Active Listening Skills Training: Improving Officer-Soldier Relationships in Developmental Counseling

Military leaders provide feedback, foster a productive work environment, and assist in the development of skills with their subordinates. Within all of those tasks, the use of active listening skills can help the subordinate feel heard and understood. Active listening skills are powerful in creating and sustaining interpersonal relationships. However, an investigation of active listening skills in the military is lacking. Sixty-seven ROTC cadets and 53 Army National Guard officers and noncommissioned officers participated in an experiment to determine the effectiveness of an active listening skills curriculum on developmental counseling. Self-report ratings suggested a positive treatment effect in the experimental group from pretest to posttest on the overall score as well as on the Sensing and Responding subscales on the Active Empathic Listening Scale. Observer ratings demonstrated a positive treatment effect on the Counseling Skills Scale when compared to the control group. The research provides initial evidence on the impact of implementing an active listening skills curriculum on leadership development within developmental counseling in the military.