Story listening is the ability to discern and understand the realities, perceptions and sensibilities of others based on their personal narratives. It’s an important leadership tool to teach in leadership development programs and initiatives for several respects, including:

1. It helps leaders to perform research. The challenge of being a good leader is preparing for the “unknown,” or for those unrecognized or unexpected problems that can sink your vision, strategic initiatives or profit margin. Whether you are new to an enterprise or serve as an existing leader, story listening can uncover and reveal critical information needed for growth and development. Story listening affords you the opportunity to be well-informed and well-positioned to manage any challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

2. It builds personal awareness. When deployed with care, curiosity and courage, story listening can help even the most ardent, inflexible or rigid leaders become more aware of their strengths and development opportunities. Story listening can help leaders grow and evolve and become the best version of themselves.

3. It helps to cultivate relationships. Despite one’s business acumen, your ability to lead and transform your environment will depend mightily on your ability to develop powerful, positive and impactful relationships with your peers and fellow stakeholders. Too often, people in leadership positions — including learning leaders who are also people managers — are too preoccupied with their own stories and narratives while not taking the time to understand the values, experiences, struggles, and aspirations of those around them. When this happens, leaders may create distant or superficial connections that facilitate daily transactions but inhibit the long-term partnerships needed to sustain high performance. When we use story listening effectively, we operate from an investment model, whereby each person’s personal development is deemed as essential to the long-term success of the whole.

4. It helps build a cohesive strategic vision. Story listening helps leaders work collaboratively with others to construct a cogent vision for the community, civic group, or organization. At times, leaders may work as the “lone wolf” as they strategize to reach a stated objective. However, tunnel vision and singular analysis can lead to results that are exclusive, ill timed or short lived. In contrast, story listening provides the means by which a visionary can deploy their best thinking with the aid of other thought leaders around them. It rejects a myopic norm and creates an ethos for soliciting thoughtful concepts and allowing the best ideas to rise to the surface. It gives leaders access to the latent institutional and innovative wisdom that sometimes gets obscured in politicized environments. As a result, story listening helps leaders construct a collective vision that can propel any organization or group forward.

As such, story listening is crucial to leading in any capacity. How can training professionals encourage people leaders at the highest levels of their organizations to embrace story listening and make it a steadfast component of their leadership practice? The following suggestions will help any leader became an effective story listener:

Model presence.

Leaders who are strong story listeners know how to be present when engaging those in their environment. If we want to be good story listeners, we must minimize internal and external distractions to be present with people in the moment. Modelling presence doesn’t mean capitulating to every person or situation that demands our attention. However, it does mean that we give our full attention in key situations to understand the information presented to us. We can’t listen to stories effectively if we don’t make time for the places and people from whom the stories originate.

Mitigate story listening bias.

At times, leaders may get used to hearing stories from only certain people or certain groups of people. In those instances, we may favor the stories of those who are the loudest, the most visible, or those whose stories most closely resemble our own. Yet, to be an effective story listener, we must be willing to entertain stories from a variety of places and people, not just from the customary places and people with whom we find favor. We must mitigate our biases to support, highlight and appreciate the stories from the underrepresented factions within our organizations.

Manage internal resistance.

The principle of story listening not only invites us to listen to stories we resonate with, but it also invites us to listen to stories that we may have resistance to. Managing our emotional resistance is perhaps the key variable in whether we will be effective story listeners or not. When we hear stories that challenge our perception of ourselves or our understanding of the world around us, they can trigger a “fight or flight” neuro response that makes us resistant and hostile to the perceptions of those around us.

Fortunately, we can take steps to manage our internal resistance, whether by pausing, taking a deep breath, or requesting the physical space to absorb any pertinent information. We can also make ourselves more receptive to third-party observations by creating the right conditions to listen by creating rituals to enliven our mood and setting boundaries to ensure we are entertaining feedback during the most optimal times of the workday.

Mobilize and move when certain conditions have been met.

Story listening does not mean that leaders should listen indefinitely. Once you have solicited information from all relevant parties and achieved the best contextual understanding that the circumstances will allow, then it is appropriate for leaders to use the information gleaned from story listening to act in a concerted and intelligent way. Story listening and decisive action are not mutually exclusive. Rather, story listening prepares leaders for diligent and judicious recourse after strategic measures have been taken to produce the highest level of success possible.

Although story listening is a relatively new concept, it is predicated upon the foundational ideas of transformational leadership. Leaders who sub-optimize their egos will become better story listeners and thus, the stewards our organizations and communities need.