Listening

I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.

—Richard M. Nixon³⁵

82 Listening: The “Hearing Phenomenon”

The other half of asking a question is how it is received and perceived, and whether it has had the intended impact. Answers alone are not a full indication that you have communicated effectively. There are two additional factors in this equation: how the question was heard, and then what you do with the answer. We discuss how you heard the answer in a moment. What was heard is the key factor in this section, and managers are sometimes completely unaware of how a question is heard.

They tend to think that just because a question was answered, it was heard correctly—that the respondent listened. But here is a very real discussion I had with an associate (A) in a large accounting firm.

A: My boss grills me every morning when she gets in.

Me: What do you mean she “grills” you?

A: I get in early every day, and when she arrives, she always walks by my desk and asks questions.

Me: Like what?

A: Like, “You are going to be fired today!”

Me: That’s not a question.

A: Yeah, but that’s what I hear every time she asks me one.

He is a young person who has been with his firm for a couple of years and gets good reviews. Yet he hears this every time his boss questions him, whether intended by the boss or not. I have discovered that this “hearing phenomenon” is not uncommon, particularly in service businesses. Checking into a major name-brand hotel at four in the morning, the desk manager told me she hears “you’re second-rate” every time her boss questions her.

In reality, these people are not facing imminent firing; they are listening through an amazing array of filters. People hear all kinds of things from their managers, particularly when asked questions. They hear things such as “You’re doing a good job,” You’re doing a bad job,” or “Your shoes are too pointy.” So, listening to the question followed up by listening to the answer is always needed.

By the way, our observations on questions/answers, and particularly listening, extend to e-mail communications—these should be included in your thinking, too. More and more manager-employee interaction is taking place electronically rather than in person. As managers become remote from the place where the work of employees is actually conducted, understanding is becoming even more important to the process of asking a question.

Before going further, let’s get some definitions out of the way. There are two basic concepts just described: hearing and listening. In spite of the preceding example of hearing something the manager did not explicitly state (we have no idea whether the accounting manager was harboring the thought of actually firing the employee, nor do we know whether his paranoia was justified), this activity still comes under the category of “listening.” It may be thought of as creative listening, but it is listening just the same.

• Hearing is the physical response of the body (your ears) to sound. Your ear hears the sounds whether you listen to them or not. Hearing may be completely active (as when one is attending a concert) or passive (where the person may or may not focus on content) or, in many other cases, a combination of both. It is also possible to hear without listening; there are a number of excellent counseling books on this subject.

• Listening is a conscious recognition of the sounds you hear. It is active, and it is a skill. The intent of the listener is to understand what is being said, what was meant by it, and then to determine the appropriate response, if any.

The distinction for managers is that hearing (Dad, did you hear anything I said?) requires you to receive the spoken word while listening (Yes, I heard you say you were just about to practice your violin in spite of the beautiful rainbow you were describing that appears so close that you could reach out and touch it) and applying your skill as a manager to the content of what is being spoken.

We hear and listen quite naturally. You don’t need this book to instruct you on how to do either of these things. What we can do here is point out some of the pitfalls to avoid and opportunities that a manager can gain by employing a few listening strategies. Some managers, even those who are very good at asking questions, may be notoriously poor examples as listeners.

You can find many good books on listening offered by psychologists, clerics, teachers, psychologists, and musicians. I’m not going to repeat any of their fine advice here. They have three basic messages in common: Listening improves communications; listening improves your enjoyment of many things, such as music; and listening is a way to learn, thus making you better at your chosen profession. A number of interesting scholarly papers have also appeared, with listening being studied as a skill that can be taught³⁶ as well as a physiologic phenomena that can be examined medically.³⁷ Studies will continue to improve our understanding of listening as a skill, but what do we do in the meantime?

You should consider four questions with respect to listening as the other half of the questions:

• Are you heard?

• Do people listen?

• Do you listen to yourself?

• How do you know you are understood?

What people hear is not always what you intended to communicate. The only way to be certain of their understanding is to listen to their responses to your questions.

83 What Are You Listening For?

A business manager I knew communicated almost exclusively by voicemail at times when he knew most of his employees were unavailable or were not answering their phones.

Me: Cal, why do you always communicate by voicemail?

Cal: I’m not interested in a quick answer—just the best answer.

Me: Why not just send a message?

Cal: Voices are better for me. I can tell a lot about the person as well as his or her answer. Are they feeling well; do I hear stress in their voice or maybe disgust? I’m responsible for people. Without them, we have no business.

