By R. Esi Asante (PhD)
Are you hearing or listening? Do you have functioning ears? How effective is your hearing? Do you possess the skills to improve your hearing? These questions are intriguing, and it’s sometimes difficult to believe we’re listening because we can hear.
Listening skills are one of the most sought-after in the corporate world due to the immense benefits they afford individuals and organisations in terms of performance and relationships. Active listening is known to boost performance and improve relationships (Godshall, 2022). Research also indicates that you become a better leader when you become an active listener.
World Hearing Day
The international community celebrated World Hearing Day on 3rd March 2025. The day was dedicated to increasing public awareness about the importance of ear and hearing care as integral to overall health and well-being. It was marked this year on the theme Changing mindsets: Empower yourself to make ear and hearing care a reality for all. Individuals of all ages are invited to be empowered to ensure healthy ears.
Looking beyond the health implications of such a theme on World Hearing Day, let’s delve into the social implications and look at active listening and its importance, benefits, and why individuals, especially leaders, need to acquire, develop, and learn the skills to improve on their hearing.
Active Listening:
Are listening and hearing the same thing? Researchers distinguish between the two. Hearing is the process, function, and power to perceive sound, while listening is the process of paying attention to verbal information being relayed, understanding it, and responding to it physically or verbally. Listening has to do with actively interpreting spoken messages and entails intellectual attention and information dispensation. Thus, simply hearing does not mean you are listening.
Unfortunately, many perceive themselves to be excellent listeners, but available evidence shows the opposite. For example, researchers estimate that typical listeners retain only 20 to 50 percent of what they hear (Bodie et al., 2015). This implies that we need to exert more effort in actively translating what we hear to understand effectively and participate in interactions.
What, then, is active listening? It involves giving full attention to a speaker, avoiding interruptions, and providing feedback (Coursera Staff, 2025). It is a key communication skill involving the absorption of shared information and responses, reflected in body language and questions. Active listening is considered a treasured workplace skill that results in strong communication and the building of effective relationships with stakeholders. Researchers conclude that listening is a foundation of communication competence and that active listening has yielded positive outcomes for those communicating, resulting in helpful, sensitive, and supportive conversations that made receivers feel more understood.
Listening styles:
There are different listening styles (Pearce et al., 2003). The first is the active listening style. It involves the listener giving full attention when others are speaking. The listener fully engages in the communication through confident body language and direct eye contact to convey interest.
The involved listener, who partially invests in the communication, represents another style. This listener lackadaisically participates. The use of nonverbal cues is incongruent with nonverbal signs of interest and noninterest in the same dialogue. Additionally, there is also the passive listener, whose character portrays a lack of responsibility to listen. The last type of listener is the disengaged one who doesn’t care about the conversation. They tend to withdraw from the interaction and appear distracted, fed up, preoccupied, and apathetic. Interestingly, we may have used one or more of the listening styles in our daily work, and it is important to know which one is yours and, if need be, to adopt the active style.
The Four Ears and EAR Listening Model:
The four-sided model, developed by Friedemann Schulz von Thun, also known as the Four Ears Model, consists of four important dimensions of any message communicated among humans (Schiffer, 2017). The dimensions are factual information, self-revelation, relationship, and appeal, which belong to a message. There are various ways to encode and interpret information, and the recipient may not always comprehend the message (Burkhardt, 2016; Reden et al., 1981).
The listener hears with four different ears, related to the four aspects of a message. On the left side is the speaker, or sender, and on the right, the listener, or receiver. The speaker sends a message that has four aspects: self-revelation, the facts, the relationship, and the appeal. When the conversation flows smoothly and all four aspects are balanced, the roles of the speaker and listener alternate. Both sides are sensitive to what they are saying and hearing.
The EAR Listening Model, on the other hand, is a three-step process standing for E, for “explore,” “A” for “acknowledge,” and “R” for “response.” It is a sequence in which the communicator explores the other person’s position and gets the person to acknowledge your understanding of their feedback (Janove, 2017). The EAR takes practice and discipline; however, we make mistakes and get it wrong. For instance, we are impatient with exploring, meaning we are unable to fully understand the other person’s perspective. Some also skip the acknowledgement step in their eagerness to get to the response stage. Instead of acknowledging, we become assumptive.
According to Janove (2017), individuals immensely overestimate their ability to listen. This is true for everyone, including CEOs, managers, employees, and HR professionals. The three steps in the EAR listening model are steps towards active listening,
Benefits of active listening skills:
Learning effective listening requires determination and drive. Effective and active listening requires dedicated effort for effective communication. Active listening is a workforce skill highly recommended for effective communication. Keyser (2013) argued that active listening leads to business success.
It is a fact now that automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are changing the nature of work, but key findings by researchers also suggest that some skill categories will still be in demand. One such skill is active listening, especially for leaders. Social and emotional skills, including active listening, have been in high demand and are projected to grow by more than 20 percent across all industries between 2016 and 2030 (McKinsey & Company, 2018).
How to develop effective listening skills:
Respecting others by giving them uninterrupted time to speak is crucial for active and effective listening. This opportunity helps people to put across their information accurately. It is somewhat worrying to see interviewers interrupt interviewees, sometimes failing to give them the chance to articulate their thoughts during interviews. Active and effective listening is important here.
In seeking clarifications, it is better to allow the interviewee to finish answering a question before interrupting them with related or unrelated questions. In doing so, it will be beneficial to be mindful of what the other person is communicating, keeping quiet and listening from the first sentence by turning off your internal thoughts and freeing your mind of other things to focus on what is being communicated.
Asking questions when necessary to clarify unclear communication is another aspect of active listening. This exemplifies active listening, and when necessary, the question should entail both paraphrasing and summarising the stated information to obtain clarification. Paraphrasing tends to repeat what was heard, whereas summarising entails consolidating the interaction to ensure accuracy and correctness. Active and effective listening should be matched with adequate nonverbal cues to establish attention, understanding, and participation.
Additionally, active listening requires that one refrains from judgement and remains neutral. I learnt these principles from my counselling class. Counsellors are expected to develop highly effective listening skills to maintain neutrality when engaging with their clients and avoid being judgmental, thereby creating opportunities (Coursera Staff, 2025).
Conclusion:
Strong leaders and individuals need to listen to understand and engage in dialogues. It can be done by changing our mindset about our style of listening while empowering ourselves to communicate effectively. This skill can be strengthened through deliberate repetition of active listening at home, at work and having in mind the four ears model and its significance. It is important to get feedback from others on how you are faring with the deliberate character you are building. A lot of patience is needed to develop this skill.
