“Why do talented employees remain silent in virtual meetings?”
“Why do so many global meetings end with false agreement?”
“Why do team members think they’re aligned when they aren’t?”
The best way to address such issues is often through better listening skills. There are many reasons why people listen to each other at work – to receive instructions, seek guidance, attend meetings, analyze problems, find inspiration, or build friendships. In a world struggling with information overload, where the use of AI may undermine our own judgment and curtail human interactions, listening with curiosity, empathy, and presence can keep people connected, motivated, and aligned.
The best way to listen, of course, depends on who is involved and the nature of your interactions with them. Here we will cover three modes of listening and consider their relevance for cross-border interactions. The first two are analogous to what Daniel Kahneman calls System 1 and System 2 thinking. The third articulates a skill vital to successful leadership at any level. All three of these forms of listening are necessary and useful when matched with a suitable purpose.
Casual Listening provides cues that trigger daily habits, enabling us to get through the routine aspects of each day smoothly and efficiently. Such cues may come from scheduling discussions, team meetings, text messages, or conversations with co-workers, and mean that we don’t have to reinvent every daily action. Phrases like “weekly meeting,” “report deadline,” or “snacks in the break room” are likely to evoke a familiar pattern of behaviors.
Rational Listening, on the other hand, requires people to slow down, observe, compare, analyze, and make deliberate choices. Those choices may or may not conform with established habits and are more adaptive to new situations or possible changes. As Daniel Kahneman says, this kind of activity also requires energy and attention and should be applied selectively. “Where should I sit in the meeting room?” is less important than “How will we reverse our decline in sales?”
The third listening mode, Deep Listening, has both cognitive and empathic components. More than either of the two other modes, it involves intentional openness, curiosity, and efforts to seek out and embrace new information and insights while adapting accordingly. People who have moved into new work roles or locations often find that prior patterns of success with colleagues or customers no longer lead to satisfactory results. Common examples include joining a multicultural team with colleagues from very different backgrounds, or an expatriate who must understand a customer’s needs in a market far from headquarters. Such drastic moves make it essential to inquire energetically and learn from others who know the new environment better.
In addition to cognitive insight, Deep Listening includes emotional receptivity and the ability to make connections, which Otto Scharmer and Peter Senge call “Empathic Listening.” This means being able to sense and respond to what colleagues are feeling, whether or not they voice their sentiments directly. The listener can perceive subtle messages or meanings signaled by facial expressions, gestures, or tone of voice.
You recently delivered a virtual presentation to a group of colleagues. When you asked for questions or recommendations regarding your proposal, several people based elsewhere whom you don’t know well remained quiet and did not respond.
Casual listening is efficient and dominates our daily lives, but it is relatively impervious to new information. This becomes problematic in unfamiliar situations that require a non-routine response. Several possible obstacles stand in the way of moving beyond casual or habitual listening to the other two levels.
The first obstacle is psychological safety. Do your counterparts feel safe to tell you what they are actually thinking or feeling? They may fear being judged negatively, receiving a poor performance appraisal, reporting an embarrassing project failure, being excluded from the team, facing career derailment, or even losing their job. Employees or managers who seek to engage in Rational Listening or Deep Listening need to build an atmosphere of mutual trust in which colleagues believe they can:
Another obstacle to non-habitual levels of listening is bias, conscious or unconscious. The CIAO model features four types of bias, each of which can get in the way of listening well or hearing new voices:
Cultural differences also challenge our ability to listen. Culture shapes not only how we express ourselves but also how we interpret and evaluate others’ communications, and even what information we perceive or ignore. People striving to listen well in a different cultural setting must learn about local communication norms in order to hear messages accurately or perceive them at all. Culture is also embedded in language, and language differences may distort messages and create opportunities for misunderstanding.
Everyday messages and emotions are both “encoded” and “decoded” according to cultural standards. Raising one’s voice in anger, for instance, might be interpreted as a sign of passionate commitment in one cultural context and as unprofessional, out-of-control behavior in another. Nonverbal gestures and facial expressions are also clearly influenced by culture. Agreement or disagreement could be expressed in more indirect cultural settings through head movements, eye contact, posture, or the position of arms and hands. Intervals of silence between spoken words may also express comfort or discomfort, depending on accompanying gestures and cultural context. At times, such nonverbal signals may actually contradict a verbal message, communicating a different response which is quite clear within the context of that culture’s norms.
The ability to pivot fluidly between the three listening modes as circumstances change begins with active listening techniques. There are several interrelated techniques, applicable in most cultural settings, that enable listeners to move from Casual Listening to Rational Listening or Deep Listening.
