Why Adaptive Listening® is Better Than Active Listening

How to Improve Listening Skills at Work

To start learning how to improve workplace listening skills, it helps to take a step back and reflect. What’s the difference between hearing and listening? At what point does one become the other? And what does it mean to listen effectively? These words exist for a reason. Hearing is the always-on feature of absorbing sound and relaying those signals to the brain. But listening implies intent. There’s human agency behind listening. Where hearing just happens, listening requires the conscious act of focusing one’s attention.

For example: When someone says, I like having the TV on in the background while I cook, what they mean is they like the sound of voices and music while focusing on another task. That’s a passive act of hearing. But what about when this same person is sitting down to watch their favorite show? Their behavior is totally different. Now, the TV’s the center of their listening.

Missing key plot points of an on-in-the-background sitcom is just one example of poor listening habits at home. But rarely does such behavior snowball into lapsing on mortgage payments or letting key deadlines slip. But distracted or ineffective listening has higher, costlier stakes in the workplace. It can undermine team and organizational alignment, waste time and precious resources, and lead to mixed or contradictory messaging.

Dive in below for a comprehensive look at:

• How listening skills function at work
• How the expectations for speakers and listeners can be optimized across a range of interactions
• Common solutions for overcoming barriers to effective listening
• How Duarte can help everyone become a better, more empathetic listener.

Cultivating the right listening skills can help avoid these common pitfalls and keep teams working in harmony toward a shared goal.

Let’s get started.

Table of Contents

What are Listening Skills at Work?

What is Active Listening?

Active Listening in the Workplace

Where Active Listening Falls Short

What Are Barriers to Effective Listening?

How to Become a Better Listener 

Listening Skills for Managers 

How Direct Reports Can Become Better Listeners

Why Leaders Need Better Listening Skills

The Truth About Active Listening in Sales

How Better Listening Skills Can Improve Sales

Essential Listening Skills for HR Departments

How L&D Leaders Can Develop Better Listening Skills for the Workplace

Listening Skills Training with Duarte

What are Listening Skills at Work?

Broadly speaking, listening skills are the strategies, tools, and techniques listeners rely on to meet speaker and situational needs. While often overlooked, effective listening skills are foundational to being a well-rounded communicator. Even though much of the focus during communication skills workshops is on speaking and presenting clearly, listening ensures information is absorbed and processed properly, and that speaker needs are met to keep interpersonal and organization relationships on balance. Failing to prioritize listening skills in the workplace is like skipping leg day at the gym or leaving vegetables untouched at dinner. Without a robust, consistent policy toward developing stronger listening skills, communicators across professions risk losing out on reaching their full potential.

And here’s why.

Listening skills help identify verbal and non-verbal speaker cues and rely on context clues to answer clarifying questions like:

• What’s the purpose of this interaction? 
• Who is the speaker, and what kind of information are they sharing? 
• What’s expected of me, the listener, as a participant? 
• Are there ways I can prepare for this interaction? 
• What key takeaways should I remember going forward? 

In workplace settings, meetings are instrumental in gathering, processing, and sharing information. They’re key nodes in the circulatory system of a business. However, every individual, team, and department connected in this exchange has the potential to expedite or stymie that flow. In each instance, working together boils down to how well they absorb and pass along what’s been said. Put bluntly, it’s a game of telephone where getting the message right is tied directly to a company’s bottom line. With stakes that high, who would you rather trust: A team of trained speakers or a team of trained speakers and listeners? 

Read -> Are You Using the Most Effective Listening Skills at Work?

Increasingly, global brands and Fortune 500 companies are seeing the value of ensuring their people can do both. Who could have guessed that when it comes to verbal exchanges, both sides matter for success. Oftentimes, this means corporations investing in active listening training to close the gap.

But the hard truth is: It’s rarely enough. 

What is Active Listening?

Developed in clinical settings, active listening was designed to facilitate conversations between doctors and patients. Eventually, it debuted in corporate environments as a cure-all for the communication breakdowns being wrought by poor listening habits. Enthusiasts praised active listening as a method of clear rules and practices for listeners to adopt and maintain at scale. Employees of all stripes were made to remodel their listening skills and change how they listen during a range of interactions. In the tradition of active listening, this meant striving to keep conversations moving seamlessly for the speaker. Overtime, the uniform set of principles that gave structure to talk therapy became commonplace in workplace settings. 