Cal was a professional listener in every sense of the word. He was the best listening manager I have ever come across. His questions would occasionally miss the point, but he was clearly someone who was much more interested in the full substance of the response, not just in the content. He liked to “hear” the response as well as listen to it. That was his philosophy.

The downside of relying too much on hearing and not enough on listening to the content is that we all tend to listen for what we expect to hear.

Cal occasionally missed things because he tended to hear what he was selectively listening for. So, when he heard trouble in the voice of his distribution manager, he generally responded to the symptom as opposed to digging in to find the source of the problem. Perhaps he did not want to know—I never asked him that—or perhaps he did know and was in denial. Whatever the case, without using some questioning tools to augment great listening skills, it’s possible to miss important issues.

This is how one of his trusted managers ended up “redirecting product” to generate a huge sum of money to cover the financial shortcomings in his salary. Some probing questions with follow-up strategies might have made the guy squirm enough to come forward with his misdeeds before the audit uncovered the wrongdoing.

One way to think about avoiding the problem of becoming a habit listener is to consider this headline posted as a CNN report in 2001:

Listening for Secret Nukes, Hearing Giant Meteors³⁸

Listening stations have been operating for decades all over the world. The listeners are predisposed to hear certain items of interest. They use this approach as a filter for weeding out information of interest from communications that are of no consequence to them. In this case, their attentiveness to listening for the secret explosions of nuclear devices enabled them to hear meteors crashing into the atmosphere long before any reports were made by “more public” agencies.

The sounds of the answer you get to any question you ask may be signals for you that contain information of importance that is not in the content. Once again, in the preceding case, Cal missed the meteor—missing product—because he did not match the content (come on up and spend the weekend on my yacht) with the stress in the manager’s voice when they discussed sales shortcomings.

If you are going to listen, you should be hearing everything.

84 Avoiding Listening Errors

As managers with ever-growing responsibilities, busy schedules, and varied commitments, we are all subject to a number of listening errors. Most of these are easily corrected provided that you are aware of them. This is a short list of the most serious kinds of listening shortcomings:

• Interrupting. Interjecting before the respondent has had a chance to fully answer the question.

• Ignoring the answer. Behaving as if you asked a question just to hear yourself talk as opposed to listening to the answer.

• Acting distracted. Packing for a trip while conducting an interview.

• Walking away. Hard to believe, but I have seen managers ask questions and literally wander away during the answer.

• Repeating the question. Losing your train of thought so completely during the answer that you need to ask the same question over again.

• Misinterpreting the response. Thinking that the respondent agrees with what you have been saying just because he or she answered your question.

These six errors can be divided between common sense (ignoring, repeating, and misinterpreting) and common courtesy (interrupting, walking away, and acting distracted). It is common sense to simply pay attention to the answer to a question you have asked. Doing so might require concentration for someone who is easily distracted by the swarm of bees that may be swirling about his or her head, but for most non-bee-threatened managers, all that must be done is to focus.

One of the main reasons I have found managers not paying attention to the answer is that they are considering what to ask or say next. It doesn’t matter. If you don’t pay attention to what respondents say and how they say it, they will start to ignore you, too.

In an office of a U.S. company with business in China, a manager had placed signs around the office with transliteration of Chinese words so that the staff might be alert to them if used in conversation with people who were still attempting to master English. Her boss arrived at the office one day and asked what she was doing to improve communications between her staff and their Chinese counterparts. She explained the signs to her senior manager. Moments later, during a tour of the office, the senior officer asked her, “What the heck are these signs for?”

This boss might have been having a bad day, her ulcer may have been acting up, or perhaps she was just getting over a nasty head cold—whatever the reason, she did not listen to the answer to her own question. She had merely asked it for effect and then proceeded on with her agenda because she probably had no expectation that the manager was addressing the problem in a creative way. This is bad enough, and likely to result in jokes about the boss, but errors of courtesy are much worse than this shortcoming in my opinion.

A manager who interrupts his or her employees during their response to questions is showing an enormous amount of disrespect to them, and to himself or herself as well. Not only does this devalue the person speaking, it also diminishes the manager in the eyes of all present. Many successful people have developed this habit. I have seen managers as high as CEOs interrupt people in the middle of answering questions during discussions with them. They would likely not tolerate the behavior in return.

Walking away needs little explanation. I have witnessed this only once and understood it to be symptomatic of a brilliant person who had an attention-deficit disorder. Still, it was terribly troubling and inexcusable.

A final bit of insensitive managerial behavior was exhibited by an HR manager interviewing a prospective employee while packing a briefcase. It’s no wonder why the employee did not accept the position offered.