Listening Impact

A few days ago I tried my darndest to push through a post-shoulder surgery anesthesia haze. I could hear people talking, but I couldn’t understand what they were saying. Some sound came through to me, yet I had no ability to make sense of the sounds. It took several hours and a nap to be clear enough to both hear and listen. That very frustrating situation once again brought to light the complexity of listening.

In my professional life I guide people from merely being hearers to being listeners—to go from taking in sounds to evaluating, analyzing and taking action. To be a really tuned in listener one must go beyond Active Listening (AL) techniques. I think of AL techniques as Listening Hygiene, or behaviors that create the impression that someone is engaged in the interaction.

When we’re told to practice good hygiene it is usually something that we do to the surfaces of our bodies such as washing hands or putting on sunscreen. Those techniques are very good for prevention and can stave off germs, but they don’t go deep into the bloodstream to heal disease. Inadequate listening is as big a “health” threat to an organization as poison is to an organism.

For this discussion it’s important that I differentiate Listening Hygiene techniques from tactics we at Listening Impact tout. Some of the more common Listening Hygiene techniques are:

• Maintain eye contact
• Lean forward
• Mirror gestures
• Remain silent

Those techniques do work for some people, especially when the interaction is pretty superficial, but they won’t suffice when there’s a lot riding on the need to fully understand the situation and content.

If we look at just one of the hygiene behaviors, eye contact, we can see how it might appear that the listener is intensely taking in what others are saying. After all, there’s the bromide that the eyes are the windows to our soul. I don’t know if that’s a true statement, but I do know that many good listening fakers can make excellent eye contact without actually paying attention. They are like I was when the nurse tried to wake me up from the anesthesia. I looked right at her, tracked her with my eyes, and apparently spoke her name, but I was not tuned in.

At Listening Impact we use Questioning Strategy as a tactic that requires both the listener and speaker to engage in the interaction.  The listener is equipped with awareness about how he prefers to listen, which informs the types of questions s/he will ask. Our listeners develop understanding of other listening habits and develop questions that fit the style of the person(s) s/he is interacting with rather than asking unrelated questions that don’t lead to mutual meaning.

While most people don’t walk around offices in an anesthesia stupor, some do substitute superficial techniques for real skilled engagement.