Watch -> Free Webinar: Why It’ll Take More Than Active Listening to Crush Your Goals

At first, this made sense. Powering off distracting devices, abstaining from multi-tasking, and giving speakers one’s full attention are understandable signs of respect. Active listening urges listeners to refrain from judgement and avoid jumping to conclusions based on information shared by the speaker. In theory, this keeps listeners open-minded, allowing them to more fully absorb and process what’s being said. However, this can severely limit the listener’s ability to engage critically with information shared in the workplace. Active listening encourages folks to pay attention while serving as a sounding board to guide the speaker toward arriving at their own conclusions. Here, active listening’s patient-first approach is most evident, and reinforced by the posture it demands listeners take toward speakers.

If active listening is starting to raise some red flags, you’re not alone.

To be clear, its usage for talk therapy is not in question. Care practitioners who place emphasis on the speaker’s feelings over arriving at clear outcomes. Speakers and listeners are encouraged to view speech as having value in and of itself. And this sees genuine results. It’s through this process that patients can move toward managing the underlying problems that led them to seek talk therapy. Plus, it comports nicely with medicine’s pledge to do no harm.

But does this approach sound useful under deadline? When there’s a sales goal to hit? When leadership needs you to make an informed decision based on competing sets of information? Where active listening can feel like a map toward better listening, its conditions become a cage during specific settings. In these moments, active listeners are at a disadvantage to truly meet speaker needs. Unfortunately, one of these settings is the workplace. 

Active Listening in the Workplace

The popularity of active listening led to widespread reliance on its teachings in the workplace. Like Radical Candor and Unreasonable Hospitality, active listening attracted true believers who saw it as the solution to a range of communication ills. A cottage industry of listening training services mushroomed to meet the demand and spread the gospel. And the results were hard to argue with. Teams and organizations saw improvements in alignment, morale, and messaging that only sparked further buzz. However, this failed to acknowledge the overall sea change toward listening. Leaders and c-suites were finally giving listening the serious consideration it deserved, and the investment was paying off.

This rise in active listening shifted the balance of workplace communication closer to equilibrium than ever before. Many professionals hadn’t had to think critically about listening since their early school years. Now, managers and direct reports alike were being asked to interrogate how their behavior succeeded or failed to meet speaker needs. Professionals at every organizational level were put through the same training and gained the same approach to listening. In a choice between developing listening skills and not, this was a clear win. But it had unintended consequences.

Read -> Active Listening at Work Isn’t Enough. It’s Time to Adapt.

By any measure, going to something from nothing is a net gain. And even the acknowledgement that organizations could have a listening problem was a huge step toward more effective communication across the board. However, it didn’t open discussion to having a diversity of techniques that addressed the increasing complexities of listening at work. As it turns out, what works well for doctors and patients doesn’t translate to the myriad types of relationships active listeners encounter during the work week.

That’s just one of the ways active listening skills are falling short in the workplace.

Where Active Listening Falls Short

With the table set on what active listening is and what it has to offer, it’s time to be clear-eyed about its shortcomings. Namely, active listening only teaches one way to listen. Anyone familiar with the phrase to a hammer everything looks like a nail should immediately recognize the dangers of lacking nuance. For such a widely applied skill like listening, this can have far reaching negative impacts. For starters, active listening assumes every relationship has the same stakes, the same dynamics, and the same balance of power. Think of the difference between syncing with a team member or direct report and presenting to the c-suite to secure project funding. Wildly divergent outcomes require a more succinct, targeted approach. This is active listening’s first major shortcoming. 

The next shortcoming is also hiding in plain sight. Suspending judgement and hamstringing the potential to offer feedback may be advantageous in clinical settings. However, they’re ludicrous standards to apply in a professional setting. Evaluating the viability of an idea to succeed or the degree to which an effort could recoup ROI are situations that demand a critical eye and honest fine-tuning. Ideas rarely emerge fully formed. Not to mention, business buzzwords like collaboration, alignment, and synergy always hit speed bumps in route to delivery. How could they not? People are complex; departments vary in size and scope, and the definition of workplace success can vary considerably from team to team. Given these realities, it’s naive to think that one elegant solution (or worse: one weird trick) could meet the menu of speaker needs that exist at a major brand or corporation.

