Dan Erwin

Listening Is NOT a Linear Game

“Wait, wait. I’m not finished.” Four keys to truly listening.

Listening is far more difficult, more fatiguing and often more frustrating than talking. Even the best listeners have to bite their tongues to stop from reacting, interrupting or verbally identifying with the person talking. 

Effective listeners listen for different levels of meaning. 

The linguistic or denotative level is simply that to which the message refers. “Jim can’t come to the team meeting.” The individual words of the sentence and the sentence as a whole have linguistic meaning. “Jim” refers to one specific person and “can’t come” refers to a specific action that won’t take place. “Team meeting” is a well-defined event. That's linear listening. 

But it’s the non-linear, interpretive level of meaning where our brains really start churning. The interpretive level of meaning in a message is created by the complex set of cues within the message itself. These cues tell the other person how to make sense of the message. Is it to be taken seriously or lightly. Does the message mean exactly what’s being stated, or even the opposite of its literal content? 

When the message is delivered face-to-face, there are liable to be mannerisms, facial, hand and body gestures, as well as inflections and tone of voice that give us clearer indications of how a transaction is to be interpreted. When the message is delivered via other means, all you have are the words. 

The third level of meaning for most messages is the relational. The relational level of meaning is the complex set of cues within the message that indicate the relationship between the talker and the listener. Every message in an interpersonal transaction (that’s right, “every message”) either reinforces or modifies the existing relationship between the two persons involved. 

In short, effective listening inevitably involves a lot of parallel processing. 

Four keys to truly listening. 

It’s obvious that the opportunities for misunderstanding within the three levels of meaning are numerous. But organizational listening, even within the interpersonal, is inherently problematic. Add differing levels of hierarchy, work teams with several members, cultural and value differences, struggles for power, competition for scarce resources and the increased use of impersonal communication media to the soup and it’s a near-perfect set up for misunderstanding. So here are four keys to more effective listening: 

Avoid and ignore distractions. This doesn’t just mean shutting down your Blackberry or closing your web browser. It’s especially important to stop the business of formulating your response to what the other person is saying. Simply focus on what’s being said at the differing levels. Focus, focus, focus. 

Parrot and paraphrase. You can feel silly doing this, but parroting or paraphrasing not only shows the other person that you’re listening, but it encourages them to keep talking by showing that you’re actually listening. 

Ask thoughtful questions. Open-ended and implication questions help you see the issues more clearly. It also enables the talker to go deeper into what he or she sees as significant. 

Explore other’s listening mistakes. It’s a lot more difficult to learn from our own mistakes than from others. Whenever I’m around a “he said, she said” conversation, I pay close attention to how a person draws conclusions from that experience. I stay curious about their interpretations, sometimes even asking about how they drew their conclusion from what they heard. If you’ve sat through a team meeting, for example, and afterword someone tells you what they heard and the meaning they made from it, you begin to see how that person created meaning and how it (sometimes) differs from you. So I don’t just walk away wondering what planet they’re on or why I missed that. Instead, I pay close attention to their inference creating, learning about my own skills and even my mistakes, from them. Statisticians will tell you that our inference creations are far, far more wrong than correct. Most of us rather automatically think that mistakes were made, but not by us. That dog won’t hunt. 

The brilliant research scientist, Duncan Watts, formerly of Columbia University and now Yahoo’s principal research scientist, has a lot to say about our inference, meaning-making capacities. In a fascinating McKinsey summary on the future of marketing, Watts finds that we need to start suspecting our intuition (our inference-drawing and meaning-making capacities). Watts is talking about hard data, but his comment applies even more strongly to interpersonal/team listening. 

We can’t help thinking that we know why people do (say) what they do (say) or what they’re going to do. But whatever hypothesis or intuition you have, however self-evident it may seem, when you test it against the data, it’s wrong—not every time, but very often.

Want to Make a Lot of Money? Don't Major in Business.

Warning: This blog may be bad for your health.

