Posts Tagged ‘case study’
Notes from the Field: Ineffective Team
You might recognize this team meeting because it’s not unusual.
- Eleven people: seven men, four women; three Asian, one black, one Hispanic, six white
- Context: weekly meeting with department manager
- I was there to observe in preparation to facilitate an off site for the group
- Meeting lasted almost two hours
Everyone seemed to have a tacit agreement about seating. The manager sat at the head of the table and no one sat until she did. The second most influential person sat at the other end of the table to balance out the power.
The manager handed out an agenda to everyone and that kicked off the meeting. The first item on the agenda took almost the entire meeting time. Following are the highlights that I shared with the team afterwards:
1. No apparent process or agreement on meeting ground rules.
The effect:
- people interrupted with impunity
- no acknowledgement of one another’s opinions, facts, feelings
- speaker didn’t check for understanding about what s/he said
- little attention paid to agenda timing or content
2. Lack of support for key actions
The effect:
- little agreement about any possible solution(s)
- went off in different directions several times
- attendees often seem confused and lost
- no attempt to follow any decision-making process
3. Advocated individual ideas with very little inquiry
The effect:
- constant revisiting of the same ideas and topics—tried to wear one another down to accept a point-of-view
- promoted opinions with few facts
- incomplete understanding of a position/theory because no one asked for clarification or more information
- power determined results instead of knowledge
If you were coaching this team, what would be the first few things you’d do with them?
Wasted Words: Do We Make It Harder to Listen than Necessary?
Recent research conducted by Rom Schrift, of Wharton, and Oded Netzer and Ran Kivetz of Columbia University shows that when a decision is easier than people expect, they often make it more difficult.
Do people do the same when listening?
I thought about that when I sat in on a meeting of a team. I was there to observe their communication patterns and identify how those patterns influence the quality of their decisions. I asked myself: Are they making decisions with the appropriate kind and amount of information and does their pace of decision-making fit the problem they are addressing
While that might be an excellent dissertation topic, I needed to make my observations and provide counsel pretty fast. Armed with the Wharton/Columbia research, I looked for listening waste. Here are some of my findings:
- When someone spoke and there was agreement among the listeners, the listeners went on and on about their points of agreement. Waste of time, attention, rigor. It would have been far better for the points of agreement to be noted, and the majority of time spent on points of disagreement.
- When a speaker provided a lot of details and data, rarely were there questions or pushback from the listeners. Waste of learning, clarification, intellectual conflict. It would have been much more effective if there were debate or Q&A to provide a platform for discussion and to increase the grasp of the content.
- Different people commanded different levels of listening attention. Waste of collaboration. The team needs to listen to everyone, regardless of position, authority or expertise.
- They used poor listening hygiene. That is, people talked over one another, held side conversations, didn’t acknowledge the speaker’s points, and failed to show attentive body language. Waste of available information and team cohesion. The team needs listening ground rules, training, and reinforcement for how to listen well.
- There was a race to the finish. Rather than acknowledging the breadth and depth of a problem, they tried to fit the decision-making process into the time allotted for a meeting. Waste of quality decision. They need a decision-making process to avoid the current free-for-all, or loudest voice wins, form of deciding.
It is easier to listen when the outcomes are established, when people actually know how to listen, and when there’s a problem-solving process in place. As the researchers point out, we often complicate decision-making because we misplace our efforts. If we set about listening with good intention and good skills, our focus can then be on garnering meaning and information from an interaction that will lead to high quality decisions.
More Research Findings
I continue to search the world for interesting research being conducted. Of course, there is much more than I find; nevertheless I enjoy sharing with you some of the tidbits. You can make of it what you will. I’m forever looking for clues about how we communicate, especially as it pertains to listening. You might extrapolate different learning for yourself.
Share any good stuff you come across.
Humor stimulates brain activity:
“Although our study looked at the brain’s response to jokes, our reasons for doing that were very serious. One of the main questions that families of severely brain injured patients ask us is can they still experience emotions? With the brain imaging technique we’ve developed here, we can answer that question in a simple and painless way.”
The study and resulting paper, published in the prestigious Journal of Neuroscience www.jneurosci.org/content/31/26/9665.full, finds that the “reward” area of the brain lights up to a much greater degree when a joke is told compared to that of simply listening to regular conversation.
