The Listening Impaired

How many times have you been in meetings where you (and potentially others) are stuck with somebody who just loves to talk? Here are some of the many thoughts that may have crossed your mind during this one-man show -

1) This guy just doesn’t shut up! 2) He just loves to get on his soap-box.

3) If he would only listen to me once in a while. 4) Are we done yet?

5) How much longer do we have to take this horse-shit?

Yup, just like some people have a tough time talking/expressing, there are many others who have a tough time listening. At the work place, this is usually your boss. Or it could be you, in case you are in some kind of leadership role. Just imagine, all those thoughts and many more going through the minds of your direct reports while you go about flexing your ego.

Listening, and that too Active Listening, is something that needs to be worked on and practiced. If you’ve taken any sort of leadership class or read any book on that topic, you will surely recall how important it is to listen in order to build strong relational and contextual leadership capabilities. I was reading an interview with Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, in the McKinsey Quarterly. Eric was talking about how he and other leaders at Google try very hard to keep the engine of innovation running and what all they do to encourage break-through ideas. Its starts by letting others speak. There is this big fallacy in the corporate world where executives and senior managers believe that they are the ones who have the best ideas or their position requires them to come up with the best ideas. When you get into this mindset, you’ve shut all the doors that could lead to potential value creation in the organization. The moment you pull rank on your troops, you’ve pretty much set the tone where things are going to be top-down and no ideas/comments/criticism is going to be welcome. Well, if you are not willing to listen, you will never find out what others have to say about the organization, the environment, the business, and about you. The biggest loser here is going to YOU.

When you stop listening, you stop growing. When your style gets in the way of free flowing conversations, you stifle creativity and development. When you, as a leader, always are the one who expresses their idea/thought first, you create an environment where others feel that their idea may not be good enough and hence fear speaking. When you are not comfortable with your ideas being challenged, you do not know if there are other team members that can improve upon your idea or if there is a better idea out there in your group or if yours is actually the best idea of all. You are probably already aware that you have a “listening” problem if your organization has a decent appraisal system that has gathered a 360 degree feedback from your boss, peers, and directs.

Based on my experience and readings, here are some ideas that you may want to try out to improve your listening abilities and the perception of them that people around you have been carrying –

1. Encourage constructive challenges and healthy dissents since these improve the quality of the outcome
2. Be the last one to offer ideas, feedback, guidance
3. Pick the person who is the quietest in the group and gently cajole them to share their thoughts
4. Criticize the idea, not the person
5. Encourage people to contribute ideas/solutions, and not just problems
6. Ask other team members to facilitate meetings, rather you always being the one
7. Encourage diversity of thinking and ideas
8. Focus on outcomes, not solutions
9. Recognize other good listeners in your team/organization
10. Practice “active” listening everywhere, not just at work

Dig what you just read? Show it by clicking the DiggIt link below.