According to some recent statistics, one of five college students today is majoring in business. Who recommended that dumb major? The pay statistics sure don’t support it. In fact, majors in American studies, political science, philosophy and literature (that’s right, the humanities--literature) make more money by mid-career than business majors.

This is not a blog that business majors and their parents will want to read. In fact, the Penelope Trunks of the world are probably already pissed by the first paragraph. Tough!

In the latest Pay Scale salary survey data for full-time employees who possess a Bachelor’s degree and no higher degrees, there’s a lotta bad news for business majors. You really, really need a liberal arts degree to make big money.

Recent employer surveys conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers find that workplaces most value three skills that you’re far more likely to find with a liberal arts education: communication competency, analytic excellence and collaborative teamwork. Don’t be too quick to think those skills are easy to come by or that you’re a natural. The level of skill sophistication demanded by most firms today would come as a shock to 99% of the twentieth-century workforce. On top of those recruitment demands, six-figure salaries are requiring three big squishy traits: adaptability, exploration competency and entrepreneurialism. In short, the driving contribution of liberal arts is a well-developed ability to learn and think, both fast and successfully.

What are the “liberal” arts?

I realize that many already hate this blog because it has the word “liberal” in it. The masses think that liberal arts types are artsy people who speak French, study Plato, ponder cloud formations and dress like counter-culture bohemians.  There’s a terrible misunderstanding about the liberal arts, and it’s not just college students who don’t get it. So here’s a bit of history.

The liberal arts began in the middle ages with the Trivium (“the three”): grammar, rhetoric and logic. Then they expanded with the Quadrivium (“the four”): arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. Ever wonder why music majors do well in software development and application? It’s the pattern thinking they learn in their artsy, music major. In most of the better colleges today, the liberal arts have expanded to what are labeled the humanities (English, languages, philosophy, the arts), the physical and biological sciences, and the social sciences (linguistics, history, sociology, political science). College and university leadership will tell you that the real purpose of the liberal arts is to enable students to make informed decisions of the most significance.

So some techie is going to tell me he or she knows how to make informed decisions? Sorry, research won’t support that widespread notion. Research findings consistently reveal that what students and graduates know is related to what they study and how they have studied it. Vo-tech schools, many so-called engine, tech and business schools, focus solely on the what. As a consequence they are limited in the how—including how to think and make informed decisions. If you think this is liberal arts elitism, you’re quite correct. And them’s the facts.

What that means, of course, is that engineering majors in the best schools are liberal arts majors. They take a lot of liberal arts courses, including humanities, physical sciences, biology, chemistry, math and the arts. Both the top public research universities and private engineering schools, including Cal Tech and MIT, require the liberal arts in both their engineering and computer science programs. And some of the top liberal arts colleges that don’t offer engineering have what is known as a 3/2 engineering degree. These colleges, like Bates, Carleton, Macalester, Williams and Colorado College, provide three years of classic liberal arts, and then their students march off to the engineering programs at Columbia, Wash U, Dartmouth and Princeton. I’ve worked with several of them. They’re really, really smart—and they make a lotta dough.

Furthermore, many of the top schools don’t even offer an undergrad major in business. Stanford, Harvard, Chicago, Princeton, Yale and Dartmouth don’t have undergrad business schools, nor do they offer an undergrad business major. They want the future business leaders to focus on a broad range of topics in the liberal arts and sciences. Just as you can’t major in medicine or law as an undergraduate, you can’t major in business as an undergrad at many of the top schools. They believe you need a liberal arts background to support the graduate MBA. Plenty of undergrads with a business major have tried to get into top business schools and found, to their shock, that those schools usually aren’t interested in undergrad business majors. Glenn Hubbard, Dean of Columbia’s business school, put it this way: “Go to the best liberal arts college you can get into and learn how to think.”

Why do so many colleges offer business majors? As a former university faculty member, I can tell you the answer in one word: MONEY. The populace believes business majors are the key to vocational success, so. . . .  In case you haven’t noticed, many of the large public research universities in the first and second tier charge more for business majors than any other undergrad major. That’s telling.

