Active listening is a comms super skill. Here’s how to develop yours.

Active listening is a hyper-focused form of listening that goes beyond everyday, passive listening. It requires the listener to pay close attention, ask relevant questions and summarise or paraphrase what they’ve just heard. 

It sounds simple: after all, listening is something millions of us do every day. However, active listening involves mastering a whole new panoply of ear-pricking-up skills: interpreting body language, allowing speakers lots of breathing space and not letting your attention span waver (even if you’re having a conversation about promoting a line of shower drains). And it means never, ever, under any circumstances, engaging in ‘bropropriating’ or mansplaining. 

“Active listening is about being present and making an effort to understand what people are saying, giving them your full attention,” says Alison Arnot, communications consultant, CIPR internal comms trainer and author of Internal Communication in Times of Crisis. “It’s about understanding their issues and responding thoughtfully, rather than making assumptions.”

First coined by US psychologists Carl Rogers and Richard Farson in 1957, today, active listening has been embraced by the Samaritans (who run an Active Listening Skills Development Workshop) and the NHS, as well as high-stakes sectors such as healthcare and aviation, where mishearing what someone’s said could have severe consequences.

Radio/TV presenter Nihal Arthanayake is a strong advocate for listening better. 

Having previously worked as a music PR (representing Elton John and rapper Mos Def) and interviewed everybody from Ed Sheeran to Stormzy, in 2022 he wrote a book Let’s Talk, which he says “should have been called Let’s Listen, because there’s no effective communication without listening. Social media has corralled us to believe everything we say matters, so we’re constantly set to broadcast and transmit, not receive. But it’s in the receiving – or listening – that we truly begin to understand the world.”

In the world of PR/comms, active listening is crucial. “In your professional role, listening to stakeholders is part-and-parcel of what you do,” says Dr Kevin Ruck, co-founder of the PR Academy and co-author of Leading the Listening Organisation. “It leads into professional development; you can’t really develop as a PR manager unless you’re open to what others are saying…”

Why is active listening so important now?

Given the cacophony of modern life (everything from endless notification pings to piped music in shops), our preference for texting/Slacking over speaking on the phone, and the desire for many of us to gadabout in our Airpod cocoons, it’s easy to think we’ve lost the art of listening intently. 

Arthanayake believes the rising popularity of podcasts in recent years could be because of their free-flowing conversational style which involves active listening. “I’ve learned more from [podcasters] Lex Fridman and The Rest is Politics’ Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, than I have any six-seven-minute rolling news interview which sticks to four or five questions.”

In our cancel culture era, active listening could be essential for clients, especially when getting somebody’s personal pronouns or nuances of a medical diagnosis wrong, could result in online opprobrium. 

How is active listening beneficial to PR/comms?

Internal comms
“Internal comms can facilitate great listening within the organisation,” says Arnot. “If you’re actively listening to your colleagues, you’ll recognise strengths, opportunities and threats within the organisation, plus also embrace and celebrate the things people are excited about so the organisation can flourish.”

How to achieve this? Here’s Arnot’s advice: “Encourage people to come forward with their suggestions, worries and fears. Arrange one-to-one meetings, regular check-ins with leaders and team managers, town halls and Q&As, hackathons and observational walkabouts where different teams walk around the company and meet others… What you don’t want is a dusty post-box sitting in the corner of the office…”

Crisis comms
A failure to actively listen to early safety warnings has been behind countless tragedies from the Grenfell Tower fire to the Titan submersible implosion. 

“Often people have been warning about poor processes, toxic cultures, technology malfunctions or other forms of organisational self-harm for months or years,” says Arnot. “The best crisis comms management is that the crisis doesn’t happen in the first place, so comms professionals need to be on the lookout for red flags and warning signs and really need to be interested in the organisation the whole time.”

And should a crisis happen, then active listening can help PR/comms navigate the catastrophe more decisively because, as Arnot says, “you’ll gather information by understanding what people are thinking and what went wrong. Also, when people feel their ideas are valued, they’ll be more likely to work to strengthen the organisation.”

Understanding clients better
By embracing active listening when chatting with clients or sitting in on media interviews, PR/comms professionals can uncover new angles and stories to help craft campaigns that truly resonate. 

Media training clients
Says Arthanayake, “If clients are being interviewed by journalists, a good PR will tell them where they should be listening: techniques used by journalists to trip them up, pivots they could use, areas of conversation, potential [verbal] traps and pitfalls. However, if you’re dealing with somebody who has the hubris of Prince Andrew, it could be impossible…”

Preventing adverse stories from spreading
You might be sitting in on your 15th media interview of the day, but a momentary lapse of attention could mean missing critical information – perhaps leading to a negative story. “[Being distracted] is the last thing you want to be doing, especially if your client says something that could affect the share price or bring reputational damage,” says Arthanayake. “There are moments when your phone needs to go away: this is one.”

The dos and don’ts of active listening

DO

Summarise and paraphrase what’s just been said
Arnot: “By reflecting on what the speaker has just said or summarising the main themes, it shows understanding.”

