Channel these improv techniques to listen better…
Most people’s first association with the word ‘improvisation’ is comedy. Their mind leaps straight to TV shows like ‘Whose Line is it Anyway?’. Whilst standing in front of a live audience and making it all up for laughs might be your worst nightmare, at Hoopla we believe learning the tools of improvisation can help all of us off-stage, especially when it comes to how we communicate at work. Improvisation is purely the art of acting without a script and actually, much of our work life is in fact improvised – especially our conversations. This makes improv a great place to look for insights into how to have better dialogues with your colleagues, stakeholders, and customers.
Improvisation begins with listening. Improv performers like those on ‘Whose Line is it Anyway?’ focus first and foremost on listening rather than speaking. They go on stage with no idea of what is going to happen next and, in an environment of such uncertainty, listening is one of the few things they can control. Also, by focusing on the other person’s ideas on-stage, it takes the pressure off a little.
Listening is crucial to all effective communication. Yet we are rarely taught how to listen. The closest we get, perhaps, is a short workshop on ‘active listening’ at work. However, many of the behaviours we are taught with active listening – such as nodding, smiling, and making encouraging noises while the other person speaks – are not essential for good listening. In fact, you could be doing all those behaviours while thinking about something else entirely.
With that in mind, here are two listening tips from the world of improv that will help you to become a better, more attentive listener…
Improv Listening Tip 1
The next time you have a conversation, pay attention to what is going through your mind when the other person is speaking. So often we aren’t really listening, we are waiting to respond. We are stuck in the script in our heads, forming a reply or even a rebuttal of some sort. Instead of getting lost in your own inner monologue, focus on staying present and listening to the end of the other person’s sentence before thinking about what you want to say next.
Improv Listening Tip 2
This second tip builds from this level of presence. How do you know someone has listened to you? It is by what they do with what you have said. Improvisers define listening as ‘the willingness to be changed’. If you are really listening, the other person’s words should land on you and change your response. Without that you aren’t relating to the person in front of you, based on what they’ve said, you are just talking at them motivated by your own agenda.
Now let’s look now at how you can listen better to your customers and stakeholders…
How to Listen Better to Customers
For improvisers, feedback from our audience is absolutely crucial. We create our shows in dialogue with them. When they laugh at something that’s been said on stage they are saying: “We like this, do more of it.” When they don’t laugh they are saying: “Not for us, please try something new.” In a very real sense the audience helps us write the script. We co-create the comedy with them.
Off-stage this principle holds too. If you don’t listen to your audience you are ignoring a huge resource. Customer feedback is an incredible gift if you are willing to listen to it without assumption or judgement. Charlotte Langley, Brand & Communications Director at Bloom and Wild, told me how they have put this principle into action:
“As a florist, Mother’s Day is clearly a big event in our calendar. But in 2018 a few customers emailed our Customer Delight team to ask if they could be unsubscribed from our emails over the period, as they found it difficult receiving marketing around Mother’s Day. We had stumbled on an insight: loss, grief and other difficulties were a real issue for many people when it came to certain occasions. Now, we offer all customers the opportunity to opt out of marketing around these occasions and have formed the Thoughtful Marketing Movement to inspire other businesses to do the same. And it all began with listening!”
When was the last time you spoke in depth to a customer? What if you brought them into the development of your product, service, or idea? How might you use social media, surveys, and other digital tools to do that?
How to Listen Better to Stakeholders
So often the challenge in communication with stakeholders is overcoming conflict. Improvisation offers a useful tool here: ‘Yes, and’, where the ‘Yes’ means acknowledging the idea and the ‘and’ refers to building on it. The best way to show you how this works is in an example. Say someone says the following to you:
‘We need to make the social media content more distinctive’.
You could respond in two ways…
- ‘Yes, but…distinctive to who? It’s about the audience, surely?
- ‘Yes, distinctiveness is important. And…it would also be good to keep the audience front and centre too when we interpret that.’
Which is the more collaborative choice?
The word ‘but’ gets you into an argument. When the other person hears ‘but’ they stop listening to you and start trying to defend their position. You want to avoid ‘Yes, but’ if you can. The ‘Yes, and’ style response on the other hand affirms the other person’s perspective and feelings (although you do not have to agree with them), whilst providing a bridge into your point of view. It allows you to make the same point as you did with the ‘Yes, but’ response, but offers a less emotionally provocative way into it. It is inclusive rather than combative.
Most of all, ‘Yes, and’ is a technique that slows your brain down so that you are mindful of how you disagree with others. It allows you to respond rather than simply react. And in the heat of the moment, that skill can be crucial in maintaining strong relationships moving forwards.
Key Takeaways
- Stay Present in Conversations: Avoid planning your response while the other person is speaking. Don’t just wait your turn to speak, listen attentively to understand what is being said.
- Be Open to Change: True listening means allowing the other person’s words to influence what you say next, rather than sticking rigidly to your own agenda.
- Use Customer Feedback as a Resource: Treat feedback as a co-creation tool, helping you refine and improve your offerings based on your audiences’ insights.
- Adopt the ‘Yes, and’ Approach: In stakeholder communication, affirm others’ ideas before adding your perspective to build a more collaborative and inclusive dialogue.
- Avoid Combative Language: Replacing ‘Yes, but with ‘Yes, and’ helps prevent defensiveness and conflict, enabling more productive and harmonious discussions.
Try This Exercise to Train Your Listening Skills
There’s nothing like trying it for yourself! So, in that spirit, here’s one of our favourite improv training exercises you can try at home. You’ll find it’s a great way to train your listening skills.
THE WORD AT A TIME STORY
- Find someone to play this improv game with – it could be a friend or your spouse, or even your kids!
- You are going to create a story together, using only one word at a time, taking it in turns to speak.
- Your story starts with one person saying ‘One’ and the next person saying ‘day’. You continue by each saying one word at a time to create the story. For example:
A: ‘One’
B: ‘Day’
A: ‘We’
B: ‘Went’
A: ‘To’
B: ‘The’
A: ‘Park’
B: ‘When’
- Take the pressure off yourselves: don’t try to tell a good story. Just listen and respond with whatever comes to you in the moment, until the story comes to a natural conclusion!
Want more tips like these? Check out Company Director and Co-Founder of Hoopla Business, Max Dickins’, book, ‘Improvise! Use the Secrets of Improv to Achieve Extraordinary Results at Work’.
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