Listening to Manage by Satish Pisharody

All of us have come across the old adage, “We have two ears and one mouth so we may
listen more and talk less”. Yet organizations most often would consider ability to speak
well as a more important prerequisite in appointing senior managers. “Improving
presentation skills”, “How to be assertive in your speech”, “Effective Public speaking
skills” etc. are considered important enough in organizations of today, for them to impart
some of these skills in-house. Not many organizations have paid attention to the flip side
of the coin and asked themselves the questions – “Do we have leaders that listen and
manage or do they barely manage to listen?” and “Would we benefit more if we trained
our managers to be better and active listeners?”.

Indians are, as a nation, poor listeners. I am reminded of a certain group discussion

among senior managers of a company that degenerated to a stage where everyone in the
group was speaking simultaneously. With many people speaking together, the decibel
level in the room was high, prompting people to speak even louder. Far from listening,
the people were not even willing to ‘hear’ the other person out. An observer, a British HR
specialist in this case, was as amused as she was shocked enough to comment, “this could
well have been a bunch of school kids fighting over chocolates”!

Perhaps it is because we are a country of a billion people and if we wait for the others to
finish speaking, it could be forever. The cultural conditioning is so strong that people
most often do not realize that they are poor listeners. What does this mean for
organizations of today that function in a multi-cultural environment and with many
Indian companies aiming to go global? Can we convert a generation of culturally
conditioned Indians to become not just ‘listeners’ but ‘active listeners’?

Research indicates that managers spend close to half their time listening to people talk.
One suspects, most of this would just be ‘hearing’ as opposed to ‘active listening’. Active
listening means we are processing the information that we are hearing – our mind is
working not only our ears. One of the troubles is that most of us can think faster than the
other person can speak, and get distracted by our own thoughts about what we intend to
say next. There is also a possibility that most of what managers have to listen to are
unappealing enough – excuses, complaints, outright lies and expressions of frustration –
for them to want to “switch off”.

An effective manager has learnt the art of ‘active listening’ – which means he / she is
hearing, interpreting and evaluating, in short, processing what is being said as well as the
way it is being said. He / she is then able to even perceive what is often times left unsaid
and derive the larger issue hiding behind the wall of words.

In an organizational context, as in any general verbal communication situation, the

purpose why people communicate can be a) to get to know someone, b) to build
relationships, c) to release pent up emotions, d) to share information, or e) to persuade
some one to change attitude or produce action
Inefficient & ineffective communication can be costly

Incomplete listening can lead to festering of unsolved problems and avoidable conflicts in
an organizational setting. Ideas can get severely distorted as they travel through the
organizational chain of command resulting in wasted time, effort and money. Employees
will feel more and more distant & finally alienated from the senior management. Poor
listening has been the culprit for many an organizational strife that could have been
avoided if we had clearly understood the reason.

How well do you listen?

Depending on where you are on the listening scale, your predominant listening style
could range from simply ignoring people that are speaking to you, pretending to listen,
selective listening, attentive listening to actively & empathetically listening. Active and
empathetic listeners make the best man-managers. Some of the barriers to active listening
are:

a) Social/cultural factors: As we know, we are culturally predisposed to poor listening

b) We are not trained to listen: Nowhere during our formal (school, college) or informal
trainings (occupational, organizational) are we sensitized to the importance of being
good listeners
c) Prejudices: we don’t like the topic or the person and therefore choose not to listen
d) Low patience, no time for listening: Feeling that listening takes too much time
e) Tendency to interrupt: The desire to ask questions, jump to pre-mature conclusions
before the speaker has finished saying what he wants to say. The message is, the
speaker or what he is saying is not important to me.
f) Advice: Sometimes all the speaker wants is a patient hearing. He / She may not be
looking for advice or solutions
g) The topic is boring: Managers oftentimes have to listen to uninteresting talk from
subordinates & peers that may be important to the speakers
h) Tendency to drift off, daydream: Human mind can process information at 600
words/minute but any normal speech would deliver information at 125 words/minute.
This excess brain processing capacity creates a time lag between rate of speaking and
information processing by the brain causing us to get distracted and go into our own
world.
i) Preconception: The listener has already made up his mind on an issue & has closed
his mind to the new inputs
j) Self-centered: We are given to listening from our own selfish point of view and tend
to hear only what is important to us
k) Preoccupation: We are mentally unavailable due to some other preoccupation or are
too busy working on the computer, reading a report or we simply not there to read the
body language
l) We simply don’t like people enough
Can we improve our listening skills?
We can be trained in and indeed improve our listening skills. But before we are able to do
that, we will need to deal with perhaps the biggest barrier to listening – most of us equate
listening with accepting. Listening refers to understanding, not necessarily accepting.
This means that one can even listen to people who think differently from us.

Tips to improving listening skills:

• Stop talking! Do not interrupt: Let the speaker get a chance to present his piece
• Remove distractions: Eyes off your laptop, the phone off the hook if necessary
• Maintain eye contact: Look into the eyes of the speaker, watch body language
• Put the speaker at ease: Make it comfortable for the speaker to share
• Sit in a receptive posture: Lean forward, show interest, don’t strike a judgmental pose
• Look and act interested: make the speaker want to share the entire story
• Don’t criticize, judge: Maybe the speaker only wants a patient hearing
• Empathize: Put yourself in the speaker’s shoes for better understanding
• Ask questions: Keep yourself & the speaker engaged by asking the right questions
• Look for non-verbal cues: Is the speech & body language in consonance?
• Have patience: However uninteresting, hold your patience and listen actively
• Paraphrase: Occasionally summarize, to ensure complete & common understanding