Read -> Why Active Listening is Failing in the Workplace

It’s easy to see why many were enticed by the on/off nature active listening proposed. But the suggestion that a single methodology can satisfy all speaker needs should be immediately questioned. For instance, picture the promise of an all-weather jacket. The offering, right there in the name, is designed to win folks over who feel the full effects of all four seasons. Yet when it arrives in the mail, the garment is a wool-lined parka. Heavy and unyielding to wind, rain, sun, and snow. Is it truly all-weather? Sure. But would you wear it at the height of summer? During a light spring rain? Or on a crisp night when you’re looking to take in some air? The short answer, no. It’s geared to handle extreme cases of cold and precipitation. Could it technically be worn year-round? Of course. But you’ll pay the price in sweat, bulk, and a lack of mobility. Active listening presents the same limitations.

To better understand just how active listening falls short, it helps to unpack the barriers to effective listening. With this framing, it’s easier to see what professionals, teams, and leaders should prioritize to improve listening skills at work through more adaptive means.

What Are Barriers to Effective Listening?

One critical barrier to listening effectively is showing up the same way during every interaction. Everyone is different, so it should make sense why taking a more adaptive approach can meet more needs. Unfortunately, active listening promotes strategies that limit how listening is understood.

Countless communication workshops rely on active listening’s insufficient practices every year. That’s why it’s important to recognize how a one-size-fits-all listening strategy is counterintuitive to meeting actual speaker needs. Coming to this realization can help listeners dismantle the barriers that they can control. To this end, the best place to start improving listening skills is to understand how you show up naturally during interactions. This can reveal the full scope of efforts needed to become a better listener and put into perspective how to build those skills effectively.

Read -> How to Overcome the Biggest Barriers to Effective Listening

Duarte’s alternative to active listening is to take a more adaptive approach. That’s because after careful data collection and research around workplace listening, interactions typically fell into one of four buckets. To best meet the speaker’s needs in each setting, Duarte developed corresponding listening styles to give listeners a blueprint to refine their efforts. 

Here’s a breakdown of the four common barriers to effective listening:

• Not recognizing emotion: Humans may be the most rational animals, but everyone is a roiling sea of emotion beneath the surface. Hopes, dreams, fears, and anxieties reveal themselves throughout the day and have no respect for a work/life balance. To best accommodate this reality in the workplace, it’s helpful to recognize when speakers are signaling for emotional support. Outpourings of joy, uncertainty, anger, and grief are liable to rise in the workplace. Responding with a listening style that matches is essential to making sure speakers feel seen and validated in vulnerable moments. This is a critical step to building trust and nurturing long-term professional relationships.
• Rushing to action: Workplaces are process and outcome driven. Meetings are meant to move projects forward, seize emerging opportunities, and mitigate risks. Such a range of pressures can ignite team members, managers, and leaders to listen and immediately rush to act. This can vary depending on company culture, the personalities involved, and their default listening styles. However, the real test for when to act expediently requires a careful read of the situation. Even when urgency is palpable, whether teams take the time to gather facts and act strategically is determined by how well they identify and process the speaker’s need for speedy, prompt action.

Free Resource – Discover your Listening Style with the S.A.I.D. Listening Style Finder™

• Over-absorbed in content: Information is power. And making sure it’s gathered and retained properly is a hallmark of success for organizations of all sizes and market caps. However, this inclination can nudge certain listeners to over-indulge in their capacity to absorb and reiterate what speakers are sharing. When time is of the essence or the speaker is seeking emotional validation, simply repeating back what was said, no matter how accurately, will not meet their in-the-moment needs.
• Too analytical: Knowing when speakers want input or feedback can be a slippery slope. It requires a clear understanding of the relationship and the ability to parse verbal and non-verbal cues. Some questions are explicit. Whereas others mean navigating the risks and advantages to speaking up and (potentially) pushing back or diverting the momentum on an alternate course. Acting discerningly can help avoid unforeseen negative outcomes and even capitalize on emerging opportunities. But it’s also important to acknowledge when the time for analysis has passed and a course of action must be decided.

