JP: There are real consequences to listening. The quality of our connection. I often like to say that the quality of our listening shapes the quality of our connection and, and relationships and, in the workplace, everything gets done in and through relationships. So it’s really the building block of good working habits and relationships.

CC: Welcome to Work Better. The Steelcase podcast where we think about work and ways to make it better. I’m your host Chris Congdon and my guest today is listening expert Jeff Yip.

Jeff is an associate professor of management at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. He’s also the director of Listening Works – a research group focused on listening and leadership development. And he’s a co-author of the May 2025 HBR article, “Are you Really a Good Listener.” Jeff argues many of us think we’re good listeners, but we’re actually not.

JY: I think the challenge with listening is that there are two delusions that’s universal, that most people have, including myself. One, we think that we are a better driver than we are and second is we think that we’re a better listener.

CC: It was helpful to talk to Jeff about why being a good listener is critical for business, and marriage, so enjoy the conversation.

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CC: Hi Jeff. Welcome to Work Better.

YP: Hi, Chris. Great to be here.

CC: We really appreciate you joining us. And actually, I kind of wish I had a chance to talk to you yesterday because last night my husband had the talk with me about how my listening skills have room for improvement. And, you know, he’s, he is actually right.
I’m usually pretty tired at the end of the day, and sometimes listening feels like a really heavy lift. I hope I’m doing better at work, but I know you have studied this topic of listening extensively and I’d really love to hear about so many things that you’re learning, but let’s maybe start with some of the basics, like why is being a good listener so critical for businesses?

JP: Yeah. Chris, thanks for sharing that. Listening is certainly not easy. It doesn’t get better also with more experience in age. In fact, it sometimes gets harder, as we think of kids being very curious listeners. And I think, with age, experience, and expertise, listening can get harder.
And this is particularly important when we think about listening in business and leadership, expertise and familiarity can sometimes breed assumptions and assumptions prevent us from listening, and that’s often the case with family members who we are very familiar with. Same with leaders who are very familiar with their business context and are comfortable with their experience.
So the more we know, the more we assume and the harder it is for listening and that’s why listening is such a critical skill and a difficult skill that leaders need to master.

CC: I think you’re right. Like I feel at work sometimes there’s something that we really feel strongly about that we really wanna say, and we’re so busy thinking about what we wanna say we’re not really paying attention to what the other person is talking about first. In your research, I know that you’ve discovered three, I’ll call ’em ingredients, if you will, for good listening. Can you talk about what those three are?

JP: Yeah. And those are the essential elements of listening. So when we think of listening, what’s helpful is to break it down to what is good listening. And good listening comprises of three parts. The first is attention, so the quality of our attention, both our verbal and nonverbal attention. The second is comprehension. So are we really understanding what we are hearing? And that’s where listening is not one way. It’s a dialogue which involves really good questions, a reflection back. And then the third is which most leaders miss is a response. So what are we doing with what we heard? Are we affirming it and are we taking action on it?

CC: Yeah. That makes so much sense. I can think of so many situations in which. You know, our attention is spread across multiple things. I had a chance to interview Gloria Mark, who did really great work on this topic of attention and how difficult it is for us to, I think our attention span is like 47 seconds or something really low. And then I find myself, and I, I’m hoping this is a good listening skill, but making sure, like, did I really understand you? Like I need to say things back to people and go, did I get this? And that helps. But I think where you’re right, where many of us fall short is that response. Like just even acknowledging that I heard you and maybe I’m not gonna be able to do it. I’m not gonna be able to solve that problem, but at least I did hear what you had to say.

JP: Yeah. And sometimes where the response goes wrong is and also the challenge of expertise and experience is we respond to solve what we heard, before we truly understand what’s being spoken.
And like you said Chris, like sometimes people we jump in too fast, with that response and, and that could be a function also of shorter attention spans in our time.

CC: Yeah, for sure. Well, so let’s break this down a little bit more because I think you’ve also identified five of the common mistakes that happen when we’re listening. Could you walk us through those and talk about them a little bit?

JP: Yeah, so these common mistakes come from a review paper that I wrote with my colleague Colin Fisher from the University College London.
So we reviewed 117 studies on listening across management and psychology and we identified a number of things these five surface from as one aspect of the review. And, the five are haste, the challenge of listening too fast. The second is on defensiveness. So when we listen to respond, but not truly to understand.

The third is invisibility that we are hearing, but we’re not truly conveying that we’re listening. The second is inaction, so that we’ve just discussed that when we’re listening, but we don’t follow up on what we heard. And the last and most critical in our time is exhaustion. While listening is important, we found what we call the paradox of listening is when listening is most important, it’s seldom done well.Because we are, it requires a lot of our physical, emotional energy and most of us are exhausted. And there’s so many things that deplete our energy that we need to learn to manage that in the process of listening.

