All you need, in most social and business situations, is the capacity to ask questions, writes JOE’s careers expert Eoghan McDermott.
Relationships are absolutely vital to career development. Vital to life in fact. Every time you encounter another human being (not matter how fleeting) you are building or dismantling a relationship. The “unposhified” version of this is “don’t be a pain the ass to people”.
Listening
A key element in your communication and relationship building skills is your ability to listen. The vast majority of people reckon they’re great listeners. They’re not. Failure to listen blocks information at source, and information, in terms of you developing your career, is vital.
Bad listening skills will cause you difficulty around completing projects, because you won’t get the brief right. It will cause you difficulty with customers because you’ll miss the important information that guides what they really want. Becoming a good listener is the best step you can take in communication terms. It will not only make you better at your job but it will, in addition, turn you into a better friend, improve your relationship with your spouse of partner and greatly improve your performance as a team member.
Shy people who dread social situations often say that what most bothers them is the fear that they’ll have nothing to say. Wrong. Nobody cares what you have to say until they have learned to value you.
So, don’t concentrate on the skill you don’t need to have. All you need, in most social and business situations, is the capacity to ask questions. Asking questions is a great way to build relationships. Questions get other people talking. People like to talk. The problem is that the world has a constant imbalance between those who want to talk (the majority) and those who want to ask questions (the minority).
There are three types of listening…
- Listen to talk – the self-obsessed does this
- Listen to win – the competitor does this
- Listen to understand – the listener does this
Listen to talk
Everybody has friends, or perhaps the better term might be “acquaintances” who talk about themselves all the time and show no interest in others. Whether you say “I was working on this last week” or “I saw so-and-so in town the other night”, they immediately leap in with their tales regardless of what you were talking about. They are listening for the gap in your conversation that is the cue for them to talk about themselves.
I know someone for example, who (clearly because they were trained at some stage) asks the occasional question.
“How was work this week?” will be their query.
“Ah, great,” I’ll say. “You know, in the current meltdown, I can’t get over the fact that we’re doing OK. I’m working on some interesting projects.”
“Yeah, same here,” is the response, and before I draw breath, he’s into his saga of the week’s intriguing travails. He never checks why I’d be interested. (I’m not.) He never works out how to make it interesting. (He could.) He’s just talking, because it reassures him. That’s listening to talk.
Listen to win
Then there are the ones who, if you tell them you have a cold, they have flu. If you have flu, they have double pneumonia and a touch of mastitis. No matter where any conversation starts, they wangle it so they get to talk about themselves and always try to top what gets said to them. That’s listening to win.
Typically, they will think they are good listeners, or at least good communicators. It doesn’t follow. Many people, when they listen, are listening-to-talk. Like my friend, what they’re looking for in the other person’s conversation is a hook onto which they can hang whatever they want to talk about.
We all do it at times, without knowing we do it. But if you observe your own conversations, you may be shocked to find out just how often you are listening with half your mind, while the other half scurries about looking for an opportunity to take over the jammie job: the talking.
Dear reader, you’ll have noticed the last category, listening to understand, isn’t covered in this article. I’ll be back soon with how to make that work for you.
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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