Duarte listening experts conducted extensive interviews and crunched the data from decades of helping global brands overcome communication issues. Our team’s careful study revealed obstacles to becoming a better listener, and opened pathways for listeners to respond to and meet speaker needs. It called for reflecting on interactions in advance and deploy strategies throughout to remain nimble. To encourage this listening evolution, listeners can explore a library of resources to learn more about the right listening styles to maximize a desired effect.

How to Become a Better Listener

Ultimately, active listening’s contribution to the field was to raise listening’s profile in the minds of executive, HR, sales, and L&D leaders. Folks who’d never considered how their approach to listening was helping or harming their career performance were suddenly curious about how to practice active listening. Overall, this was a net gain for empathetic listening and better communication overall.

Read -> How to Become a Better Listener Through Empathy

But now that we’ve covered how active listening falls short in navigating the barriers to effective listening, it should be clear that something more is needed. That’s why those looking to improve their listening should learn how to adapt their listening. Consider the listening barriers above: Is there really one tool that accounts for the particulars of each situation? Once again, active listening reveals itself to have the limitations of a hammer. But what if there was a way of listening that offered a customizable, reactive approach? That’s why Duarte experts developed Adaptive Listening® developed to offer the versatility of a multi-bit combination screwdriver. Because some interactions demand a flathead. Or Phillips. Or god forbid, a Pozidriv. Just figure out which listening style will best unlock the speaker’s needs in each moment. And turn to the left.

Read -> Become a More Empathetic Listener with Your Listening Lens™

To this end, becoming a better listener means using empathy before and during interactions. But it also requires delving deeper into the context and particulars of each setting to decide how best to adapt your listening. Taking time to reflect on a meeting setting, the information being shared, and how the speaker and listener can best navigate those details, all inform what listening style to adopt. Duarte’s Adaptive Listening® methodology calls this focusing your listening LENS. It guides listeners to adopt the practice of conducting evaluations before meeting face-to-face or virtually with a speaker. Moreover, continuous reflection lays the groundwork for a more empathetic listening approach to become one’s default setting. Communication skills-building and becoming a better listener starts out as tools and strategies. But ultimately, attending workshops, undergoing coaching, and putting radical ideas into practice is about changing overall behavior.

And the good news? No matter where you sit at your organization, becoming a better listener is a skill that can be learned by anyone, at any point.

Listening Skills for Managers

Managing can be a thankless job. Nestled between direct reports and higher echelons of leadership, finding one’s footing in the chain-of-command as a manager requires a two-way signal. And communicating up and down as both a speaker and listener means keeping both skillsets sharp. As the conduit between decision-makers and doers, a manager’s role is instrumental in conveying messages and marching orders to their direct reports. Meanwhile, healthy organizations encourage managers to relay on-the-ground feedback from direct reports back for leadership to assess its progress. From ensuring messages circulate to gauging their effectiveness in real-time, managers who cultivate their listening skills offer an array of benefits where they’re needed most.

Given this multi-faceted nature, investing in listening skills for management can provide critical infrastructure at any size organization. To return to the four main barriers above, this approach can turn managers into versatile, adaptive listeners who meet the needs of both their superiors and direct reports. While strictly hierarchical structures can deprioritize the needs of those along the bottom rungs, opening two-way lines of communication can help incorporate their insights and show they have value. This can boost transparency between managers and direct reports, build trust, and improve talent retention through an improved workplace culture. From an HR and L&D perspective, understanding the benefits of an inclusive work environment can get greater buy-in across departments and showcase organizational ideals.

Read -> 3 Communication Skills Your Team Can’t Affort to Miss

Team leaders and managers alike can begin improving their listening skills by using tools like the S.A.I.D. Listening Style Finder™ linked above. With the right language to think about and pursue better listening outcomes, managers can then take the next step to evaluate characteristics like environment and information, alongside speaker and listener nuances to help optimize interactions before they start. With the right framing, acquiring and maintaining Adaptive Listening® best practices will ensure managers see the full benefits of a nimbler listening posture, no matter which way communication is flowing.

