EFFECTIVE LISTENING

You're not learning anything while you're talking

President Lyndon B. Johnson

"Listen" is ‘to pay attention to, or, to give heed to’.  Effective listening is found to be the central to enhanced communication.  Listening is also a key dimension of communication.  It is essential to understanding.  Listening and understanding a situation allows management to gain a significant competitive edge.  Listening refers to a complex set of interrelated activities including:

• Apparent attentiveness,
• non-verbal and verbal behaviour,
• attitudes,
• memory, and
• behavioural responses

Listening is often more tiring than talking.  Listening in the workplace has been found to be a complex activity.  According to Parasuraman (1995), listening organisation can be characterised as having knowledge of customers and an ability to satisfy those customers.  Deaf organisations rarely or never measure customers’ opinions on service quality.  Since organizational listening occurs in a setting which includes interruptions, time pressures, and ongoing activities and relationships, the quality of listening has been found to be poor in most communication areas.  It is disturbing to most employees to know that a portion of what they have said has not really been listened.

Basically there are two types of listening:

-          Social listening - the kind of listening people do when chatting with friends, acquaintances, or a stranger in a bar. They listen, but their mind can be wandering.

-          Active listening - the kind of listening is more difficult and demands concentration.

In a world of excessive information, listening overload causes many managers to listen and respond selectively to items which are of interest to them.  Preoccupation is another common flaw in listening.  The listener sometime is so wrapped up in their personal or work concerns that listening simply does not take place.

The three (3) processes of Effective listening are:

•        Hearing – the physical and neurological process which enables a person to hear sounds above a threshold intensity level within a certain frequency range

•        Listening – being aware of auditory impact but without evaluation

•        Understanding – the message takes on meaning within the listener's frame of reference; understanding may come through empathy or by relating it to something of which the listener has knowledge

Listening activities fall into three (3) categories:

• information seeking,
• evaluating others and
• responding to others

Organizational level listening skills focus on informational and evaluative needs.  Organizational listening skills can be reinforced by redesigning office layouts and work space.  In empathic listening, people are required to talk less and listen more.  Good listeners get others to communicate by asking good questions.

Active listening is characterized by responsive behaviour such as questioning and paraphrasing.  But bear in mind that response alone does not indicate good listening skills.  Many managers are guilty of excessive talking, they cannot, or will not, stay quiet long enough to listen.  Thus making many employees feel that managers do not listen to them and that they have absolutely no opportunities for upward communication.

 

Have ears but hear not

Comparatively few managers are found to receive training in effective listening.  Poor listening leads to inefficiency, misunderstanding and conflict.  Listening to employees is vital for innovation and timely information and also feedback.  Through effective listening manager know what needs to be communicated.

A manager with effective listening skills will be a more creative and responsive problem solver.  Listening is a function which must be constantly developed and sharpened.  These skills can help to:

• become more aware of what needs to be communicated
• foster a commitment to excellence
• create an organizational climate responsive to the needs and motivations of employees
• create climate which is conducive to employee involvement and increased productivity
• indicate that opinion is valued and respected
• learn more about the businesses

Our thought speed is generally four times faster than speech speed, causing many listeners to be left with free mental spare time.  Untrained listeners usually use it to take mental vacations, often missing part of the information transaction.  Once the listener has formed judgements about the message, they stop listening.  This is because they are afraid of, or do not agree with, what the other person is going to say.

Researchers have studied listening as a mode of communication towards achieving transparency in understanding.  Effective listening requires

• openness,
• attentiveness
• a non-judgmental attitude, and
• awareness of one’s self

The screens in listening prevent people from receiving and understanding others.  The agendas people have regarding what they want to achieve or avoid, also their fears and desires; block the ability to “see through” the other people’s meaning.  People need to be alert, attentive, relaxed and receptive when listening.  When listening trying to achieve a goal or for a specific purpose beyond the purpose of listening, a “strain of acquiring” will interferes with the process of just listening.

Try listening with the whole body and mind.  It requires one to be in a state of being fully attending to the task at hand without an agenda, without thinking of the next thing to say, and without expecting results.  Because in the conventional forms of listening, we usually listen through our own agenda, desires, fears, and filters.  Practice mindful listening by being fully present to oneself and the person to whom one is listening.  Mindfulness is the process of deliberately paying attention to the present moment in a non-judgmental way.

 

REFERENCES:

Lyndon Jones, Effective listening, Education & Training, February, 1980

Lyndon Jones, Effective listening, Education & Training, February, 1986

Marilyn M. Helms and Paula J. Haynes, Are You Really Listening?; Journal of Managerial Psychology, Vol. 7 No. 6, 1992, pp 17-21,

Ozum Ucok, Transparency, communication and mindfulness; Journal of Management Development Vol. 25 No. 10, 2006 pp. 1024-1028

William J. Glynn. Sean de Bu´ rca, Teresa Brannick, Brian Fynes and Sean Ennis, Listening practices and performance in service organisations; International Journal of Service Industry Management Vol. 14 No. 3, 2003 pp. 310-330