Listening Well - It Involves More than Ears

I've seen a lot of people in my time who are very solicitous and who are patient as you speak to them but who are not great listeners. Why?  Because good listening is not just about hearing another voice - that is only one aspect of being a good listener.  The other - and from my perspective - the much more important skill is the ability to provide a safe harbor for someone to talk. 

What do I mean by that?  People will not share what they are really thinking unless they trust that the person with whom they are speaking will not use the information in ways that expose them or threaten them but who will also do what they can to help solve solve the problem.

I have had many a manager or colleague who would repeatedly express an interest in listening but when you expressed a problem would do any of the following:

• Publicly expose me and my concern to a group in a way that made me feel like I was causing problems and not competent to solve problems myself
• Reiterate the issue and tell me that they had full confidence that I could go fix the problem with the involved parties which left me thinking...if I thought it was so easy to do, I wouldn't have the problem in the first place  
• Bring up issues in a performance review discussion as a negative mark at some later date
• Look at me or respond judgmentally
• Cross their arms

All of which pretty much shut me down. Now over the course of my career I am sure that I've had problems that were wasting someone's time and probably very much my own fault. But here is the catch, once I had one of the above experiences there was no way I was going to take another problem to that individual. So they could hear everything I had to say and they never would have understood what was really going on with me because I wasn't going to say anything.  From their perspective, they may have thought they were spending a lot of their time listening...but they were listening to the sound of silence.

So, the biggest part of listening is that things go unsaid. Things go unsaid when others are not sure whether they have a supportive, non-judgmental environment in which to speak.

The result? It is not good enough to open your ears (or search for the name of your brand online) - you must actively solicit people's opinions and when they are negative or critical you have to hold back, not jump to conclusions, and explore with them what is causing those opinions...and not use it against them in a personal way.  In a world where things are speeding up, this is one area where we need to slow down or we won't actually hear anything. It's not about getting bigger ears, it's about getting a bigger heart.

Comments

[MikeTrap]

Amen. "Active Listening," exactly what is called for: http://www.studygs.net/listening.htm

[Rachel Happe]

Thanks for the addition Mike - that is a great guide to active listening.

[Kevin Cesarz]

Well spoken Rachel. They is often an anti-art practiced in not listening while listening. I try to imagine the irony of a conversation in which I point out the value of social media and building the conversation while the listener is straining for ROI. Listening is not watching the clock.