Adrian Owen at The University of Western Ontario’s Centre for Brain and Mind
Six functions of nonverbal communication
Nonverbal communication is thought to comprise six functions in human communication. These functions consist of complementing verbal messages, substituting for verbal messages, accenting verbal messages, contradicting verbal messages, repeating verbal messages, and regulating verbal messages.
Leathers, D. (1997). (3rd. ed.) Successful Nonverbal Communication: Principles and Applications.
The influence of facial characteristics on communication
Researchers have found that facial characteristics may compel one to desire communication interaction with another. The introduction and management of interpersonal relationships often rely on nonverbal communication. Facial characteristics of a significant other are used as a template for evaluating new people. Anderson, Reznik and Manzella (1996) found the emotions and character attributed to a significant other can be transferred to a new acquaintance based on the similarity of facial characteristics. When a facial similarity to someone already liked is recognized, those good feelings are transferred to that new person. We are more likely then to approach and to desire acceptance by the new person. Facial features also elicit negative feelings if the significant other being compared evokes negative feelings. Many times these comparisons happen at an unconscious level and are manifested at the conscious level by the willingness to approach a new person. Concurring with other researchers, Palmer and Simmons (1995) suggest to conduct successful interpersonal relationships the ability to interpret nonverbal cues is needed, because social constraints often hinder explicit verbal messages.
It has been consistently found, however, that adult women are better than men at decoding nonverbal communication (Hall, 1984). Research indicates a woman`s superior ability in decoding for a variety of nonverbal cues regardless of the age or sex of the sender. What remain are the indeterminate causes for this gender discrepancy in decoding ability. One suggestion for a causal factor is cross-culturally, nurturance is fostered in girls and care giving is their expected gender role rather than boys.
Research has shown girls display more nurturance communication behavior than boys and this would account for a higher sensitivity to nonverbal cues (Bullis, & Horn, 1995). It has also been suggested that the greater interpersonal sensitivity may be due to disadvantaged status. The disadvantage creates a greater motive for women to accurately interpret nonverbal cues. If there were high motivation for the receiver to decode the message properly, then they would be more likely to attend to all communication cues, verbal and nonverbal. It would also indicate women should have higher skills in verbal decoding ability, but this has not been shown.
Laurel J. Dunn, Department of Psychology, Missouri Western State University
Why Are There “Yes” Decision-Makers?
London, April 20 (IANS) Some people are born “yes men,” thanks to their genes which make them more likely to follow other people’s directives.
Researchers found that coming to a decision often involves listening to two parts of the brain – one that relies on taking advice and the other on experience.
The brain weighs up the often-opposing views and then comes to a decision to take an action. But Brown University researchers in Rhode Island discovered that some people have genes that skew the decision towards one part of the brain than other.
They discovered the DARPP-32 genetic variation meant that individuals are more likely to do what he or she is told, even when it is contradicted by experience, the journal Neuroscience reports.
The gene means that like “a ‘yes man,’ who is flexible to a fault, the brain is more likely to be influenced by what it is told than what its experience tells it,” the report said, according to the Telegraph.
Michael Frank of Brown University recruited more than 70 people who gave saliva samples and then performed a computerized learning task.
The subjects were shown symbols on a screen and asked to pick the ‘correct’ one, which they had to learn by being given advice that was not always correct.
Ultimately, the people with DARPP-32 were the “ones who stuck with wrong advice the longest, and in a later test they were more likely to choose symbols that they were advised were correct over those that in reality had higher likelihood of being correct.”
Frank said that being a “yes man” might actually be advantageous as taking advice is easier and less dangerous than always having to experience things.
What does that mean for people with different listening habits? Each time you listen well, you rewire brain cell connectors and reshape listening ability; thus you increase the likelihood you will be a fluent listener rather than being a “yes” or “no” listener.
Notes from the International Listening Association Convention
The drive from Greenville, SC airport was anything but welcoming. Darkness fell just as I entered my rental car and booted up Tammie, the GPS. Mapquest said 2.5 hours, a person I know from that area said four, the van driver said three, and the agent at the desk agreed, then said it would probably take longer “because of the rain and fog and all goin’ over the mountains.”
She was right about the conditions, and either I wasn’t aware of just how yucky it was, or my years of driving in Pennsylvania made me foolishly confident. I walked into my sumptuous hotel room at a little less than 2.5 hours.
Most of the conference attendees were academics, many coming to share their latest research, and some to examine the present and future state of listening. I seemed to be the only one there to discuss the application of theory and research to the business world. That made me a bit concerned about how my work would be received, but I need not have worried.
