Summing Up
When Is Listening Not a Good Strategy?
Like a good case debate, the discussion of the question of whether listening is a lost art was not one-sided. What was clear was how important people felt listening is to effective leadership.
As Shari Morwood put it, "It starts at the top-if we as management don't listen or don't know how, we can't tap the full power of the amazing talent in our own organizations. Listening is learning." Rosa Urtubi added that "listening is assuming the responsibility, generosity to do something with whatever you hear. After all it is someone's gift to you." Wendy Zito believes that "when you feel you are being listened to then it helps you connect to the other person but it also helps you hear yourself."
Gael raised the question to a more universal level with her comment: "Listening to oneself requires sometimes crude and painful honesty that most people feel they can't afford." That is why, she continued, it is so important to have real friends with good memory who can be our sounding boards. "Listening to others works better if you can show empathy and put yourself in the other peoples' shoes."
Several argued that the skill of listening is on the wane. "I fear that social networks may make the problem worse," commented Gamaliel Pascual. "The technology may be hardwiring a younger generation to create virtual tribes where the congregation is based on shared biases/values." Allan Torng said, "Society has become too focused on looking for 'positive responses' … instead of finding out how we can do things better by listening and responding to 'negative responses.'"
Others were not so sure. Tema Frank said she is not convinced that our ability to listen is any worse than it has been in the past. "The problem is that most people are terrible listeners, and we are all so time pressed that we are reluctant to take the time that is required to really listen to others." Dennis Nelson added: "The art of communication, which includes listening, has always been a problem. What is different is that the impact of miscommunications becomes more apparent more quickly in today's knowledge and highly interactive society…."
KB raised an interesting point with this question: "How many times (do) you have an answer as soon as you heard the main topic, suddenly your mind stopped listening and started developing your argument?" A discussion leadership strategy at Harvard Business School is based on this assumption: It is that a discussion leader should avoid calling on students whose hands have been in the air for several minutes. The assumption, which is nearly always borne out, is that they will bring the discussion back to where it was when they raised their hand, the point at which they stopped listening to what was being said by other students.
Others posed counter-questions that are important to consider as well. For example, Aim suggested, "I think the right question here is, what makes people think not listening is OK? … Or even better, are there any situations that would require you to not listen deliberately?" Wayne Brewer provided one response to that one when he said, "Maybe companies (and individuals) are figuring out that listening to customers is not as profitable as other forms of interaction. There is at least one book that points out the counter-intuitive relationship between success and listening to customers: The Innovator's Dilemma.
Whether or not that is an accurate representation of Clay Christensen's book, it raises another interesting question: When is listening not a good strategy? What do you think?
Original Article
The week that I write this, I needed help programming a television set for recording purposes. Before being connected with the cable company service representative, I agreed to provide telephonic feedback about the service after my call. The call went miserably, in large part because I couldn't understand what the rep was saying. After 30 minutes, it was clear that my time was running out, and I was shunted off the call quickly with little assurance that I had programmed my television set correctly.
Several minutes later, the automated call came for the questionnaire. A recorded voice thanked me for cooperating and assured me that the poll would take only two minutes. The first question was, "On a scale of 1 (low) and 5 (high) how would you rate your overall experience?" I pressed the "1" on my phone. Whereupon the automated voice thanked me for my cooperation and hung up, consuming only about ten seconds of the two minutes.
Having studied and written about the value of "listening posts" in business, I concluded that the company's management wasn't interested in listening.
In his new book Quick and Nimble, based on more than 200 interviews, Adam Bryant concludes, that, among other things, managers need to have more "adult conversations" —conversations needed to work through "inevitable disagreements and misunderstandings" —with our direct reports. Such conversations require careful listening.
In the same book he reports that CEOs expressed major concerns about the misuse and overuse of e-mail, something that they feel encourages disputes to escalate more rapidly than if face-to-face conversations had taken place instead. The latter, however, would require people to listen.
Edgar Schein, known primarily for his work on corporate culture, pursues the subject from a different direction in a little book, Humble Inquiry. In it, he asks and answers a question we discussed here several months ago of why CEOs talk too much and listen too little. And he proposes an antidote, something he calls "the gentle art of asking instead of telling," describing the kinds of questions designed to elicit useful information. At the same time, according to Schein, the mere act of asking, if done sincerely, requires that the questioner make himself temporarily vulnerable to the person being questioned. This in turn, builds trust so lacking in many organizations today.