What did I tell my daughters? Get in one of the top liberal arts colleges and major in whatever you want—not business, even if they offer it. Do they do well financially? You can bet your sweet bippy on that one.

So what, over the long term, are the best liberal arts majors for big money? The top thirty salaries at mid-career all emphasize science and math—the liberal arts. Business doesn’t get near the top thirty careers. It’s number 59 in the listing. So knock it out of your thinking.

Photo: Flickr, Images_of_money

A Poignant Memorial to Vaclav Havel

With Havel, the message mattered but it was words themselves that penetrated the heart.

                              --Madeleine Albright

Although I regularly read the obituaries of leaders in the New York Times, when I finished Albright’s memorial to Vaclav Havel, “the principled president,” I performed a unique act. I sat in front of my computer glued to her words, tears flowing down my face and clapped. I cannot remember doing such a thing. It was an automatic response, much like the silence followed by an overwhelming ovation after a great musical performance. 

Admittedly, Albright had one of the few, truly magnificent leaders of the past fifty years in her sights. But this memorial focused upon Havel’s principled uniqueness while emphasizing his surprising, earthy, gutsy, poetic humanity. Facing the disintegration of the Soviet Union, he pleads with the Western world to assist the Russians. Albright’s panegyric emphasizes the contradictions in Havel, redefines what it means to be fully human and marked by contradiction. Invited to the US Congress, Havel does not celebrate the Czech Cold War triumph, but pleads for us to reexamine our moral values.

Summarizing the life work of Havel, Albright concludes with a reprise that speaks to us in our fragmented world.

Of the man who hates, Havel wrote, “He is incapable of making a joke, only of bitter ridicule . . . . Only those who can laugh at themselves can laugh authentically.”

As for ideals about governance, he concluded that “We may approach democracy as we would a horizon, and do so in ways that may be better or worse, but it can never be fully attained.” Summing up, he declared himself neither an optimist (“because I am not sure everything ends well,”) nor a pessimist (“because I am not sure everything ends badly”) but, instead, “a realist who carries hope, and hope is the belief that freedom and justice have meaning . . . and that liberty is always worth the trouble.”

Photo: Flickr.com, edition_of_one

The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition and Productivity

A special report from the McKinsey Global Institute focuses on the next business frontier in two words: big data. McKinsey defines “big data” as “datasets whose size is beyond the ability of typical database software tools to capture, store, manage, and analyze.”

One thing for certain, the “frontier” will be impacting careers, recruiters and human resource departments profoundly.

To frame the big data problem--and the opportunity--McKinsey summarizes the data torrent in eye-catching statistics.

Here are some of the big data details from their report:

$600 to buy a disk drive that can store all of the world’s music

5 billion mobile phones in use in 2010

30 billion pieces of content shared on Facebook every month

40% projected growth in global data generated per year vs. 5% growth in global IT spending

235 terabytes data collected by the US Library of Congress in April 2011

15 out of 17 sectors in the US have more data stored per company than the US Library of Congress

Figuring out what all the sheer volume of data means and capturing the value of big data (McKinsey’s business) is even more striking in its potential for development in all the sectors and geographies. Here are the McKinsey estimates: 

$300 billion: potential annual value to US health care—more than double the total annual health care spending in Spain

€250 billion: potential annual value to Europe’s public sector administration—more than GDP of Greece

$600 billion: potential annual consumer surplus from using personal location data globally

140,000 – 190,000 more deep analytical talent positions, and. . . .

1.5 million more data-savvy managers needed to take full advantage of big data in the US

The opportunities for careers, recruiters and human resource people lie in the talent needed. What’s obvious is that our secondary and post-secondary schools have a lot of educating in math and statistics to be able to successfully take advantage of these opportunities. What many fail to recognize is that deep analytics typically require post-graduate university exposure, a costly, though equally profitable opportunity.

Are our schools ready for the implications of Big Data?

It's Not "An Eye for an Eye," but "Two Eyes for an Eye."

Don’t take “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” too literally.