Some of the highlights:
Global listening differences are shrinking with the advent of technology. While there are still differences with cultural norms across the world, people are learning to meet in the listening middle. For example, Americans understand that Asians listen first and answer second; whereas, Americans often listen and answer almost simultaneously. So Americans and Asians are getting better at pacing when dealing with one another, especially in virtual meetings where the technology plays a role in the communication process.
I told the following story about a team I worked with. When the team convened and introduced themselves to one another, one person said to a colleague, “Oh, you don’t look at all like your emails.” That unexpected and simple comment was a profound example of how much we read into all interactions, whether in person or virtual.
There’s growing interest in my perspective on listening as a habit that involves the brain, body and emotions. Few presenters brought up neuroscience and the role of the pre-frontal cortex in directing what to listen to. I went to one workshop on how a physical experience helps to articulate ideas.
Finally. The second morning was kicked off by a man named Manny, I didn’t catch his last name at that time. He spoke knowledgeably and passionately about the Association and the history of the field of listening. I appreciated his obvious depth of experience
Manny stayed for my presentation and afterwards said we should meet for lunch becaue of similar interests. Lunch was dedicated to the past presidents, so Manny invited me to sit at his table. When I sat down next to him and I saw that his last name is Steil, probably the first and most respected name in the creation of listening as a field of study. Lyman Steil. He was gracious and probably amused when I blurted out that I’ve been following his work since I began my research, quoted him in my blog, include his taxonomy of listening in my coach certification. I confessed that I wanted to use his company for ours; that is, until I learned it was wisely trademarked.
We tried to talk, but there were luncheon speakers, which made it impossible and impolite to talk, so we exchanged cards and we’ll continue when we both return to our respective offices. I want to pick his brain about automating his and their business model. He liked the designation and description of the four habits as well as how we’re focusing on listening as a cost/benefit ratio.
I was dubious about whether ILA would be worthwhile—it was a real learning environment for me and a place to interact with new colleagues.
More Research to Share #2
This post is a continuation of articles taken from Discover Magazine, Fall, 2010 issue on The Brain.
From the lead article:
Inside Man by David Ewing Duncan, pp 5-11
“With the power of neuroimaging, Discover reporter David Ewing Duncan takes a magical mystery tour of his own mind, exploring fear, memory, and faith.”
MJT: I’ve been following the work of Dr. Adam Gazzaley, director of The Brain Lab at University of California at San Francisco, and have cited his work in previous posts. In this article, the author goes to the UCSF lab to test his ability to remember.
“Through his research, Gazzaley has set out to prove that the brain does not lose its ability to remember as it ages but rather loses its ability to filter out unwanted memories; in a sense it remembers too much. He is demonstrating that the frontal lobe—the rational and decision-making part of the brain—has a major influence on what is retained by the hippocampus and the brain’s other emotional centers. Neuroscientists call this function top-down modulation, a process by which the frontal lobe guides both what people recall and what they do not want or need to burn into their memory cells. The brain does the same thing with hearing. Young ears (and brains) can easily discern the voice of a friend sitting across a table in a noisy bar; as ears and brains age, they are less able to pick out the friend’s voice from the barrage of others sounds. ‘We think it’s a filtering problem,’ Gazzaley says.”
MJT: Because aging brains do not always filter out what it was supposed to ignore, we must really focus our listening to absorb what is crucial. If you sense you’re not filtering well, learn and use techniques to keep yourself attuned.
Article:
The Internet Makes Deep Thought Difficult, if Not Impossible by Nichols Carr, pp. 13-15
MJT: I love the following analogy the author makes.
“Imagine filling a bathtub with a thimble; that’s the challenge involved in transferring information from working memory into longer term memory. By regulating the velocity and intensity of information flow, media exert a strong influence on this process. When we read a book, the information faucet provides a steady drip, which we can control by the pace of our reading. Through our single-minded concentration on the text, we can transfer all or most of the information, thimbleful by thimbleful, into long-term memory and forge the rich associations essential to the creation of schemas. With the Net, we face many information faucets, all going full blast. Our little thimble overflows as we rush from one faucet to the next. We’re able to transfer only a small portion of the information to long-term memory, and what we do transfer is a jumble of drops from different faucets, not a continuous, coherent stream from one source.”
“…improving our ability to multitask actually hampers our ability to think deeply and creatively….The more you multitask, the less deliberative you become; the less able to think and reason out a problem.” Quoted from Jordan Grafman, head of the cognitive neuroscience unit at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
“The Roman philosopher Seneca may have put it best two thousand years ago: ’To be everywhere is to be nowhere.’”