There's a catch, however. It requires that the questioner know how to listen, something many CEOs have forgotten.
The question is brought closer to home in a new book by Daniel DeSteno, The Truth About Trust. DeSteno presents evidence from the world of psychology that we don't even listen to ourselves. As a result, we shouldn't trust anything that we say or plan. He cites studies that conclude that people deceive themselves into thinking they will do things in the future that, when the time comes, they have no intention of doing. Further, we often deny that we ever expressed the intention in the first place.
Am I imagining that this is a growing problem, or have I just been picking up the wrong books lately? Has it always been like this? Are we forgetting how to listen? If so, what are the reasons? What do you think?
To Read More:
Adam Bryant, Quick and Nimble: Lessons from Leading CEOs on How to Create a Culture of Innovation, Macmillan, 2014.
David DeSteno, The Truth About Trust: How It Determines Success in Life, Love, Learning, and More, Hudson Street Press, 2014.
Edgar H. Schein, Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2013.
At the CEO level, they've also had years of being rewarded for being decisive, and taking the time to listen to underlings rather than make and announce a decision when they think they know the right answer would be counterintuitive.
Picture three people in a room. Persons A and B are conversing and agreeing: the third, C, says "I don't get it. I don't even understand what you are talking about" A now talks to C who then says "now I get it." Wherein B says to A and C "I'm glad we all get it now; but I didn't understand what you were saying to each other." All three were speaking English, but the lifelong contexts of the three speakers and their respective jargons only overlapped to limited degrees. Person A obviously had contexts and jargon common to person B & C even though B & C contexts and jargons were more different from each other. Compound this example with personal preferences for seeing, hearing or feeling messages ... and so on...not to mention physical "hearing" problems, and listening is less about a lost or disappearing art then it is about truly being an art to be consciously acquired.
Stovepiped societies of old required specific and limited hearing enabled people to be able to repeat activities and processes in volume. Today's knowledge society requires expanding types and volumes of hearing to enable people to interact more, be flexible, and be in almost a constant state of change. Diversification and international coordination has added additional dimensions.
I remember the employee panic when the employees in several organizations first learned they were to be reorganized into teams as opposed to historically working alone or in stovepipes. They realized intuitively that their lives would change significantly. They would have to learn to communicate and constantly experience change in whatever they did - like any member of any professional team. As they needed to "hear more", they did, and acquired the associated skills needed as well.
I think the right question here is, what makes people think not listening is OK? Arrogance? Fear of loosing power? Culture? And for the sake of effective global argument, lets throw in here China, Russia, CIS, Europe and Africa instead of narrowing our brainstorming to an Ivy Tower.
Or even better, are there any situations that would require you to not listen deliberately? Who determines that? How?
Listening to others works better if you can show empathy and put yourselve in the other people shoes. The more clear you are about your own thoughts the better you can listen to others. Also quality hear is more important than quantity. Expressing concerns can be done effectively if done in a certain way. That is technical. Time is short and the better people express themselve the easier it is for the listener to get it. It can be taught. Then, sincere care is the most impactful factor of trust. People dont listen well because they dont really care. They dont because they are under the water themselves. Good managers dont let themselves in such situations. Therefore they find the time and can afford to pay the required attention to their employees.
When people chat or do posts, it seems, to me at least, that these are more like broadcasts rather than attempts to have thoughtful dialogues.
It's interesting that what prompted your question about listening, to begin with, was your interaction with what I assume is a helpline call center where a person on the other end probably walked through a script based on answers you gave to questions, then your unusually short survey where it appeared your negative answer gave all the information they needed.
The books I listed all have to do with behavioral psychology ...why we act the way we do. What may be happening here is that you are right ...no listening is really going on in a larger and larger number of our everyday transactions. There is a process and a script for just about everything. The acceptable answers and responses have already been anticipated and the follow-on actions and responses are prescribed, as well. Behavioral psychology posits that we are capable of logic and reason but fall short of using them ideally in common, predictable ways. What if our situations have become so mechanized from a process standpoint that, in truth, it doesn't pay for us to really pay attention as much anymore. Maybe we become happy to just bounce through the pinball machine of processes and routines because most of the time we get the reward we seek with minimal effort. We pay for this ease in the more infrequent times where our desired outcome is more complex or not accounted for
by the pinball machine.
