Good morning and welcome to the Increase Your Impact podcast. I'm Justin Sua, episode 2189. I recently read

an article by Dr. Bob Sutton, who is an organizational psychologist, and he was talking about

listening. And I'm really fascinated by this topic because I think listening is one of the key skills that every leader, every coach, every person for that matter, should learn how to develop.

Yet it is something that we are told to do, but how to do it is something that is missed by many people.

And he gives this metaphor that I really like,

that you're either an elephant or you're a hippo.

An elephant has big ears and a small mouth,

and a hippo has a big mouth and small ears.

And Bob Sutton invites us to be more like the elephant type of listener.

And he gives two different ratios that we should be very mindful of.

Ration number one is pay attention to how much you talk versus how much your team or the other person talks.

And ratio number two is to pay attention to how many statements you make compared to how many

questions you ask.

And his research shows that the best types of leaders, the ones who really make change,

the ones who really make a difference, who really deeply understand their people, are the ones who

talk less and are the ones who ask more questions. Now, as we spoke it many times, not all

questions are considered equal. There are curious questions, open-minded questions, non-judgmental questions, which are the questions that

you really want? Those are the questions that really elicit openness and transparency and

vulnerability from the people that you're listening to. They will give you high signal information

that will help you with decision making. The other types of questions are more judgmental.

They are closed questions.

They are interrogating questions.

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