Most of us are familiar with the deeply held notion of an eye for an eye. In an intriguing study of interpersonal relations, Boas Keysar and his colleagues at the University of Chicago found that reciprocity, what he calls “giving and taking,” is asymmetric. People reciprocate generosity fairly equally the first time around, less so as time goes on. But selfish acts are treated quite differently. If you screw somebody, they’re going to screw you back twice as much—or more.

Overall, conflicts (taking) between people escalate rapidly, while generosity and compassion (giving) sputter out pretty easily.

We like to think that reciprocity is a simple give and take, “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” But the sentiments of that well-worn aphorism don’t square with reality. The research found that relationship (social) exchanges, in contrast to dollar-based exchange of goods and services, simply don’t work on a fair market basis. The study revealed that social exchange is based upon the meaning and interpretation of the social actions rather than on the objective value of those actions. That includes positive versus negative behaviors, compliments versus insults, rewards versus punishments, and helping a colleague versus hurting a colleague.

Keysar said, for example, that if you’re kind and let someone go in front of you, that driver may be considerate in response. But if you cut someone off, guess what? That person “may react very aggressively, and this could escalate to road rage.” The same rules operate in work settings.

Another experiment, using money as the exchange in a game, showed that taking quickly escalated as players became increasingly greedy over repeated exchanges. In a companion money experiment, the study confirmed that the act of taking inevitably has a far bigger impact on people’s responses than the act of sharing.

In sum,

1. Generosity is rewarded, but there is a tendency on the part of the recipient for it to weaken and sputter out.
2. Acts of taking have a far bigger impact on people’s responses than acts of sharing.
3. Taking escalates negative actions quickly--proportionately faster and larger than giving.
4. Relationship exchanges and responses, both positive and negative, are based largely on the personal interpretation of the actions, rather than the objective value of those actions.

Some work implications:

1. Rewarding generosity.

--Overtime work to achieve boss’s goals will be rewarded (however, continual overtime can be taken for granted, and lose its impact).

--Donating resources and time (occasionally) to colleagues will ingratiate you to them, making reciprocal rewards available.

--If you want support for your good deeds, you’ll need to interpret the deed to the relevant persons and self-advocate.

--Significantly effective and “useful” hierarchical and peer relations require a personal reputation of liking and respect.

2. Acts of taking.

--Refusing to support a colleague’s project can result in lack of support for your project, even when the person sees your project positively.

--Critical and negative feedback may do more harm to your relationship than good. Be very cautious, contract to give critical feedback, and match the negative feedback with the positive.

3. Escalating negative acts.

--Never, never burn your bridges, it’ll always cost more and more.

--If you have an image problem and people don’t think well of you, better to demonstrate your positive qualities in a new setting where you don’t have to overcome so much baggage.

--Loss of trust may be difficult, even impossible to repair.

4. Exchanges tied to interpretations.

--Rewards won’t be granted solely on the basis of your deeds and generosity no matter what the actions. Personal interpretive and advocacy strategies are needed to “grease” the relationship.

--Interpret your repayment of generosity to the original giver. He or she may not otherwise understand.

--People trust their first impressions, whether of taking or giving. After the first impression, changes are difficult.

--Make self-advocacy the rule, not the exception.

There you have it: street smarts par excellence! Hope it helps.

Boaz Keysar, Converse, Wang and Epley, (2008) Reciprocity is not give and take. Psychological Science, V.19, N.12.

Photo: Flickr, by Manoj Trikila

More Clarity on Ben Franklin's Two-Bird Economic Theory

My December 7 blog on turkeys and bald eagles received some exceptionally useful insight on the birds—and their characteristics, from one of my readers, a lover of the wild turkey. Franklin, as I wrote, sorted economic philosophy between the turkey and the eagle. 

Franklin’s economic point was that though the eagle was classy looking, it made its living by feeding on the helpless. I related my grandson’s observation that the eagle was a mean bird who stole fish from the gulls in flight. One especially knowledgeable commentator and hunter, Chris Blazer of Montana, pointed out, in agreement, that the eagle was “frequently a scavenger.” 

