Listening is one of those behaviors that most people take for granted. Until, that is, they miss something very important that impacts their job, career or significant other. So, when interviewing colleagues for a development client, I inevitably ask about my client's listening skills. There are important reasons for this.
As a specialist in communication and rhetorical behavior, I’m well aware that the two most basic skills, skills upon which all interactional competencies are built, are listening and questioning. For example, you can’t manage people, negotiate or develop effective teamwork unless you are effective at both listening and questioning. In addition, it’s also clear that the quality of human information processing is partially dependent upon a person’s level of complexity. Studies reveal that individuals who can manage highly complex material in conversations will understand more in their listening experiences than those who cannot verbally manage complex material.
To get at these issues, I intend to focus on both the stages of listener-adapted skills and the basic chunking of the listener competency. By chunking I refer to the skill bits that make up the listening competency.
Listening stages
Notice the caveat about complexity: listener-adapted skills are about complex conversational abilities, not merely thinking or talking abilities. That’s a very important qualifier. I once worked with an academically brilliant Stanford MBA who could go an at length about any business subject, but she really couldn’t engage team members in conversations. What went on in her attempts to converse was inevitably one-sided: she ended up doing all the talking—and sometimes interrogating. Her overall performance was seriously limited. The result of little listener-adapted competency.
What this also suggests about listening—and I’m certain it’s also true of questioning—is that listening skills are developed in stages. In an older study by Delia and Clark, they identified five stages of listener-adapted communication skills in six-, eight-, and 12-year-old boys. As stages, the listening skills build upon each stage just like Erikson’s stages of development. In Erikson, stage one is the development of trust, rather than mistrust. So if the infant does not develop trust, when he’s an adolescent of the age when he should be developing identity (stage 5), he’s going to have a great deal of difficulty with his own personal identity, largely because he’s unable to access identity input. I know adults in their thirties who never developed trust, and so identity and relations remain difficult and sometimes dysfunctional. The analogy is also true for the development of listening skills.
In the first stage the child is unable to understand that listeners (e.g. parents) have certain characteristics that enable them to accomplish relational tasks. Fathers cannot nurse--mothers are built for that. In some families, the infant may not recognize that only the mother can provide him with food.
Gradually (stage 2) the child recognizes differing proficiencies in different people—their little friends and adults. In stage 3, the child gradually begins to recognize that friends have certain abilities, but they do not yet connect these abilities with communication tasks. They can see the task getting done, but they don’t understand that what she says gets the task done by the other person. In stage 4 the child begins to associate what he says with what the other person is doing, but his ability to control and adapt his messages to adapt to another’s behavior is limited. In time, the child begins to adapt to different kinds of listeners and situations through the use of very general adaptation strategies—for example, altering his tone of voice or including a phrase to show deference like “please help me” or “can I have some more cheese?” Or, like my eldest daughter (59-year-old) who as a precocious 18-month-old toddler used to grab my briefcase upon my arrival home from work and say, “mine.” She changed my behavior so well, that her mother had to distract her so that I could grab what I needed from my briefcase when she wasn’t looking. That was a potential battle in which we became adept at stealth wins without ever engaging in a frontal attack. In the final stage of refinement, the child (adolescent and adult) has developed control over listener-adapted strategies. He interacts based on inferences about the attitudes, qualities and possible reactions of the listener.
If you look closely at each of these stages, you’ll see that some adults have progressed rather well through the stages and demonstrate a refined ability to learn from questioning and listening. But you’ll also see that persons break down in different stages. The Stanford grad of whom I referred earlier, demonstrated serious difficulties in stages 4 and 5. She could not recognize that what she said, both in tone and words often alienated people so much that they regularly sabotaged her efforts. I expect many people to have difficulty with stage 4 and greater difficulty with stage 5. The unrelenting emphasis on digital technology only makes these failures worse, offering little opportunity for conversational-listening adaptation.