How Direct Reports Can Become Better Listeners

On the other end of the power continuum, direct reports can become better listeners through identical means. Just as managers can navigate the particulars of their position with empathy, direct reports can enhance their ability to listen up through the same avenue. That’s because Adaptive Listening® was designed to be accessible across working relationships. While bosses, managers, and c-suite may wield varying degrees of power, they’re all people with complex layers of emotions and experiences that inform and impact their demeanors and decision-making. Direct reports who practice Adaptive Listening® can do their part to ensure information is shared, digested, and acted upon in a way that respects these nuances.

Read -> How Adaptive Listening® Can Bring More Empathy to Work

Instead of adopting a defensive or self-preservationist posture, direct reports can gain influence and aid their organization by knowing when, where, and how to listen in proactive ways. Managers are often stretched thin juggling a broad range of tasks and oversight. They most likely have technical and practical skills-based knowledge. But ultimately, those performing the work themselves have the clearest insight into what’s working and what isn’t. This first-hand experience can shed much-needed light on procedures and policy decisions that may have trickled down from above their purview. To once again frame workplace communication as a game of telephone, preserving a message’s accuracy is just as essential coming from leadership as it does reflecting back. 

Direct reports can listen better by clocking speaker cues, taking marching orders, or giving feedback where appropriate. Going beyond active listening principles with an adaptive, empathetic posture, direct reports can respond with the right emotional timbre to their managers, gain greater insight on projects, and help sharpen ideas for greater impact. In the end, Adaptive Listening® can help connect and build trust with leadership at every level. This can unlock a wealth of advantages for direct reports and nurture a healthy workplace culture from the ground up.

Why Leaders Need Better Listening Skills

Leaders who thrive in their positions are accountable to folks beyond their organization. Customers, investors, shareholders, board members, media representatives, and industry partners can all have lines of communication to folks in leadership. And when leaders participate in Q&As, town halls, panel discussions, interviews, and earnings calls they’re opening themselves up to playing the part of both speaker and listener. Where leadership training workshops often prioritize the speaker’s side in communication, listening is an invaluable skill for projecting polished executive presence and setting the right emotional tone. In this accelerated social media age, a response that talks over or around speaker concerns during a live or recorded event can snowball into a public relations crisis. Depending on the gaff’s severity, years of trust and goodwill can be undone. All it takes is one viral moment of not connecting with a concerned customer, event attendee, or fellow panelist to destabilize your brand.

Read -> To Get Organizational Change Right, Leaders Need to Listen

When it comes to internal communication, committing to Adaptive Listening® best practices during all-teams meetings, kick offs, and moments of uncertainty can help keep alignment on track and avoid tanking workplace morale. Everything from outlining a yearly vision, introducing a new product or service, to navigating change communication requires transparency and opportunities for staff to pose candid questions. Given the platform, environment, and content of their queries, leaders can benefit from adapting to a range of listening styles to get at the heart of what’s being said. Not only can this help smooth over rough patches and diffuse tension, but it gives leaders space to reassert trust and authority during moments of scrutiny. Just like with high-stakes public events, one poorly handled exchange can cause a ripple effect of distrust among top talent. And the last thing leaders need during a moment of organizational change or recalibration is to contend with an exodus of their workforce.

For too long, active listening has led leaders to repeat mantas like we get it, or we hear you when their responses and follow-up actions show the opposite. Adaptive Listening® can’t guarantee leaders will make the right decisions during high-stakes moments. Adaptive Leaders are better equipped to take in and process emotional and critical feedback. By adopting the correct listening styles and evaluating speaker cues and situational specifics, leaders can respond more accurately and with greater empathy: two key ingredients for keeping any ship afloat.