Franklin argued, incontrast, that the turkey was symbolic of just one instance of the issues of freedom. He believed that people who work hard and play by the rules should have a fair shot at prosperity, and rejected the notion that self-indulgence and genetics should be rewarded. 

He was especially attracted to the wild turkey and proposed the turkey for the national bird, but my description, Mr. Blazer pointed out so well, was quite a bit shy of the mark. I described the turkey with an “easily distracted mind and artificially swelled breast.” Through the lens of the barnyard, the turkey is a hard worker, disciplined, a follower of the rules, and quite willing to give hell to anyone who tries to make trouble. Mr. Blazer pointed out that my description had little relationship to the wild turkey and the strength of Ben Franklin’s analogy. With Blazer’s input, Franklin’s point is far stronger. 

Mr. Blazer happens to be a hunter—and a fan of the wild turkey. He revealed my confusion (and ignorance) between the wild and the domesticated birds. As I wrote, “the domestic turkey is easily distracted and puffed up." But, "the wild turkey (in stark contrast) is a wily bird that eludes predators and hunters readily, manages to thrive in a wide variety of environments and, while not aggressive, defends itself and its own when provoked.” Franklin’s analogy has a lot more strength, insight and contemporary relevance than I first noted. 

As the writer so eloquently put it, “we could be a very different nation if we had followed his advice.”

Listening Is Actually All About Questioning

Effective listening is not about listening harder.

“My boss--or my colleague--won’t listen to me.” Although it’s rare to see much about effective listening on the web, my single post on the subject, Listening with minimal encouragers--with nearly 20,000 viewers--is still going strong. Listening problems in organizations never seem to go away. Part of the problem is most still frame listening through the lens of attention. So they emphasize “pay attention and listen harder.” That, however, won’t significantly impact the quality of your listening. Listening actually involves the same fundamental skill as interpreting an email, a tweet or dealing with any other message media that requires responsiveness.

Being effectively responsive to messages in any format is first and foremost all about questioning, especially within the organization. That implies that our knee jerk response to the messages we receive within interpersonal conversations or scripted media is neither reading closely nor listening more attentively. The questioning may be verbalized orally or merely internal and silent, but effective listeners are invariably questioning.

Although written messages are infamous for misunderstanding, face-to-face conversations are still more complex. That’s especially true when it comes to effective listening. We’ve been taught to listen for the big ideas and pay attention to the words and meanings, but that’s only part of the issue. Effective listeners question the larger conversational context, the immediate setting, audience relationship, emotional tone, body movement, the gestures, eye gaze, tone and inflection as well as the words. In short, effective listeners are parallel processors who question what they both see and hear within the conversational package.

Can you question all of these factors at one time? Of course not. But as you question what you’re seeing and hearing, you’ll begin to notice just a few factors in each conversation that stick out. Usually those are the factors on which to focus your questioning and analysis. This might include context issues, for example, as obvious as, “why is Joe interrupting repeatedly?” Or, “why is the leader getting 'defensive' about that set of questions?” Sometimes the more important question might even be, “why don’t I have better insights into this seemingly politicized issue? How did I miss out on what’s evidently going on here?”

Invariably, there are only a handful of questions that apply to nearly all business settings:

1. What’s the meaning of this conversation? What’s being said and what’s the real subtext?
2. What are the relevant context, hierarchy, political, relationships, emotions, tone, body language and gesture I need to focus upon and analyze? Who are the obvious players here, and why are others saying nothing?
3. What are the relevant “undiscussables?” What’s not being messaged, but would be extremely useful to know and understand?
4. What’s the impact of the person’s messaging upon the context, conversation and myself?
5. What does he expect me to do about what he’s saying--and what am I really going to do about it?
6. What are the messages my listening is sending to the speaker and what adjustments do I need to make about those messages—if possible?

You’re not always going to be comfortable asking these questions orally in every setting. But your ignorance of the answers to these listening questions can impact your projects and career, sometimes seriously.