CC: I feel like you’re sharing this feedback with great empathy, which I appreciate. ’cause I think I’ve done all five of those. I can think of so many situations where I’m like, yeah, okay. Yeah, I’m just, I’m running to another meeting. What is it that you wanted to tell me? Or like, I’m, I’m a little worried that you’re gonna say something to me that I don’t really like, so I’m like, no, no, no, no, no. I don’t, I don’t wanna hear it. Uh, and exhaustion for sure. You know, like just sometimes I’m like, oh, I don’t know if I can hear anymore. Jeff, do you think that there’s some kind of, are we like an inflection point or there’s some kind of urgency around this?
Like I’m curious what made you go through all of those papers and decide that this was really a topic to study?

JP: Yeah, I think the urgency and the inflection point is the demands and challenges with our attention. It’s not gonna go away that we’re being bombarded by information. The opportunities to access different options and information.
It’s only gonna go up and that poses a challenge. Not just our general attention but our attention in listening in building deep, authentic connections in the workplace. And I think listening is the medium by which we can build back up our attention again. If we look at listening as a context where we can focus our attention, increase our comprehension, and build quality responses. I think the other aspects of our attention can also go up through listening.

CC: Yeah. Is it almost like a muscle, you know, like you’re kind of building your listening muscles, so to speak?

JP: Yeah. It’s almost like a muscle and a gym. So listening I think is our gym for increasing, working out on our attention. And it’s not just an exercise. So yeah, I think it is the gym by which we can do better.

CC: I mean, it’s hard for any one of us, I guess, to feel like we matter, that we’re making a difference if it feels like we’re not being listened to, and heard. So talking about kind of the, like this, this muscle thing, I just want to talk about the skillset around listening because it feels like it’s something we don’t get training in necessarily how to be a good listener. We get training on how to be a good speaker, or we just assume that for somebody to have made their way through school, that they had to learn how to listen to their teachers and their professors. But can you just talk about why we don’t really have that skill developed?

JP: Yeah. The thing with both of them is we take it for granted. Like as soon as we get the driver’s license, we don’t think so much about how we improve our driving or get better. We just assume that we are great drivers now that we can drive. Same with listening. We think that now we’ve able to hear and respond that we’re great listeners, right? The listener doesn’t get to decide whether their listening is great. It’s often other people. And what happens is we often don’t get enough feedback where we fall short on listening.
Number one is to get feedback, to make it a deliberate practice, to make it known to others. Whether it’s at work, a trusted colleague. I’m engaging a coach to say that I’m really working on my listening skills and I’d like to get feedback where I fall short, where I have not paid attention, where how I’ve responded was not really comprehending what you said or where I didn’t follow up. So that’s one that leaders need to be more focused in terms of their deliberate practice. So getting feedback as well the other tools that we’ve used and methods and glad to share more about that.

CC: Well I really am curious how you would teach listening. How you go about teaching, listening, because again, you know, I think about, earlier in my career, I had a communications coach. But now that I think about it, it was all about my speaking. It wasn’t about the other side of communications, the listening part of it, and I can’t remember ever seeing that on a course curriculum or anything else. But first of all, can you teach those listening skills? Feedback was one thing you talked about that I thought was really helpful. Are there other ways you go about teaching?

JP: I think we can. I think if we think of the two modes of communication, speaking and listening. Clearly, we’ve thought of ways to teach better speaking. For myself too, like I was very nervous as a public speaker.
I’ve stumbled on speaking, but true deliberate practice, true frameworks through coaching become a little bit better at speaking. And we have a lot of those, we have platforms and resources, and even in our business school courses that teach list speaking but not so much on listening.

Similar to speaking, I think listening can be taught through practice, but also through frameworks and processes. One framework that I like to use to teach listening is the notion of what I call double loop listening. This term is not new. Double loop comes from Chris Argyris, he’s a management thinker who wrote articles about double loop learning.
So there are two loops to learning. The first loop is just information and what was spoken. And one of the errors often people make with listening is that listening is just paraphrasing speaking back and reflecting well. But often people just reflect in that single loop, like just saying exactly what they heard, but not going deeper than that.

And so the single loop is quite limited. In fact, it doesn’t change the conversation, it’s just recycling what was said. Then the second level, which requires practice, is the second loop. The second loop is beyond what is spoken to understand what are the emotions that’s driving what is spoken. What is the context? What are the motives, what are some of the assumptions? Expert listeners do really great at that and it requires practice to reflect back. Is this how you’re feeling about it? This is what I’m hearing. I’m keen to hear your thoughts about this. So it’s reflecting back, not the exact words that a person said, but reading deeper into the motives, the emotions, and the context.
So we practiced this.

CC: If I’m hearing you right, it’s like internalizing what the other person said. And to your point, like understanding the context or thinking about the why behind maybe the what was said. Is that right?

