When Did You Last Really Listen to Your Business?

Running a business can be noisy.

There are customers to look after, people who need decisions, suppliers to speak to, emails to answer, numbers to review and problems that rarely seem to arrive at a convenient time.

For many business owners, that becomes the normal rhythm of working life.

We become very good at responding, but I sometimes wonder whether, in becoming so good at responding to everything around us, we lose the opportunity to do something equally important..

To listen

Not simply to hear what people are saying, but to really listen to what the business might be telling us.

The Signals Are Usually There

Over the years, I have become increasingly convinced that businesses give us signals long before many problems become serious.

The challenge is that those signals are not always dramatic.

• A good employee becomes a little quieter.

• A customer who has been with you for years starts buying slightly less.

• Decisions that were once made quickly begin taking longer.

• The same operational problem appears for the third or fourth time.

• Meetings become dominated by today's issues rather than tomorrow's opportunities.

• Or perhaps the owner simply finds themselves becoming increasingly tired by a business they once found exciting.

  
  

None of those things necessarily means there is a serious problem, but they may be telling us something and sometimes the most valuable thing as a leader can do is to create enough space to notice.

Listening Is More Than A Conversation

When we talk about listening in business, we naturally think about conversations.

And those conversations matter enormously.

I have always believed that listening is the beginning of any successful partnership. Whether I am talking with a business owner, a colleague or somebody within a leadership team, I want to understand their perspective before offering mine.

But listening to a business goes further than that.

• It means paying attention to the things people do not say.

• It means noticing patterns.

• It means looking beyond a set of financial results and asking what might be creating them.

• It means being curious when something doesn't quite feel right.

• And perhaps most importantly, it means being willing to hear something we were not expecting to hear.

  
  

That can be uncomfortable, particularly when we have spent years building the business ourselves.

Are We Asking the Right Questions?

One of the risks of experience is that it can tempt us to believe we already know the answer.

• We have seen similar situations before.

• We recognise the problem.

• We know how we dealt with it last time.

  
  

Experience is undoubtedly valuable, but businesses change, markets change and people change with it.

Sometimes the question we need to ask today is different from the one we asked five years ago which is why I think curiosity remains such an important quality in leadership.

Instead of immediately asking:

How do we fix this?

perhaps we should occasionally ask:

Why is this happening?

Or:

• What are we not seeing?

• What do our people know that we don't?

• What are our customers trying to tell us?

• Which problems keep returning, and why?

• What have we quietly accepted as normal that perhaps shouldn't be?

  
  

Those questions don't always provide immediate answers, but they often start better conversations.

Listen to Your People

If I wanted to understand the health of a business, one of the first things I would do is listen to the people working within it, not because they will have every answer, but because they experience the business from perspectives that the business owner cannot.

• They see the frustrations in processes.

• They hear what customers say.

• They know where time is being wasted.

• They understand which responsibilities are clear and which are not.

• And very often they have ideas that nobody has thought to ask them about.

  
  

That is one of the reasons I believe people represent such an enormous opportunity within every organisation.

But that opportunity can only really emerge when people feel able to contribute.

There is a considerable difference between asking somebody for their opinion and creating an environment in which they believe their opinion will genuinely be heard.

Listen to Yourself Too

There is another voice that business owners sometimes overlook.

Their own.

• How do you actually feel about the business you are running?

• Do you still enjoy it?

• Are you excited about where it is heading?

• Are you spending your time doing the things where you add the greatest value?

• Or have you gradually become the person everybody depends upon to solve everything?

  
  

These aren't questions we necessarily discuss around the management table, but I think they matter.

A business can appear successful from the outside while placing an enormous burden on the person who owns it.

Growth, revenue and profitability are important measures, but they are not the only measures.

If building a successful business eventually leaves its owner with less time, less freedom and less enjoyment, I think it is reasonable to ask what success is supposed to mean.

For me, a good business should ultimately create greater Freedom of Mind, not greater dependency.

Creating the Space to Hear

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to listening is simply time.

When we are busy working in the business, stepping away from it can feel almost irresponsible. There is always something more urgent to do, but reflection is not inactivity.

Sometimes stepping away from the immediate demands of the business is precisely what allows us to see it more clearly.

• That might mean an hour without your phone.

• A conversation with somebody whose judgement you trust.

• A walk with a notebook.

• A meeting where the purpose is not to make decisions but to ask questions.

• Or simply sitting somewhere away from the business and thinking about where it is heading.

  
  

It doesn't have to be complicated it just needs to be intentional.

What Might Your Business Be Telling You?

• Perhaps your business is telling you that it is ready to grow.

• Perhaps it is telling you that your people are capable of taking greater responsibility.

• Perhaps a process that worked perfectly well five years ago is now holding you back.

• Perhaps your customers are beginning to want something different.

• Perhaps you are spending too much of your time solving problems that somebody else could solve.

• Or perhaps everything is going extremely well.

  
  

That is worth listening to as well, because the purpose of reflection isn't always to discover what is wrong, it sometimes helps us recognise what is working and why.

There is no single question that reveals everything we need to know about a business and I would be suspicious of anyone who claimed that there was.

But there is one question I think every business owner could benefit from asking occasionally:

When did I last stop long enough to really listen to my business?

You may be surprised by what it has been trying to tell you.