The Truth About Active Listening in Sales

Let’s count the myths. Customers want to be seen. They want to feel heard. In reality though, they want their problems solved. Customers need sellers who are ready to actually listen. As noted above, hearing and listening, and the acts they imply, are vastly different. And sellers who rely on an active listening playbook to guide their customer interactions risk falling into the former category at their own peril. That’s because active listening does not provide pathways to sufficiently interrogate the customer needs that arise across disparate accounts. Customers can be unresponsive, vague, taciturn, rambling, or any number of descriptors that make pinning down their exact pain points a Herculean task. When sellers arrive to such diverse interactions with the hammer of listening methodologies, it’s no wonder customers look elsewhere for partners who take a more nuanced approach. 

Watch -> Free Webinar: The 4 Listening Mistakes Stalling Your Sales—and How to Stop Them

To make this dynamic even more complex: customers aren’t always aware of the problems they have or how they can be solved. Where active listening is great for getting speakers to open up, it doesn’t provide strategies for sellers to perform the detective work needed to respond to speaker cues. This is yet another instance where active listening’s clinical roots are notable and a helpful reminder that doctor/patient relationships aren’t the same as buyers and sellers. Instead of guiding patients toward self-awareness, effective sellers are trying to match the right solutions to customer problems. That’s where adopting an adaptive posture can cut a clearer path. Sellers  can better assuage customer anxieties and help them form meaningful connections with their available offerings.

How Better Listening Skills Can Improve Sales

Pitches and scripts provide critical foundations for sales professionals. They can help align messaging and offer a runway for sellers to gain experience and riff on approved content. But when paired with active listening, they risk inviting sellers to sit back and wait for the next opportunity to return to their talking points. When buyers are overloaded with information and competitors are itching to poach contacts, developing skills hard-wired to improve sales sets sellers apart. Adaptive Listening® delivers on this promise by directing sellers on how to meet a range of customer needs. Following careful research and analysis, Duarte experts broke the mold of active listening by introducing a nimble, reactive framework that works seamlessly with sales materials at every stage of the pitch.

With a little foresight, sellers can curate responses in real-time to possible questions with complementary customer data, testimonials, and bespoke use-cases to meet evolving speaker cues. By focusing on where and how to listen, Adaptive Listening® ensures time is used strategically to make the most of seller availability. Close readers have already been chuckling at the fact that Adaptive Listening® asks listeners to stay more alert than active listening. That’s because no pitch, conversation, or meeting sticks to a consistent theme. Putting in the work where it counts to make the most of time-sensitive relationships is another defining feature in a good seller. Even when the chips are down, how well sellers adapt their listening determines their ability to meet speaker’s needs. By cycling through listening styles as needed, sellers who practice Adaptive Listening® can recalibrate at a moment’s notice to keep pace with changing speaker/customer needs.

Read – > 5 Listening Habits to Improve Your Sales

Whether sellers choose to engage with Adaptive Listening® via the book or a training workshop, they can learn how to dovetail sales assets with the appropriate listening style for immediate results. True practitioners know active listening walked so Adaptive Listening® could run. Once sellers experience the knock-on effects of advanced listening skills, the ROI is baked into the journey. This includes deeper customer relationships, repeat and renewed sales contracts, and a wider network of contacts through earnest recommendations. 

That’s because when buyers feel supported, cared for, understood, and related to, trust blossoms. Adaptive Listening® lets sellers stop chasing leads and settle in for long-term customer relationships that meet both buyer and seller needs.

Essential Listening Skills for HR Departments

The purpose of HR departments can run the gamut. Protect the company. Nurture talent. Lay a policy groundwork for the future. From hiring to retention, securing benefits packages to succession planning, HR is faced with countless interactions that require diverse listening skills. Every day, HR professionals need to represent their organization in the best light possible. They celebrate parental leave and process deaths in the family. HR folks meet externally with insurance providers, financial firms, and payroll solutions to ensure benefits are distributed on time and meet critical deadlines. During all-teams and periods of restructuring, HR can be the communication focal point alongside leadership to help organizations weather the storm. Each situation exposes HR teams to unique listening environments, and a range of speaker needs. When it comes to getting complex healthcare, tax, or company policy initiatives off the ground, just paying attention won’t cut it.