JP: Yeah, that’s right. So listening should move the conversation forward. It shouldn’t just circle within, like this is what you said.
I’m just gonna say back what you said, but just like our conversations. You interpret it a certain way and then you reflect that back and then we move forward in our conversation through that. So the quality of the conversation is also the quality of the reflection and the second loop of listening.

CC: So in our conversation we’re talking about leaders a lot. We all need to be better listeners. I think we can all agree on that one, but in particular for leaders, like is there a cost to an organization if leaders aren’t listening so well, more so than just everybody in the organization?

JP: Yeah, I think there are three costs that I can think of.
The first is around disconnection. Connection happens through listening often, just like we’ve discussed, like some of our examples, not just at work but more in life with partners and family members. That listening is key. Feeling heard is key to a good relationship quality connection. And so when employees feel disconnected from their leaders, their managers primarily, often they don’t feel heard, they don’t feel listened to. So that’s the number one cost of listening.

The second cost of listening is it creates resistance. So when people don’t feel heard, they’re more likely to not speak up or they’re more likely to undermine or to go against a certain direction. So listening creates this connection, it builds up resistance and resentment.
And then finally it creates cynicism where you know, when one is not listened to once, twice, or the third time one feels like, okay, my leader’s not really listening. They’re just trying, pretending to listen. And so then it creates cynicism where people, you know, act, you know, don’t voice out, or really truly disengage from their work. So I think the damages are harsh and start from a simple thing, like really not listening effectively in conversations.

CC: And I think you just answered a question that I had running through my mind as you were talking, which is I’m connecting the dots between listening or maybe lack of good listening. And a lot of the things that we hear business leaders worry about, like employee engagement, and you were just saying, you know, that people are, they become disengaged if they don’t feel like they’re being heard. So maybe that’s one of the root causes of some of the behaviors that we’re seeing in the workplace.
Does that sound right to you?

JP: Yeah, that sounds right. And I think if we unpack the layers to employee engagement, like one of the findings that is often cited is Gallup’s research on engagement. And finding that, you know, having a good friend at work is a very strong predictor of engagement. Right?
But if we dig deeper to that, often a good friend is someone who truly understands us and who listens. So I would go, I would push that even further to say just feeling heard is likely to be the strongest, one of the strong predictors of engagement. If we want engaged employees, then we need to think about the quality of listening. Not just one-to-one listening. We wanna think about large town halls, group level listening. Leaders with large organizations need to think about what are the channels for voice input and listening to happen. I do think that that’s critical for engagement.

CC: Yeah. You’re so right. When I think about it, there are a lot of things that we do in this direction, like town halls or like I have one-on-ones with people on my team. I’m sure that’s, you know, just a regular management practice, other kinds of meetings. But now you’re making me wonder, like going back to the mistakes that people make.
Are we doing those with too much haste or are we doing those when we’re not actually really ready to pay attention because we’ve got some other problem on our mind? So we’re taking some of the right steps, but we’re not closing the loop. To go back to the analogy you said before.

JP: That’s right. So like, just like, uh, Christine, your example of like, you know, in your role, like you have one-to-ones, but there other forms of listening too, and most managers do have a range of ways they listen. And just like I think we have productivity audits and habits, like what are my regular habits and how am I, how am I doing it? How can I refine that? I think it would be useful and we do this in the class around doing a listening audit. Like, so what? You know, what are the expectations for you in your role to listen?
So who expects you to listen well? Who are the stakeholders? What are the expectations? And then how do you listen? How can you improve the quality of your listening? We look at also exhaustion. Like where you feel tired and burnt out, right? By listening and how we can improve that. So I think there can be a design element to listening that, like taking a step back, looking at the demands of our listening in a week and actually doing an audit and improving on that.

CC: You know, I know you’re not an interior designer, but a lot of our listeners are people who are focused on the place and making place a good experience for people. And I’m curious if you have any advice for us who are doing that? Like are there ways that we can create better kind of the conditions, or infrastructure if you will, for people to be better listeners?

JP: I think so, I think certainly we can design for effective listening. So I think just as Steelcase prides itself on design, I think in human interactions we can design the physical environment, the social environment for effective listening.
If we just think of the physical environment if the acoustics are not right, and we talked about the role of exhaustion in this thing. If our attention is being sacked away by bad acoustics in a room it’s gonna be harder to listen. So it’s harder to listen in a really noisy space.

We also think of the physical positioning of people. For example, listening in a circle creates a mutuality that everyone can speak and listen. And often the challenge in the traditional classroom dynamic where there’s one person in front and there’s a lot of others, it’s harder often for the person in front to listen because they feel the weight of the expectation of speaking. So even where we position ourselves sets up different expectations for speaking and listening. I would advocate for a circle environment which creates a mutual, a mutual expectation in a large group for listening.