“I Do Not Interrupt,” She Says
There is gender representation among all four listening habits.
Females and males do display some different behaviors when interrupting.
It’s easiest for me to tell a story to illustrate the point than to try to explain it in scientific terms.
When I was conducting the beta test of Hear! Hear? Your Listening Portfolio®, two women, known to me but not to one another, told me they could not answer the first question on the assessment. The question has to do with interrupting others.
I asked why and, independent of one another, they said, “Because I don’t interrupt.” They are both North Americans, one a businessperson, one an educator, and both mature adults. Thus, their responses were not what I would have expected, nor what I have experienced in my years working with people, many like them. Because I know them, I’m also aware that their socio-economic backgrounds override cultural influences. In other words, these women are used to being heard.
Certainly, as the developer of the instrument, I was not about to argue with their responses; yet, I was sure they were wrong in their self-perception. I described interrupting as signaling you have something to say. With that definition in mind, I requested that each woman ask colleagues if she does interrupt, and if so, how does she interrupt.
They both responded to me, fortunately in a good-natured manner, and were pretty surprised by what they learned about themselves as interrupters. One woman said her colleagues told her she looks at her watch, wiggles in her seat, and takes deep breaths to signal that she has something to say. All her colleagues called it interrupting. The other woman also made it clear to others that it was her turn, but without uttering a word, although she did have the habit of clearing her throat when she wanted to talk. “And, apparently, I clear my throat louder and louder the longer they take to shut up so I can talk!”
Males mostly interrupt with words and females with body language.
Following is an excerpt from a study done in 1994 by Carol W. Kennedy and Carl Camden, at the School of Nursing, Ohio State University and Department of Communication, Cleveland State University:
Women leaned away from the group significantly more often than did men and when leaning away, women were more likely to be interrupted. Women were also more likely to be interrupted when smiling than were men, and women smiled significantly more when taking the speaking turn. Finally, women were interrupted significantly more often than men when they did not look at the turn-taker.
Do you experience differences between genders in respect to interrupting? If so, what do you notice?
What’s a Good Listener?
During my research I came across a couple of instruments that promised to tell me if I was a good or bad listener. Sign me up. I want the world to think of me as a considerate, interested and intelligent listener, so I answered the questionnaires accordingly. I responded by circling all the things I believe good listeners do and ignoring their opposites. My scores indicated that, indeed, my listening skills were world class.
Fast forward to reality. My one son, Alex, would often chide me by saying, “Mom, you’re not listening.” To show him he was wrong, I repeated the last words out of his adolescent mouth. He was not impressed. “Just because you can repeat my words doesn’t mean you’re paying attention to me.” He had me there. My ears and brain were working, but my attention was elsewhere (on the ringing phone, barking dog, hungry children, papers strewn over the dinner table, work deadline, tardy husband…).
Alex didn’t need me to make eye contact or even face him. I could’ve been picking up stray papers, or even feeding the dog. What he did need was for me to respond with a retort, question or acknowledgment to show I was connected and heeding his thoughts.
Good listeners do something with the information that another transmits. Message reception is not enough; the listener must respond. © 2007 Central States Communication Association
In my coaching practice, I’ve learned another attribute of the good listener: remain noncommittal while listening. In my early coaching years, I foolishly thought I was being paid to have answers.
A primatologist at the Bronx Zoo, who I begged to help me become a better observer, disabused that notion. He told me to watch the primates in one-minute intervals and note what I observed. At first I didn’t notice much unless they did something overt that anyone would see, such as moving position or taking food. Eventually my observation skills improved until I could notice small eye movement, sound differentiation, preparatory responses to others, facial expressions. After a fifteen-minute watching segment, the primatologist asked me what all the one-minute observations might add up to. Only then did I consider patterns and possible meaning.
His tutelage was invaluable. By remaining noncommittal while listening, it gives us the opportunity to gain new information or find out what the person is really thinking.
The third attribute flies in the face of what most of our parents, teachers, coaches, Girl/Boy Scout leaders (and on and on) taught us: obey the Golden Rule.
We definitely do not want to listen to others as we would have them listen to us. We want people to listen to us as we are, not as they are. I vividly recall an exercise in negotiation skills training that brought the point home to me. We were given a case study in which one person played a customer service agent and two other people played passengers, each of whom were vying for the last seat on a plane that was about to leave. One passenger had an important personal need and the other passenger had a pressing business commitment. The two passengers, ignoring one another, marshaled their best arguments, but the agent wasn’t compelled by either. He offered to flip a coin as resolution.