Read – Listening Skills Training: Go Beyond Just Paying Attention

Thankfully, HR professionals who practice Adaptive Listening® can wear many hats throughout an average workday without missing crucial information. By developing robust listening skills, HR departments can get into the habit of envisioning how interactions may unfold and prepare listening styles in advance. This groundwork can make switching gears between new hire onboarding, a healthcare enrollment seminar, and evaluating competing retirement services both fluid and effective.

Unlike active listening which would have HR adopt a uniform stance for each interaction, choosing an adaptive alternative gives breathing room to meet divergent personalities with care and compassion. Developing listening skills for HR can bolster the ability for highly visible organizational ambassadors to set an empathetic expectation at every juncture.

How L&D Leaders Can Develop Better Listening Skills for the Workplace

Where HR works to acquire, nurture, and retain talent, it’s L&D’s job to refine it for greater and as-of-yet-unknown challenges. It means learning to thrive as training workshop programmers, curriculum planners, and budget justifiers at every organizational level while interacting frequently with outside partners. As listeners, they need to understand the peculiarities of each department and craft educational content that will connect with and motivate an idiosyncratic workforce.

Oftentimes, this requires extensive 360-degree interviews at every tier to get a  perspective of:

• Where skills currently rest 
• What hurdles need to be overcome 
• What untapped resources would help improve day-to-day operations 
• How better workplace listening skills would help meet organizational goals.

Success in L&D is deeply tied to having well-developed listening skills that can respond effectively to all internal and external stakeholders. Here again, a one-size-fits-all approach would leave critical needs unmet and risk erecting an artificial ceiling on both listening skill-building and organizational potential. To avoid limiting performance in an increasingly saturated market, L&D departments can tailor exceptional communication skills training that center speaking and listening. Along with leading by examples thorough comprehensive L&D team training, implementing workshops at scale to match the experience would lift and align all boats. 

Read -> How to Develop Better Listening Skills for the Workplace

L&D departments who secure leadership buy-in to upskill listening skills at their organization can be on the forefront of creating a more generative environment for sharing, retaining, and acting on information. When combined with data storytelling, speaker coaching, or executive presence training workshops, teams gain interlocking abilities. Such an overhaul in workplace communication pairs naturally with complementary programs. From our experience, L&D professionals have a detailed understanding of what it’ll take to improve listening skills at their organization. But sometimes, getting the right outside insight to eliminate guess work and accelerate the benefits of good listening is what matters most.

In that case, Duarte can help.

Listening Skills Training with Duarte

After decades of speaker coaching, Duarte experts realized they had a knack for listening. Not only that but helping global brands and Fortune 500 companies meant breaking established rules of effective listening. Duarte speaker coaches judged trainees; they gave real-time constructive feedback and didn’t let clients flounder on their path to improvement. If something was wrong, Duarte speaker coaches broke the news with honesty, empathy, and never without a path for improvement. And for speakers in these instances: It was difficult to hold a grudge. Who wants to go on being bad when they can be better? 

Reinforced by the success of Duarte’s speaker coaching program, it was clear that questions around how to become a better listener needed to be reevaluated. And if necessary, active listening needed to be knocked off its pedestal.

That’s why Duarte’s Maegan Stephens and Nicole Lowenbraun dove into the deep end to explore good listening skills. After careful study, research, writing, and re-writing, they emerged with Adaptive Listening: How to Cultivate Trust and Traction at Work. 

Their extensive study resulted in a novel listening methodology that argues attentive listening skills should be redefined and expanded. Their tireless exploration revealed a more empathetic solution to listening that pushes active listening beyond what workplaces are used to experiencing. Rather than letting speakers and listeners feel handcuffed by outdated and misapplied practices, Adaptive Listening® posits a whole new era of two-way communication that removes barriers by revolutionizing what’s possible in every interaction.

Free Resource -> Adaptive Listening® Workshop Overview

To take your organization to the next level in their listening development, start by leaving active listening by the wayside. Book a call with a Duarte Training Concierge to discuss how Adaptive Listening® can help. Whether you’re convinced listening is your Achilles’s Heel, or you want to explore how Duarte’s Agency professionals could elevate your next high-stakes moment, our experts are standing by. 

We’re all ears and can’t wait to help turn listening into your next frontier for success.