Just listen — please, just listen!
If you want to transform your life, work, business, relationship(s)…then learning how to listen more effectively is likely to be the most important investment you can make.
This article was originally published via LinkedIn on 9 February 2017. It’s reproduced here as the message is still as relevant as ever; and to give it a wider audience.
Every single day, we have customers, clients, colleagues, stakeholders, friends, family and loved ones saying “Just listen. Please — just listen” but we don’t. We’re so poor at listening, we don’t even hear them asking us to listen!
Corporately, professionally, personally — we continue to fail to hear the constant cry “I just want to be listened to. I want you to listen to me. I want to feel that you have listened. I want you to demonstrate that you have listened”.
As you might expect, in my work with people who have mental health issues, who have attempted suicide, or who have faced loss or grief, a major theme is usually wanting to be listened to and often feeling that no-one is listening.
However, I get it in my daily interactions with people and organisations from diverse sectors and environments, including government, not-for-profit service providers and commercial organisations & their customers — from ordering a meal at a restaurant to taking the car in for a service. “Why don’t they just listen”. And it’s a problem in every workplace every day.
In 2010, we had an RSA ‘Big Ideas for Breakfast’ event (“3 big ideas before we finish breakfast” — it works every time!) and one of the breakthrough ideas that emerged was “transforming our lives, businesses, and relationships by learning how to listen better”.
We set up ‘Listen Hear: The Global Campaign for Effective Listening’ which was voted the TEDxSydney “best idea worth spreading” in 2011.
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/3793186
A group was pulled together to analyse the extent of the problem. It was massive. It was everywhere. It was global. We carried out an audit in 28 countries and asked group members and RSA Fellows participating to visit their local schools, colleges, universities and workplaces to find out what ‘listening skills’ courses or development programmes existed.
The answer was virtually nothing. We quickly found courses on all other aspects of communication — speed reading, business writing, creative writing, public speaking, etc — but usually nothing on listening skills.
When we asked, we were usually directed to “the counselling courses”. That’s right, wait for a crisis that requires counselling and only then do we start listening. Have we never heard of “prevention is better than cure?”!
We audited a range of professions. Again we found poor listening practice and little or no listening skills development. Politicians of course, but also their advisers and PR professionals (who are taught not to listen as they spin their messages and try to control the news agenda), engineers, lawyers, accountants, doctors, marketers and researchers — yes, even researchers.
A Harvard Medical School study found the average time a doctor listens before opening their mouth is…17 seconds!
Today, we still find executives, managers, business leaders and board members who regularly sit through 3-hour meetings without ever asking a question. They tell, they don’t listen. They brief, they answer questions, they don’t ask questions, they don’t listen.
I researched the profession of researchers — one of my own core professional communities — and found most created lots of tools & techniques and ‘time efficient’ processes that all get in the way of listening.
In 1996, I changed my professional practice, and threw away a lot of my ‘research tools’ when I met with the (sadly many) relatives of those murdered by the serial killers, Fred and Rosemary West. I just listened, and listened, and listened some more. I didn’t need any tools apart from my ears, my eyes (because you listen with your eyes!), and my recorder to listen more later.
I remember the 2011 RSA A+NZ AGM where we had John Corrigan taking us through the new world of education where teachers now have to learn to listen to children. John said “the age of blind obedience ended in 1918…the age of command and control ended with the abolition of corporal punishment…in the old world, teachers had the knowledge and children didn’t so there was a ‘psychological contract for one way flow’ but in the new world children have knowledge and expect teachers to coach them through it…listening to children has become an essential skill”.
However, in many of our workplaces today, a disempowering command and control style is still the dominant management style (most managers or leaders don’t even know there are alternatives!) and listening is still a rare event until some sort of externally-facilitated process enables listening to take place.
Most managers have been promoted to where they are by taking quick decisions and giving advice so they think there is no benefit to stopping and listening — until it all goes wrong with dissatisfied customers, exiting talent, staff with mental health issues, their own mental health issues, or their marriage falling apart (because they don’t listen at home either!).
As soon as managers, leaders, professionals, politicians — people in any walk of life — start listening, their personal & professional relationships are transformed. If they seek out and receive listening skills training and get coaching support to improve their ability to listen to combine with a greater desire to listen…a whole new world opens up where previously intractable problems start to be solved and life is so much less stressful. You cause so much less pain to others, and you cause so much less pain for yourself.
So try it out. Try listening. Try slowing down the pace a little. Think about that customer, client, colleague, stakeholder, friend or relative who is wanting you to hear them, wanting you to listen, wanting you to give them the focus of your attention (instead of your mobile phone which you seem to love so much!), and wanting you to demonstrate you have listened.
And just listen. Please — just listen.
Paul Vittles FMRS FAMI FRSA Dip. Couns. is a coach, consultant and counsellor; and the founder and chief facilitator of ‘Listen Hear: The Global Campaign for Effective Listening’.