Only when the negotiation skills instructor told the two passengers to change seats as well as personae was it possible to reach for agreement. The role-play trio began to ask questions that indicated they were listening to one another’s plights and showed an interest in finding a mutually agreed upon solution. It took an intention to listen for meaning to come to agreement.
Thus the true Golden Rule for listening is: Listen to others as they would have you listen to them.
What anecdotes can you add to these three attributes of good listeners?
When Generating Ideas Can Backfire
When I listen, I have a bias to listen for ideas. And that can get me into trouble. I need to know when to use this habit and when to flex into other listening habits.
Last week I was in a meeting with a colleague to explore ideas he could take to his client on using social media to reinforce skills and tools from a leadership development program. We stumbled around in an energetic discussion for thirty minutes. For me, with a bias for “conceptualizing” listening, it was delicious. That’s because my brain and my listening preferences are wired around ideas. I love them. They make my neurons snap. The idea of coming up with options in a situation is a luxury. So in this meeting with my colleague I listened to what I thought was the problem and as soon as I had it formed for myself I went off to listen for strands of information on which to build my ideas. I surfaced what I thought were ten viable ideas for using social media with this client. My reflection after the meeting was that I had been productive, I’d helped with some innovative solutions to the issue at hand.
One week later and my colleague debriefed me on how his meeting with his client had gone. Briefly: badly. He said that the ideas fell on stony ground. Looking back, I believe this was mostly because I had used the wrong listening habit. I had listened for germs of ideas about what types of social media might work for this client. In reality the big question for the client was not what to implement, it was how to implement. What I should have been listening for was “what is the problem or issue that the client is trying to address?”
Tim Brown, Chief Executive and President of Ideo, in a 2009 interview said “The big trick to being a successful designer is always making sure you’re asking the right questions and focusing on the right problems.”
In the Hear! Hear? Your Listening Portfolio I learned that my dominant listening habit is “Conceptual Listening.” When I am listening to someone I invariably am thinking “So What?” The pieces of any presentation or conversation that really excite me are the new and novel applications or suggestions or possibilities. My development as a listener, communicator, designer, manager, contributor, is to know when to use, and when not to use this default listening habit. I also need to develop my usage of the other listening habits so that I can become a fluent listener who can really master the right way to listen and engage in different contexts.
Lesson 2: I need to understand my listening biases and master a range of listening habits?
Question: How do you know when to listen to generate ideas, as opposed to listen to understand the situation or problem at hand?
What Is Listening Anyway?
Is listening remembering, is it reflecting on what was said, or is it paraphrasing? Listening is all those things. And more. Listening is differentiating.
What do we remember? Do we remember what is important to us? Sure, but suppose the speaker wanted us to remember what is important to him? Take this situation as an example of differentiated listening styles.
Belinda, a top-notch bench scientist, is soon to meet with Rashi, a visiting expert on the relationship between frogs and global warming. The purpose of the meeting is to discuss experiments Belinda is doing in Rashi’s field of expertise. After they greet one another, Rashi says he’s suffering from jet lag, and tells Belinda he’ll try his best to stay alert.
They talk for an hour, minus the number of times Rashi goes for another cup of black coffee to help him stay awake. But, he manages to be alert enough to critique Belinda’s experiments, provides her with the names of three others she should connect to in the field, gives her ten ideas she might consider incorporating into to her work, and offers to mentor her through her most challenging projects.
After the meeting, Belinda’s boss asks her how it went. She tells him Rashi was really too tired to be of much help, although he did give her some follow up suggestions and praised her work. Her boss is somewhat disappointed, but was aware of Rashi’s jet lag.
Was Belinda listening? She was, but not to Rashi, instead she listened for what she wanted to hear, that her experiments were doing fine. She could even recite details from Rashi’s critique to show that she heard what he said.
Clearly there was a misfire. Belinda listened for herself. Rashi was focusing on providing information to work the problem. Belinda and Rashi never agreed up front what the intention of the interaction was, so they both missed out and never really “heard” one another. Belinda lost the value of learning from Rashi, and Rashi probably walked away with a poor impression of Belinda’s professional qualifications.
Listening is differentiating. It’s about being able to use what another says, but as intended by both the listener and the speaker.
What advice would you give Belinda for her next listening interaction?