If your question about your TV setup had fallen into a more routine problem easily solved by an easier to understand call center worker and you would have rated your experience a 9, then gone on to press a few more positive response buttons and then probably listened to a request for some other product sales pitch (the real reason for the survey ...get you saying yes before asking you to make another purchase from the company), you might have come away from the experience pleasantly surprised that the process was so easy, then submerged yourself into the movie you were trying to watch with a newly planted seed of another product you may grow to desire in the future. Some potential counterpoints: Maybe out of the other 150 calls into the center that hour, you were the only "1" and the team celebrated the lowest rate of poor ratings all day at the top of the hour, or maybe the "1" you pressed automatically forced a block on the line of your hard to understan
d representative, and by the time the the extra minute and 50 seconds expired that rep was in his boss's office with both listening to the recording of your call.
Situations we're in and the way we construe them have an enormous influence on our behaviors. Maybe companies (and individuals) are figuring out that listening to customers is not as profitable as other forms of interaction. There is at least one book that points out the counter-intuitive relationship between success and listening to customers: The Innovator's Dilemma.
Secondly, in our fast pace world, we tend to listen for what we want to hear. A real issue for everyone. I have found the quickest way to shut down listening is to hear something you don't agree with. So the onus is on us sometimes to fight through our own walls. Just because we are the boss, CEO, parent, etc....doesn't make us always right.
Today, we have difficulty bringing all these assets to bear. We have text messages, phones, e-mails and major language differences (even when speaking the same language) in our "modern" interactive world. All these methods place limits on listening. Text messages and emails allow no real interaction and does not allow you to see and read the other person speaking. There is no tone of voice etc. We really have to guard about using email and phone, etc for important communications.
The author is right on the concept of questioning. You must ask questions more than tell less in conversations. I have always taught in my seminars this fact,"How you ask a question says more about you and your thoughts, than the question itself." As a leader, you cannot ask questions that places people in bad positions or makes them feel inadequate. Sorry, all the TV shows showing ill mannered or pushy bosses is doing our natioin a great disservice. There is an old saying every boss should have to remember,"Embarrassing a man in public is tantamount to taking his life." If you embarrass, belittle, or attack when asking questions...you will not get what you want and will lose any connection with that person...possibly forever.
Listening is a tough, energy draining, and difficult task. I think that alone makes it difficult for all of us. It is plain hard work.
Many of us don't have to make our teachers feel heard. That's why some of us don't do it well.
By the way, dialog happens when we take turns to listen.
Humility is a virtue which is either inherent or developed through difficult and trying circumstances and difficult to teach .It requires us to subsume our innermost selves to accept the opinions of others even if we disagree with them. Perhaps a start could be made in business school as part of the wider curriculum.
A lot of latent misconceptions developed through the exchange of emails can be effectively thwarted by a singular face to face encounter where everyone has an opportunity to speak without being interrupted. However, such encounters in today's workplaces are few as most people want to be heard above the noise and end up becoming part and parcel of the noise.
Perhaps a good example would be the recent Congressional standoff on budget ceilings. Everyone wanting to be heard but very few willing to listen to each other or themselves.
Despite this, people are prone to talk more and listen much less. Even when they do, they only ' hear ' and avoid to listen.
Listening is an art which every successful person - manager and leader in particular - needs to learn. People, however, seem impatient to vomit their views not allowing others even to speak. We find this in Board meetings also. The Chairperson speaks forcefully to ensure his word is carried. Dissent is generally not appreciated and, but for companies with good corporate governance, the other directors just remain silent and nod assent. On many occasions, this leads to damage.
Even in HR management, such attitude by the leader is visible as he fails even to listen to reason.
To my mind, what's on the decline is sincerity and authenticity. Communication is about an honest exchange of feelings and opinions....when it becomes about one's agenda it's pretty understandable why people tune-out and appear not to "listen". And that is not a new phenomenon.
This situation is similar to your 10 s automated call questionnaire. After the your first negative response, the survey questionnaire was terminated. It is like the cable company wasn't really interested in hearing what your feedback on that experience was after learning you had nothing positive to contribute.
Society has become too focused on looking for 'positive responses'... instead of finding out how we can do things better by listening and responding to 'negative responses'.
t listen or don't know how, we can't tap the full power of the amazing talent in our own organizations. Listening is learning.
Regardless of the situation,a great book for anyone is "Listening Below the Noise" by Anne D. LeClaire. Lots of reasons "why" and "how" to interact better with anyone. Be still more.
But building the argument on this premise that CEOs are less inclined towards listening is not totally correct. Its my personal observation that there are managers in plenty who first listen and then communicate.