#RelationalDialectics

[muddyseasaltsparkles]

Influential Listening

The greatest influences I have ever had have been listeners. I don’t mean that they simply listen while I talk. We’ve all been in “conversations” where it’s clear the expectation of the other person is that they are there to talk and you are there to listen. I true listener isn’t produced by a steamroll conversationalist.

No, a true listener is different. They make you think. They draw from you in such a way that even your un-articulated thoughts are laid out clearly. You may not even have known those thoughts yourself. It takes a true listener to draw that out. Listening is not a passive exercise. The true listener doesn’t make you carry the buckets up the hill by yourself. 

You know you’re with a true listener when your thoughts become more concrete, or, you find yourself arguing against what you’ve just articulated: “No,” you say, “that can’t be right.” Listening takes work and it requires patience. It’s a mistake to think that by the mere act of speaking one is necessarily crystallizing the understanding of their interlocutor. To be sure, the true listener gains insight and understanding, but so are you. 

Communicating with a True Listener is one of the most vulnerable places you can be. The True Listener not only draws out, the True Listener has expectations for transparency while using care to draw out your thoughts but also draw you up. Many people are afraid of their own thoughts or being alone with their thoughts and no other distractions. I think we tend to fear the worst expecting to make a discovery that can’t be undiscovered. The True Listener boosts your confidence as you are no longer alone on the quest. 

This is not to say that the point of conversation is mere self-discovery. What is being emphasized is that there really is great influence to be found in listening. Not pausing waiting for your turn to speak. True Listening makes room for understanding and meaningful exchange and connection. Without adequate space for listening, you run the risk of engaging in dialog where each voice seeks dominance or is superficial.

Baxter talks about such communication as “dialogic contraction” (Baxter, 2011, p. 9). This contraction runs the risk of “a discursive playing field so unequal that all but one monologic, authoritative discourse is silenced” (Baxter 2011, p. 9). Some notions of influence or “influencers” often hinge upon one’s ability to exert authoritative monologic discourse. 

True influence, lasting influence, depends more upon the draw than a push. 

What might this mean for social media influencing? It means there is a place for social media messaging which is evocative. It can be easy to generate messages which spark reactions. Reactions are short-lived. They may not ever rise above the guttural to a place of pre-cognitional, let alone cognitional. This means sharing messages that interact with unarticulated interests, desires, or questions. Curiosity is a powerful draw, and curiosity is not titillation. 

What might this mean for organizational leadership? It means there is a place for True Listening. “Shaping” others is just as much about helping them take shape rather than trying to make them do what you think they should be or do. It also means doing the work of cultivating where this kind of valuable influence can take place. Depending upon position - manager/subordinate - too often boils down to a preferred personality type that seeks to establish hierarchical good as though that is identical to an organization’s good. 

When organizational leaders make hierarchical good and organizational good identical, this is where dialogic contraction occurs. Not only has leadership failed to listen, not listening has become the design. So when a “subordinate” voices a differing perspective, there is no feedback loop to inform and allow for course correction. In particularly toxic situations, a leader will perceive the differing perspective as a threat by virtue of it being different. Influence, in this situation, becomes an exertion of will to stifle or silence another. 

Discussing values becomes an unavoidable part of determining the kind of influence one seeks to have with others. Is influence merely a matter of getting others to behave or believe in ways which correspond to your will? Or does influencing require something deeper? Instead of placing expectations for others, influencing requires something of the influencer. The influencer must value the other person, be patient to do the work of seeing that person not only for who they currently are but who they are capable of becoming. 

Constructive influence cannot be monologic. Mutual listening is necessary. Influence which depends upon self-assertion or exertion of power over another is parasitic in nature. The good of one comes at the expense of the other. Constructive influence, however, leads to building up and a more expansive good than the “good” of momentary acts of compliance-inducing actions which are fleeting, whose goals are forgotten but whose tactics, sadly, are not.

Baxter, L. A.  (2011).  Voicing relationships: A dialogic perspective.  Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.