Chapter Seven

Listen, don’t judge

What happens after you ask? You listen. And listening, as simple as it sounds, is an essential but challenging skill to practice when interacting with people who have ideas that are different or conflicting to you. Studies have repeatedly shown that most of us are terrible at listening, at least when measured by asking people to recall what others have said. One seminal study indicated that most of us only recall about 25 percent of what we hear.¹

Listening empathetically is the key to helping you move beyond your assumptions about another person’s experiences and perspectives. We spend our lives attempting to justify our perspectives and choices, and when someone shares a story that challenges our own worldview, most of us stop listening and start creating a defense of our own opinions.

Imagine a world where everyone is free to live life their way without causing harm. You can be part of that world if you suspend judgment long enough to get to know people for who they really are instead of who you think they are.

Here is an example from Matthew’s experience:

When I was in seminary in the early 2000s, the mainline Christian denominations were debating whether to bless same-sex marriages, or allow gay and lesbian clergy to be ordained. Most of the students and faculty at my school fell on the conservative end of the theological spectrum. And so it was something of a surprise to see, published in the student newspaper, an alumnus’s article defending same-sex marriage from a Christian perspective. Many people were upset. They felt the “safe space” of their ideologically similar bubble had been compromised. And others went into debate mode, defending their position and attacking the other.

I made a different decision. I e-mailed the author and asked him out to lunch. The author of the article, Steve, told me that I was the only one that reached out to learn more. Others, including at least one faculty member, only communicated with him in order to challenge what he said.

Don’t get me wrong—I love a good debate. And at the time I would have described myself as conservative on the issue of LGBT inclusion in the church. But I also realized this was an amazing opportunity to listen, without judgment, to a voice that I was not exposed to on a daily basis.

And so at lunch, I heard Steve’s journey of reconciling his faith and his sexuality. I asked questions, seeking to understand and not judge. And I accepted his invitation to go to a church service with the group Integrity, an LGBT-friendly group within the Anglican Church of Canada. In the end, the possibilities of my in-group expanded to include those who I had been taught to exclude.

We’ve established that like attracts like, which is part of the larger challenge. Nonetheless, we have come to know many people with similar stories where listening without judgment transformed their relationships. Don Cowles, a former human resources leader at Reynolds Metals Company, shared this story of how listening without judgment was an essential part of transforming the culture of the company.

I was head of HR at Reynolds Metals Company, and we were getting all the human resource leaders together. The issue was that HR at Reynolds, and in the industry generally, we were basically the enforcers of the rules. “Carry out the big boss’s wishes!” We were not perceived as partners; maybe we were the enemy. So in this culture of employee empowerment that Reynolds was trying to create, the big question was: Could the HR department become an ally and give up some of its control over the system?

In order to make this change, Don decided to invite the HR leaders to embark on a listening process—listening to outsiders, listening to other leaders, but most of all listening to each other.

We had customers come speak. We had people outside of the organization come speak and present their perspectives. But then we had a cultural anthropologist come—the notion was that people are living out a story in your corporation and it’s embedded in your organization. It’s just seen radically differently by different people.

So we created a history timeline and put it up on the wall. It covered some years before the oldest person in the room who would have picked up stories, and it went to the present. And the first exercise was to put down the cultural events across history that were part of your experience of that time. The next was to put down the corporate events and stories, including the economic cycles, the layoffs, the plant expansions, the latest HR buzzwords of the time. And finally your personal story under that—where it intersected with that.

We discovered that people had such radically different experiences driven principally by when they came to the company. I was in my 40s, and I was made the head of HR in the company and these other HR professionals were in their 50s and 60s. I was being asked to lead because I wasn’t bound up in the past. And what I learned was how wounded many were with the change, that it was a rejection of all they had done for all these years.

Until you hear another person’s narrative, you don’t even know it exists. I had no idea of the other efforts under other leaders that had been tried and where the cynicism had come from, which in part was wisdom—but I couldn’t see it because I hadn’t had the experience. I had no way of knowing, and nor could others, until we learned to listen.

Don shared this crucial insight that is at the heart of listening as a means to building relationships:

Creating authentic relationships requires an act of courage from the get-go, and a certain humility that you don’t know everything. It begins with an appreciation of your own incapacity to understand.

It is honestly difficult to communicate how essential listening without judgment is because most of us think of it as a basic skill we already do well. We often conduct active listening exercises in our workplace trainings. Participants regularly mention how rare it is for someone to focus exclusively on listening to what they have to say without other distractions. No cross talk, no checking the phone or Apple watch, no glancing at the clock or the computer screen. We are surrounded by distractions, and mostly unpracticed at the skill of tuning out the wider world in order to simply listen to another person.

Perhaps more destructive than distracted listening is our habit of listening to others with an ear for where we can interject our own stories and experiences. Although there is nothing wrong with having a conversation and finding commonalities, it is different than pure listening and contributes to our inability to recall what others have said. The moment you start thinking about what you want to say, you have stopped listening.

The general difficulty most of us have actively listening to others translates to an even greater challenge when we try to listen to those with whom we have some significant differences of opinions or life experiences. When someone shares an experience that is unfamiliar to us, or an interpretation of an experience that challenges our worldview, it becomes even harder to not interrupt, challenge, debate, or otherwise insert ourselves into the conversation. But if we are to build authentic relationships across difference, this is exactly what we must do. Because in order to uncover our blind spots, we must check our ego long enough to really hear someone else’s perspectives.

If the idea of a listening lunch feels too nerve wracking, just go out to a public place with lots of foot traffic and observe people. Watch and listen. Allow the total strangers to just exist. If an organic interaction occurs, don’t discourage it. Be present. Talk and listen. Smile without being creepy. Look without staring. But mostly just listen without judgment. Notice how often you formulate opinions about total strangers, but don’t judge yourself for doing so. We all do it. Again, it’s human nature. So just get out there and notice what you notice without trying to assign too much meaning to it. We are more interested in you getting into the habit of noticing people’s humanity as well as your own. Whenever you feel judgmental or biased, try to reconnect with humanity by being still and listening to the cacophony of voices and sounds people make in a coffee shop, a park, or a train station. Everyone has a story, and when you keep that in mind, it pushes your bias a little further out into the periphery.

CALL TO ACTION

Catch yourself in the act of judging and make a different choice. Are you judging something about a person that they can’t control? Their appearance? Their background? Remember that the choice to judge says far more about us than the person being judged. Judgment is a habit that we have to break.