“What is management for?” asked the front page of L’Express on November 10, 1969, when “the word and the thing that arrived from America after the war” were in their infancy in French companies. Fifty-five years later, management, its teaching and practice are everywhere. In open spaces, sport, administration, business schools, bookstores and sometimes even in places where you don’t expect it, like these training courses which offer “working on foot with a horse to strengthen cohesion teamwork and rapid decision-making. Coaching galorepopular HR gadget tools, personal development books… Never have executives been so inundated with speeches and pseudo-techniques supposed to make their jobs easier.
Like all human and social sciences, management does not necessarily lend itself to hard sciences. But the numerous research studies published over the past half-century – and too often ignored by companies – shed light on which methods have proven themselves and which have not. L’Express reviews some of them. In this third episode, it’s time for active listening.
EPISODE 1. From Teams to WhatsApp… The damage notifications have on our concentration at work
EPISODE 2. MBTI, Disc, enneagram: the great scam of personality tests in management
And what do you think?” “What do you mean by that?” “What do you want to express?”… Active listening seems to be the alpha and omega of today’s management. We no longer count the training courses on “knowing how to practice active listening”, “how to best listen to your colleagues”… So much so that we end up thinking that active listening has become an end in itself. Observant listening, where one is attentive with all one’s senses to the emotions expressed by the person”, this is how Sarah Alves, teacher-researcher at the EMN Business School, defines the principle of this practice. Why such popularity today? According to the professor of human resources management, “the issue of emotions has not been addressed much in business. When we arrived at a company, we left our emotions at the door. Covid has also shown that we cannot leave our personal emotions aside when we leave work. And perhaps today we allow ourselves more to experience our emotions in the world of work.“
At the origins of this concept, a famous American psychologist Carl Rogers. At the time, in 1957, it was for the one who would become a form of management “pope” to find a method to treat children in difficulty, recalls psychologist Sandra Pedevilla, member of the AFP-ACP, a association which brings together around 200 practitioners who are based on the Rogers approach. A very innovative way of doing things. After several years of clinical research, Rogers understands the incredible power of listening. “This method is not ‘magic’, it works if the person feels welcomed, accepted by the person listening to them,” explains Dr Pedevilla. In an article named Communication in Business today, co-written with Richard Farson, he states that “active listening does not systematically mean long sessions spent listening to complaints, it is only a way of approaching the problems that arise on a daily basis in any what a job.” But this approach from the world of psychotherapy, which requires several years of study, is not so easy to master in a company and the numerous lightning training courses which offer keys often only scratch the surface.
Do managers only have mental availability?
Sandra Pedevilla points out one of the limits of the system: “It’s very good to be empathetic, it’s very good to have respect for the person, a positive, unconditional outlook. It’s very good to be in harmony , but if the person doesn’t get that, it’s useless.” The problem too, she says of having supervised training sessions, “as soon as there is a group leader, people shut up.” Furthermore, notes Sarah Alves, “we are in a world of urgency, which means that we do not allow ourselves to take the time”. However, experts confirm, this approach takes a lot of time. “Because it is a return to the other, centered on him, with our whole being in observation,” explains Sarah Alves. As Carl Rogers himself writes, “to be effective, active listening relies on the engagement and attitude of the user. It cannot be used as a technique if one is not fully engaged in it.” , because then our behavior will be empty and sterile and our colleagues will realize this immediately.”
He says listening is more than half the battle. It doesn’t matter what the employee has to say, the important thing is that he says it. All of this can sometimes place manager and employee in a fool’s game where everyone plays a well-oiled comedy. The company is not a psychotherapy office but a place with rules that all the listening in the world alone is not enough to change. Not to mention the availability of managers, who find themselves as receptacles for emotions that they also sometimes have difficulty managing. Sarah Alves, who is also a professor of human resources management, recalls her own experience: “I was a dean of faculty with up to 100 people on my teams. If I practice this method with 100 people, it becomes too energy-consuming.” Active listening actually adds a little more on the shoulders of an already busy manager. Between the multiple tasks incumbent on him, from the most administrative to the most strategic, does he even have the mental availability to listen? And who listens to him?
Furthermore, not all situations lend themselves to active listening. The employee often expects their manager not to lend them a sympathetic ear like their best friend or their mother would, but “effective decision-making and clear directions”, highlights the training institute’s blog. Demos in an article entitled “When to use active listening”. Some managers can quickly find themselves overwhelmed and trapped by this system, not always knowing where the limit is and how to respond to demands that cannot be met.
In any case, this method has the virtue of recreating the bond between employee and manager, with a single key to success, authenticity. “If we feel that the person is pretending to try, just nodding, they will feel that they cannot trust this person. They are trying to manipulate,” notes Sandra Pedevilla. There is no point in wanting to go through 100 active listening interviews in a row, but nothing prevents you from practicing the basics when you feel able to do so. Even if true “active listening” therefore falls more within the field of psychotherapy, to identify good management training in the field, it is necessary to understand that this concept aims “first to dig into self-knowledge to understand one’s communication preferences” , specifies Sarah Alves. Before probing the emotions of your colleagues, you must therefore be clear with your own, this approach therefore requiring muting them.
A quick Google search shows that besides management, active listening is a popular concept in so-called positive parenting. That we want to practice caring listening with our children, beings who never asked to come into this world – why not – but that we consider in the same way our collaborators who also receive a salary for their presence and are part of the company, we dare to hope, of their own free will – that seems more limited.
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