Ask open-ended questions
Encourage the speaker to elaborate, by asking questions such as, “What do you think about that?, “What happened next?” or “How did that make you feel?” As Arthanayake says, “If your question will elicit a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer, don’t ask it.” The technique of ‘scaffolding’ can foster deeper conversations. “Saying, ‘That’s interesting, tell me more’ enables the speaker to say something they never intended, which’ll give you deeper insight into their feelings,” says Ruck.

Get into deep listening
“Deep listening is about listening to the pauses: what’s being said,” says Ruck. “Whenever there’s a pause, it suggests a reluctance to answer the question. This can highlight deeper issues or difficult topics, which’ll give you a deeper insight into what that stakeholder is thinking or feeling.” However, tread carefully. “If you’ve stumbled across a sensitive topic, the person may show discomfort talking about it,” says Ruck. “Acknowledge this by saying, ‘If this is something you don’t want to talk about, let’s move on.’”

Get the speaker to clarify confusing points
“Be brave to admit when you don’t understand something,” says Arthanayake. “Ask them to explain again if you don’t get it. Don’t blag or bluff it.” “It’s never wrong to ask somebody to explain a technical subject in layman’s terms – nobody will get offended,” adds Ruck. 

Show genuine interest
“Sometimes leaders go out intentionally to ‘listen’ to employees but do it only as a tick-box exercise,” says Ruck. “We did some research where employees would say their bosses were ‘smiling but not with their eyes’. These leaders may have wanted to listen, but clearly didn’t want to be there, which was reflected in their emotions.”

Conduct forensic research
Arthanayake: “As soon as you do the research, you’ll find a link. I once interviewed [British Olympic legend] Daley Thompson and found out he grew up in Notting Hill, London. Before we started the interview, we talked about the Notting Hill Carnival and its sound system culture, and he immediately leaned to me over the other journalists.”

DON’T

Stick to a script of questions
Arthanayake: “When interviewing, I only ever start off with one first question. However, I spend a lot of time researching the interviewee and thinking what that one question will be, as it’ll allow your curiosity to guide the conversation. Using preordained questions leaves little space for you to have your opinions changed.”

Be afraid of silence
A powerful listening tactic. Try buttoning your mouth and the speaker will invariably fill the gap. “It may feel awkward holding onto silence, but these are spaces where people really dig into their own thoughts and feelings,” says Ruck.

Interrupt journalist interviews
Arthanayake: “Working as a PR for Sir Elton, I realised you’re never going to interrupt one of his interviews because he’s so clever and much more experienced than anybody who could ever do his PR.”

7 ways to start active listening

Expert: Clemmie Broom, life coach and NLP and ‘Time to Think’ practitioner (which includes active listening)

1 Get into the zone 
Before an important meeting, use some form of ‘grounding’ method, such as taking five minutes to yourself or doing some breathing exercises. It’ll help create a sense of ‘ease’, which will allow you to pay full attention to what somebody’s saying. 

2 Resist the urge to interrupt
Create a ‘Don’t interrupt’ rule for yourself. This is the hardest challenge, but a crucial part of active listening.

3 Enter the same semantic field as the speaker
If you use some of the phrases the speaker uses, you’ll allow them to feel they’ve been heard. People often use sensory language, which reflects the way they perceive the world. For example, some people use kinaesthetic (or ‘felt’) words: “I’m going to tackle this interview head-on; I’m going to strong-arm this person; I need to feel the ground under my feet.” Others use ‘sight’ language: “I can see the road ahead; everything is looking brighter”. If you can adopt that language – perhaps talking about the shared ‘vision’ – you’ll put yourself in a similar frame. It can be very impactful.

4 Master eye contact
If you can avoid looking away and keep the focus, it can be incredibly powerful, because the moment you look down to doodle on a piece of paper, or out of the window, the other person will pick up a cue you’re not listening to what they’ve just said. Make sure you use a soft gaze rather than boring into their souls!

5 Ignore your inner monologue
One of the most distracting things during a meeting is listening to the voice in our heads. To quieten this, during the meeting, bring yourself back to your state of ‘ease’. When I do that, I can feel my weight in the chair and drop back to a feeling in my body. It also brings my internal monologue down by a few volume levels, allowing me to focus on what the other person is saying.

6 Be endlessly curious
Retain a sense of fascination in the human mind. Try to get excited about what this person is saying next. If you’re fascinated with the amazingness of the human mind to think for itself in unique and creative ways, you’ll sit on the crest of the wave of interest while speaking with them. 

7 Practice on your friends
You might not want to do complete active listening down the pub, because it might appear slightly weird. But try to remind yourself of active listening’s main components when you’re with people: stop yourself from interrupting, find a sense of ease, focus on your eye contact, and use open-ended questions to ask people what they think. If you do that frequently, it’ll become second nature.

Christian Koch is an award-winning journalist, editor, content strategist and brand consultant.

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