Most of the standards for children have focused mainly on grammar, syntax and sentence construction rather than the need for communicative competencies. And that lack shows up in adulthood, throughout business and the professions.
Listening chunks
Although I use the listening stages as an executive assessment tool, I have always focused on chunking as the easier way to identify listening needs with colleague interviews. But understanding the client’s listening stage of maturity is also a rhetorical means of understanding his performance background, and often his psychosocial background and family of origin. Furthermore, no matter what my client has stated as needs, both listening and questioning always surface in the 10 or 12 interviews of client colleagues—because these competencies influence all development. If my client is a poor listener, then my coaching will require more constant detail, analysis and clarification of their behavioral growth.
Nearly always the first response to the question regarding listening is that the client is a "good listener." That’s usually indicative of the fact that interviewees have no skills in listening themselves, so are merely generalizing with a positive statement. “Ok. Then let’s analyze that skill by breaking it down into small bits.” Then I start chunking the listening competency, one-by-one breaking the listening competency into small bits and question the interviewee colleague so I can gain a better understanding of the client’s abilities.
The diagnostic begins with an obvious question about "parroting." “Does my client occasionally parrot back what you’ve said to make certain he understands accurately?” Then I go on to chunks like paraphrasing, summarizing. Then I go on to the most complex and telling data, “Does my client ever use an implication question” in his listening, to clarify when issues are complex? I have never had a positive response to that question unless it comes from a previous client with whom I had worked on the process. Really smart interviewees understand that I'm deconstructing the listening competency and quickly get to the point: "I guess he's not as good a listener as I thought," the interviewee responds. Whatever the original developmental objective of the client, listening is typically a piece of the problem. Listening--and communicating--across organizational disciplines are fraught with difficulty. The difficulties can be about differing language, priorities, values and even attitudes. Research reveals that the misunderstanding rate in most any context is usually about 50%. My own thumbnail attitude toward organizational misunderstanding is that the rate is probably higher than 50%. Failure is inevitable.
My assessment of listening competencies is an indirect means of understanding the client’s performance success and failure—a topic for another blog. But, in general, ineffective listeners tend to be ineffective performers.
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 folk still frame listening through the lens of attention. So, they emphasize “pay attention and listen harder.” That, however, will never significantly improve a person’s listening. The issue is not listening harder, but gaining the skills making up the entire competency. And as you may have recognized by now, listening is fundamentally about questioning, both silent and oral.
In fact, being effectively responsive to messages in any format is first and foremost all about questioning. That implies that our knee jerk response to the messages we receive within interpersonal conversations or scripted media is neither just words or listening more attentively. So, questioning may be verbalized orally or merely internal and silent, but effective listeners are invariably questioning the material they read or the people with whom they are interacting. And then following up with paraphrasing, summarizing or talking through with potential implications to double check meanings.
Although written messages are infamous for misunderstanding, face-to-face conversations are still more complex. We’ve been taught to listen for the big ideas and pay attention to the words and meanings and potential subtexts, but that’s only part of the issue. Effective listeners also 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?”
Listening assessments
Invariably, there are a handful of questions that apply to listening in nearly all business settings:
What’s the meaning of this conversation? What’s being said and what’s the real subtext?
What are the relevant contexts, hierarchy, 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?
What are the relevant “undiscussables?” What’s not being messaged, but would be extremely useful to know and understand? Why can’t these undiscussables be surfaced orally?
What’s the impact of the person’s messaging upon the context, conversation and myself?
What does he expect me to do about what he’s saying--and what am I really going to do about it?
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 failure to question can impact your job, 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 questions 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 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. Successful listeners must always understand the inherent politics of the context. The politically astute understand that nearly all conversation has political overtones that must be factored into their listening. And often surfaced and negotiated—or at least managed in some form. That’s stage 5 of listener-adapted skills. Stage 5 illuminates why so many are terrified of organizational politics. They know neither how to adapt or manage organizational and personal politics. But that’s an issue for several blogs.