Cultural agility, too, fosters listening that goes beyond habitual behaviors shaped by environmental factors and repetition. It requires cultivating self-awareness, understanding others’ backgrounds, and using bridging skills to enable style-switching when needed. Five dimensions of culture – Independent/Interdependent, Hierarchy/Egalitarianism, Risk/Certainty, Direct/Indirect, and Task/Relationship – are particularly helpful in understanding one’s own default approach to listening as well as how to adapt to other work styles.
Taking the Direct/Indirect cultural dimension as an example, here are suggestions for how to “style-switch” for more effective listening. These adjustments build on the active listening techniques discussed above but are tailored to fit forms of communication shaped by culture.
| Listening to indirect communicators | Listening to direct communicators |
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| Sample countries with communication styles that are comparatively indirect on average: Indonesia, Japan, United Arab Emirates | Sample countries with communication styles that are comparatively direct on average: Netherlands, Germany, Australia |
“Usually when you listen to some statement you hear it as a kind of echo of yourself. You’re actually listening to your own opinion… When you listen to someone, you should give up all your preconceived ideas and your subjective opinions; you should just listen, just observe what the person’s way is.”
Suzuki Shunryu, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
In contrast to Casual Listening and the autopilot routines for which it provides cues, Deep Listening encourages the critical review of established beliefs and habits and the modification or discarding of what no longer serves us well. It also goes beyond the analytical deliberations of Rational Listening by focusing on the search for fresh insights.
Listening intentionally for what we have neglected or previously didn’t know is often the prelude to change. This kind of listening can be useful not only with everyday office colleagues, but even with friends or family members. Here are a few relatively straightforward ways to get started:
Deep listening is also particularly vital when working across cultures because the differences between people tend to be greater and our expectations are more likely to be wrong. Outcomes, too, are less predictable in intercultural settings, and tried-and-true strategies may not work.
At Aperian, we had the opportunity to conduct a series of interviews with leaders across numerous organizations and industries whom their organizations identified as their most successful expatriates. Here are a few of their comments about learning to listen:
“We’ve tried to implement programs that worked at home, but they failed miserably here… We face a lot of challenges in a tough economy. I don’t know all the answers and we need to work things out together… You have to get to the point where people will tell you you’re wrong and explain why.”
“Assume that you know nothing every day. Be ready to open yourself to learn and make mistakes; be open to it.”
“The key thing is the ability to listen to other people, in the broadest sense: perspective, arguments, even hidden speech, culture. Don’t jump to conclusions before getting the rationale behind their behavior – investigate.”
These quotes reflect the growth mindset that is indispensable to Deep Listening. People who take on challenging new roles, especially those living outside their home country, commonly have what are called “crucible experiences.” Behavioral patterns and assumptions are reshaped through the crucible of hard-won lessons, both successes and failures. This transformation usually increases a person’s ability to respond flexibly to new circumstances and fosters related skills such as creativity.
The term “Invite the Unexpected” refers to a discipline associated with Deep Listening. Effective entry into new markets, for example, calls for keen insights into local customer requirements, competitive threats, regulatory restrictions, and impending social or political events. Leaders must position themselves to discover unfamiliar aspects of the local cultural and market environment that are crucial to solving business problems. Inviting the unexpected entails deliberately setting aside established forms of expertise and exploring unfamiliar ways of obtaining information and knowledge. The insights gained through Deep Listening often become the impetus for personal, professional, and organizational growth.
Deep Listening may produce insights with emotional content along with their cognitive and strategic implications. Managers and executives who want to build a fully engaged workforce must learn to listen especially for feelings of exclusion. Almost everyone has felt excluded at some point in their lives, but leaders of multicultural teams need to be especially attuned to others’ experiences, as these take various forms and vary in intensity. Here are some examples:
Listening for insights into how others are feeling requires careful attention coupled with empathic understanding, affect, and action. Helpful actions are to:
Listening across cultures naturally incorporates all of the forms of listening in the human repertoire. However, working effectively with people from different backgrounds often requires less Casual Listening and instead reexamining and shifting away from habits that don’t translate well, while building a new behavioral repertoire. Rational Listening and Deep Listening can both serve this purpose, but Deep Listening is the best source of cognitive and emotional insights that inspire real personal and professional transformation.
Transforming a global team’s communication patterns doesn’t happen by accident, it requires shifting from comfortable defaults to intentional, deep connection.
At Aperian, we help teams cultivate the best practices that define high-performing global teams. Contact our experts today to explore how our learning solutions, including Listening Across Cultures, can help your multinational leaders unlock the power of Deep Listening.