply the question. Now is the time for leaders to really listen, understand the context, resist the temptation to respond with generic answers, and recognize your own listening limitations — and improve on them. Have compassion for yourself — you can’t scream at your own brain like a drill sergeant and whip that raw grey matter into shape. What you can do is recognize your weak points and make the necessary adjustments.