Remember that the conclusions you draw if you don’t ask a question out loud may be off base—far off base. I inevitably assume that my assessment of what’s being said—if I don’t verbalize my question to the other—has a greater potential for being wrong than right. It’s smart to distrust your judgments about the other person and what he or she is meaning. My friends, as well as my clients, tend to expect that I’ll call back after sleeping on a conversation to once more clarify a conversation’s meaning.

If you build a social contract—an agreement with the person--that you can ask questions about what’s being said, and do it early on and regularly—you’ll find it possible to ask nearly all these questions. Of course, you’ll need to regularly renegotiate the contract. If the person is a superior, you’ll want to find out whether he’s OK with questions in public or would prefer them in private. Eventually, even the most reticent will agree to public questioning of significant issues.

FYI: Systematic research in communications, psych, anthropology, and sociology underlies all these listening questions. But I decided that enough was probably enough. Still I’ll drop one overarching piece of research directly related to listening into this blog: Misunderstanding is more prevalent and widespread than understanding within the organizational communication package. Organizational misunderstanding can be tied as much to contextual politics and body gesture as to the meaning of words. (I should remind readers that politics is not a dirty word. Nearly all conversation has political overtones.)

Ben Franklin's Two-Bird Economic Theory

If you’re like me, a lover of roast turkey at Thanksgiving and the holidays, this is a good time to reflect on the turkey’s proud heritage. You might be surprised to know that one of our founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, gave a lot of thought to that bird and its future role in America. He believed that the turkey, not the bald eagle, should be the national bird. He also thought that we should plaster pictures of the turkey on our coin and bills, giving the turkey place of honor. 

In a recent New Yorker article by Adam Gopnik, the writer reveals some highly fascinating ideas about Franklin and the symbolism of birds, specifically the turkey and the bald eagle. The turkey, I learned from Adam Gopnik’s article, is the Meleagris gallopavo and in the 18^th century the most local of birds. Indeed, we slammed on the brakes just Wednesday before Thanksgiving to avoid plastering a wild turkey across the pavement in Wellesley, Massachusetts. 

But it was a glorious moment in the 1780’s when Benjamin Franklin argued that the turkey should be the national bird, not the bald eagle. Gopnik explains that Franklin’s ideas are not a “finger-on-the-nose bit of Old Ben playfulness.” Franklin, like Warren Buffett, didn’t believe that there should be hereditary legacies in American life. And he used the turkey and the eagle to make his point. 

Ben Franklin’s two-bird theory:

Franklin sorted economic philosophy between the turkey and the eagle.  His economic point was that though the eagle was classy looking, it made its living by feeding on the helpless. To him, the eagle was reflective of old Europe, its class structure and its inequities. 

A couple years ago while fishing with my youngest grandson, Henry, we watched the gulls grab the dead minnows we tossed out. Suddenly out of the blue sky swooped a huge bald eagle, taking the minnow from one gull while in mid-flight. My grandson had it right: “That eagle is a mean bird,” he commented. He stole from the pathetic gull—and the gull flew away in fear. (Bald eagle-lovers will claim that this libels eagles. But. . . what would you expect from eagle-lovers?) 

For Franklin, Henry's comment about the eagle is spot on. Admittedly, the turkey has an easily distracted mind and artificially swelled breast. But Franklin knew that though the turkey might be silly and vain, it shares the feed with the other birds in the yard. It’s a hard worker, disciplined and it follows the rules. And, like a lot of barnyard birds, it’s quite willing—eventually--to give hell to anyone who tries to make trouble. 

In Franklin’s world of symbol-building, the national bird question was just one instance of the issues of freedom. He believed that people who work hard and play by the rules should have a fair shot at prosperity. He also rejected the notion that self-indulgence and genetics should be rewarded. 

That wise Republican, David Brooks, summarizes the conflicts of the turkey and the eagle best. He asks which values will be rewarded and reinforced? The choices are effort and self-discipline. Or, bad governance and rigged systems? 

It strikes me that Franklin’s thinking about the turkey and the eagle is even more relevant today than in the 18^th century. 

Hope your Thanksgiving was as enjoyable as mine, and that you prefer turkey.