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Before Robert Vander Wees meets with an employee or colleague, he jots down the initials SU -- for shut up -- on a piece of paper.

This reminds him not to interrupt, and give a person time to say what he or she needs to.

The approach is paying off in spades.

Having recently met with one of his staff to brainstorm how to generate new business, Mr. Vander Wees says that the longer he listened, the more good ideas the salesperson came up with on his own.

"It was a win-win for both of us," Mr. Vander Wees says.

"He felt like he had really contributed, and I came away knowing how we were going to kick off our . . . quarter."

It was a marked change of tactic for Mr. Vander Wees, an area manager for the Business Development Bank of Canada in London, Ont.

He had earlier found himself jumping into conversations and offering his opinions before employees had even finished talking to him.

"I knew instinctively this was not the best way to engage people or motivate them to improve their performance," Mr. Vander Wees says.

He found out how important listening is to leadership when he signed up for a one-day seminar put on by Toronto-based Suzuki & Associates, a firm that offers training in effective listening skills.

The result: Mr. Vander Wees has been buttoning his lips more ever since.

According to Suzuki principal Carrol Suzuki, 40 to 60 per cent of the workday is spent listening to others, yet fewer than 2 per cent of people have been trained on how to do it effectively.

But deeper listening can improve relationships at work and make people more effective in their jobs, says Ms. Suzuki, who works with corporate leaders and employee teams to help them understand and apply the principles of good listening in the workplace.

Creating an environment in which leaders and managers really listen to their staff makes good business sense.

"It used to be that leaders created the vision and expected people to follow along," says Tom Bowes, a principal at Georgetown, Ont.-based InCourage Inc., a firm that delivers team effectiveness and leadership programs.

"Today, good leadership is more inclusive and involves listening to people and their ideas, so that a shared vision can be created."

There's growing evidence that when employees feel heard, they tend to stick around longer.

In his book, The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave, author Leigh Branham cites feeling devalued and unrecognized and receiving too little coaching and feedback as two of the key reasons employees jump ship.

Both of these issues are often a result of poor listening, says Carol Holub, a regional director at WarrenShepell, the Toronto-based employee assistance program provider.

"When you have a manager who doesn't listen, the result is a team of people who are unclear about their role, and who don't feel respected or motivated to perform," she says.

Better listening is also key to kickstarting innovation, Mr. Bowes says.

"If working in a listening culture makes us all happier and more engaged in our work, then it makes sense that being listened to would make us feel more comfortable sharing our thoughts and ideas with each other."

So what is good listening and how do we know if we're practising it?

The most critical component: Open your ears a lot more than your mouth, Ms. Holub says.

Too many people enter into conversations intent on making their point and displaying their brilliance. Instead, people need to stop focusing on themselves and work on hearing the perspective of others, she says.

The benefits of good listening became apparent during a program aimed at strengthening a new and relatively inexperienced marketing team in her division, says Julie Marchant-Houle, director of Toronto-based Procter & Gamble Inc.'s beauty products unit.

"We needed to beef up our coaching capabilities," Ms. Marchant-Houle says. "It became clear that one of the pillars of being a good coach is being a good listener."

InCourage coach Jan van der Hoop says that one of his first priorities for the program he led at P&G last year was to get across how listening deeper requires going beyond the words being said.

By asking managers to do an exercise in which they paired up and spoke to each other about a project for 60 to 90 seconds, participants learned to listen for the speaker's tone of voice, emotional state, things that weren't being said, and even the values the speaker was expressing through his or her story -- all elements that are critical to listening well.

Ms. Marchant-Houle says that this was an "aha" moment for her, when she realized that she had forgotten how to really listen for the context of what people are saying.

Experts agree that it is the non-verbal cues that we often miss, including facial expression and body language, that provide more than 90 per cent of the meaning of a conversation.

Mississauga's Credit Valley Hospital has also discovered how more active listening directly affects employee performance.

Since 2003, the hospital has been putting groups of employees -- doctors, nurses and administrative staff -- through a customer-service program called Our People Care.

According to program co-ordinator Brenda Zalter, an important part of the training involves teaching hospital employees the value of listening, with the purpose of understanding each other better.

Staff members learn effective listening techniques, such as paraphrasing ("What I'm hearing you say is. . .") and how to ask clarifying questions ("Is that the whole story?"). This helps them make sure they really "get" what the speaker is trying to get across, before jumping to their own conclusions, she says.

Ms. Marchant-Houle says she has seen payoffs from better listening. The program at P&G "reminded me that listening takes work, and that you have to stop and take the time to do it well," says Ms. Marchant-Houle, who now makes a conscious effort to really sit back and simply let people talk.

Employee feedback has been very positive, she says. "Staff now thank me for listening to them and validating their ideas. I see that this is very empowering for them."

Special to the Globe and Mail

Open your ears

Here are some tips from the experts on how to become a more successful listener:

Stop talking. Button your own lips and give others the floor.

Show interest. Turn off your cell phone, lean into the speaker and maintain eye contact.

Put yourself in the speaker's shoes. Imagine, for instance, what it's like to be in his or her position and doing his or her job.

Pay attention to non-verbal cues. A speaker's tone of voice, facial expressions and body language are cues that often tell more about the intended meaning than the words do.

Don't interrupt unless the building is on fire.

Acknowledge what's being said without commenting or criticizing. Try open-ended questions, like: "Is that so?" or "What did you do then?"

Use paraphrasing to make sure you understand the key points being communicated. Examples might be: "So what you're saying is. . ." or "It sounds like this is what's happening. . ."

Give and receive feedback. See it as positive, and encourage others to speak up and share ideas.

Write down what you've heard. Right after a conversation, jot down as many details as you can recall. The more you remember, the better you listened.

Jacqueline Foley