CC: I love that so much. One because I’m very anti-rectangle. And I know that sounds like a silly thing to be against when there’s so many other issues, but I always just feel like when I’m at a rectangular shape in a and you’re trying to listen, you’re trying to collaborate, and people are leaning back and forth because they can’t make eye contact with each other or they can’t see what’s on the screen and it feels like it’s got this hierarchy.

And I’d never thought about it from that perspective, that not only is maybe the person at the head of the table or the head of the classroom have this kind of hierarchy dynamic going on, but also like you feel a lot of pressure ’cause you’re the one in the front of the room. That’s right. And I’d never really thought about that before. It’s so interesting.

JP: Yeah. I feel the same with rectangle. So if you think of boardrooms and the leader sitting at the head of the table or Thanksgiving dinner. Whoever is at the head of the table tends to be the one to speak more, right? It creates a social expectation.
And then the reverse is a round table. So sitting at a round table denotes that. They’re kind of, there’s equal equality in terms of our speaking and listening.

So there are physical structures that can really shape our listening, but also social structures. So one good example of effective listening is from Jeff Bezos during his time at Amazon, he had this principle and he writes about it, about being the last to speak in the room. Because he realizes because of his standing that people expect him to speak and would listen to him first and that would shape the conversation. So just knowing that like the social structure of or the rule of being the last to speak can work with these kinds of work. Against these social structures where we expect the most senior person to speak, maybe if one is the most senior in the room to be the last to speak, to allow other people to speak up.

CC: I think that’s such a wise principle for all of us to try and remember because it’s always tempting when you’re in a leadership role to feel, well, maybe tempting is not the right word, but it’s always like, I’m supposed to be a decision maker, so I should jump in there and give people direction and let them know what I think. It can be a lot more effective if you try and let people be heard first.

JP: Yeah. It goes to your point when we started Chris, that around like, why is it so hard for business leaders to listen? It is because there’s that weight of expectation to speak.
But if a manager or leader can think about my role is to be a chief listening officer. Because we always think, oh, if I’m leading, it’s to be a chief speaking officer. I gotta say something. I gotta make that input. But how have we reversed it a little bit to think about being in that role is also about being a chief listening officer.

CC: That’s so great. That’s so great. Jeff. I could talk to you all day. I do want to ask for the benefit of myself, for my me search that’s going on right now, but also for all of our listeners. Do you have some just practical tips, here’s some things to take away to where I could be a better listener tomorrow?

JP: Yeah, I think two things come to mind and I’ve also been practicing this too. It’s a mountain with no talk. Listening is a life journey of practice, right? The first is to listen to three conversations. In every conversation there’s actually three conversations that are happening.
So there’s the spoken conversation, and often where we fall short is we just reflect back the certain words. But, and we’ve talked about this, the next level is going deeper to listen and to speak to the emotion and the assumptions behind the conversation.
And then the third is the context. Where are these words coming from? Where’s this position the person is in and trying to understand. That’s where perspective taking and empathy comes in. Like where is their perspective coming from? So not just the words, but the emotions, the motives and the context. And if we attune our listening to that like it all the time I think it can grow with practice.

The second is a practice of listening to close the loop which is basically about the response. And it’s particularly so in the workplace that we’re listening all the time and we get requests and feedback all the time. And oftentimes people think that their managers are not listening ’cause they don’t close the loop and closing the loop, meaning, “this is what I heard.” And being realistic. Listening is not just accommodating every perspective. That would be very tiring, but listening is being very realistic with what one hears. And to say that I agree with this and reasonably, I think I can get this done in the next month and I’ll get back to you on these other two things that you mentioned.

So close the loop continually building on what one hears. And closing the loop on the listening the challenge with listening often in the workplace is it opens a loop that has not closed. And that creates distrust, miscommunication and disengagement. And so just this, these two practices like listening deeper with the three conversations and the habit of closing the loop, just affirming and showing how one is responding to one hears.

CC: I think that’s really good advice and I’m so appreciative that you spent time with us today, Jeff. I think this is, I know it’s gonna be helpful for me and I’m sure it’s gonna be helpful for a lot of our listeners as well.
So thank you so much for joining us today.

JP: Thanks Chris. Appreciate your questions, uh, and really enjoyed the conversation. Yeah, me too.
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In this conversation I learned how important good listening creates connection and engagement with our teams. Small design changes like round tables, or quiet, distraction free spaces can help us pay more attention and be better listeners.

If you want more on the power of the environment to impact our engagement at work check Season 1 Episode 3 with author Annie Murphy Paul on Groupiness at work.

Before you go, remember to share the episode with a friend or colleague, follow us and visit us as steelcase.com/research to sign up for our new weekly newsletter on workplace research, insights and design ideas delivered right to your inbox.

Thanks again for being here and we hope your day at work tomorrow is just a little bit better.