Last week, JOE’s careers expert Eoghan McDermott skimmed across the three types of listener. This week he follows up with the components of listening to understand in the workplace.
You might assume that everyone knows how to listen to someone. People know how to listen. But not how to listen to someone.
Three steps – Stop. Look. Listen. In that order. Particularly in the workplace.
Stop what you are doing. There is this wonderful concept called multi-tasking. It is a wonderful concept and, apparently, something that only women can do well. I disagree. Multi-tasking is doing a bunch of things without paying proper attention to any of them. It may be that women are better at doing that than men, but I’m not convinced they should be.
Anyway, if you want to listen to someone then you need to stop doing other things. You will have thousands of pieces of information to pick up on; facial expressions, body movements, the language used, the jargon to be decoded and the message to be understood.
You just won’t be able to process that lot and finish off that game of Peggle. (You’ve never heard of Peggle? Google it – one of the greatest wastes of time ever invented.) If, however, what you’re working on is urgent, tell them nicely that you’ll be back to them in ten minutes because you need to get whatever it is off your desk ASAP.
Look. Pay them physical attention. Turn your body, head and eyes towards them. Have you ever found yourself dealing with someone who just won’t look you in the eye – even for a second? Someone who talks to you while staring at a newspaper, computer screen, smart-phone or window? Or someone who talks to you over their shoulder. Simple message given here, whether it is deliberate or not, that the neck twister doesn’t want to talk to you, and neither do the other folks.
Listening isn’t just about keeping your ears open. Often it is about making sure that you stay quiet until they’ve said all that’s on their mind. If someone comes to you with an issue, don’t start talking immediately. If you let a silence fall, or say “Go on,” nine times out of ten, you’ll find that they really have something much deeper on their mind that they want to share.
The free gift of your attention is often the best thing you can give to another human being.
Now, don’t get worried about having to solve whatever has been presented to you. Sometimes, just talking the problem out loud with someone prepared to give uninterrupted attention allows the other person to solve their problem, so you don’t have to come up with a solution.
You may not have one, and a solution may not be what they’re looking for, so just ask them how you can help, don’t jump in with a solution. The free gift of your attention is often the best thing you can give to another human being. The oddity is that when you let someone else do all the talking, they tend to develop a sense of you as being very interesting and will certainly walk away with a positive impression of you.
Question time
Listening is also about asking questions. You should learn to ask open questions.
“Do you like sun holidays?” is a closed question. It allows only two answers: yes or no.
“What kind of holidays do you like?” is an open question. It allows a vast range of answers.
“Do you play hurling?” is a closed question.
“What sports do you play?” is an open question.
A good rule of thumb is that questions beginning with ‘Do you’ tend to be closed, whereas questions beginning with ‘How’ and “Why” tend to be open.
- Learn to ask appreciative questions: “How did you manage that with all those difficulties?”
- Learn to probe further: “Tell me a little bit more about that.” “Why did you decide that?”
- Learn to ask directive questions, “Talk to me about…?” “Go on.”
- Learn to ask questions without saying anything, with a smile, the raise of an eyebrow.
No small-talk
Learning to ask questions rather than fill the air with small-talk has enormous advantages, if you concentrate on doing your utmost to find out interesting stuff about and from every person you meet.
The first advantage is that people, when the warm light of someone else’s attention is shone on them, tend to become much more interesting than they appeared at first glance. So you find your world populated by much more interesting people than you used to know.
The second advantage is that you make links. Ireland is a small country and if you pay attention and ask the right sort of questions, you’ll sooner or later find out that you and the other person share a relative, a mutual friend or a favourite place.
The third advantage is that you learn from the other person. You learn ways of tackling problems, you learn how a business or a sport works. You hoover up material that, stored away, will sooner or later become useful to you.
Trust
Finally, you create trust. You build, rather than deconstruct a relationship.
When you’re listening, you need to be listening to differentiate and remember. In his book, Information Anxiety, Richard Saul Wurman, wrote that human beings are bombarded with information and, because of this, find it difficult to see significance in it and remember.
A pay off for you from listening to differentiate and remember is that the person becomes more interesting.
His comparison was that we get more information in a copy of The New York Times or The Sunday Times, than a medieval scholar would have encountered in a life time. Our ability to remember hasn’t improved, but our ability to edit has. When chatting with colleagues or meeting with clients we can sometimes hear things but disregard them and forget them.
Listening to differentiate means actively seeking to capture what is different about this client and their business. That means refusing to accept the obvious. A pay off for you from listening to differentiate and remember is that the person becomes more interesting. On the flip side, they find you more interesting. Good listening meets that essential human need to be found worth listening to.
If you have a question about your job or career that Eoghan could help you with, why not email JOE at shout@joe.ie?
Eoghan McDermott is Head of The Careers Clinic in The Communications Clinic and is the author of The Career Doctor- How to Get and Keep the Job You Want.
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