Any councilmember or municipal staff member who has fielded complaints and concerns from residents for long enough will know that many people who are upset simply need to be heard in full.
Listening carefully to constituents can take many forms. It can be establishing rules for a public comment period during council meetings and consistently following them. When complaints come in through a city’s social media channels, it can take the form of explaining what the city has learned about the problem and what steps it is taking in response to it.
For officials to successfully convey that their residents are genuinely being heard, they will often need to use the skill known as “active listening.” It involves focusing all attention on speakers, responding to what they are saying and otherwise showing a genuine interest in learning from them, and demonstrating that officials will retain and may act on what they learn.
U.S. Army officer Henry Martyn Robert was the creator of Robert’s Rules of Order, which city and town councils can adopt as a supplement to state law and local ordinances governing procedures for how council meetings should run.
Robert published the first edition of his rules in 1876, nearly a century before the term “active listening” gained currency.
Even so, he expressed a belief in the power of sincerely listening for the work of government, writing that the “great lesson from democracies to learn is for the majority to give the minority a full, free opportunity to present their side of the case, and then for the minority, having failed to win a majority to their views, gracefully to submit and to recognize the action as that of the entire organization, and cheerfully to assist in carrying it out, until they can secure its repeal.”
Listening with the intent of real understanding has the ability to improve fairness, identify solutions and strengthen trust.
Here are several key points to consider when listening actively:
Pay attention to nonverbal cues.
Even when listening to speakers silently, listeners will inevitably give signals about how closely they are actually listening. For example, a listener who doesn’t look at the speaker or who fidgets impatiently is almost certainly just waiting for the conversation to be over, or to make a response they are already formulating and which may not even be responsive to the points raised. Folded arms or angry expressions can also convey that the listener is not receptive to anything being said.
Nonverbal cues that the person really is listening can be as simple as making eye contact, nodding, and giving a pause before responding, to make sure the person really has finished talking.
Seek clarifications.
Active listeners will ask follow-up questions whenever they are unclear on what they hear. Asking open-ended questions, inviting the speaker to expand upon their points, can be more informative than “yes or no” questions that tend to shut conversations down. Listeners can also facilitate understanding by summarizing and restating the points made so that the speaker can confirm that the points carried across.
Avoid judgment.
Active listening requires that listeners be willing to reflect on what is being said, and even to change their minds in response to compelling arguments. Listeners should therefore avoid negative judgments of what they are hearing. They should avoid criticizing or assigning blame to the speaker, and should be careful not to interrupt or argue with the speaker.