Dan Erwin

Why Is Listening Accuracy So Very Difficult?

The obvious reason for listening failure is that people are unaware of listening processes. For example, lots of folk think resolving listening failure is all a matter of listening harder. But research makes it very clear that listening harder barely improves listening. As an exec coach and a specialist in listening, I learned years ago that people don’t understand that listening is actually a process containing several elements.

Got some doubts about that insight? Here’s how I found out about listening ignorance. And learned that very few smart MBAs—even from the top schools--understand that process.

Whatever my client's developmental objectives, whether influence management, strategic thinking, client management, decision processes, bias recognition, or leadership, I usually get around to asking participating interviewees a few very, very basic questions.  

One of the killers is this simple query:  "How effective a listener is my client?"  Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I get the innocuous response--"he’s good."  Then I dig in:  Does he repeat what you've said?   Does he clarify or check out what you've said?  Does he summarize or paraphrase what you've said?  Or an even more significant question--to what extent does he verbalize the implications of what's being said? 

After four "nos" in a row, half the interviewees fill in the blanks and say something to the effect that it’s obvious my client may not be as effective as they once thought. The majority of interviewees have a question right at that point. In fact, I’ve found it advantageous to respond to their implicit listening questions.  (When I get three or four “never thought about that” responses, I’m knocking on the door for further business.) Then after confirming their insight, I take the next step—providing research information.  

The research is a shocker. It reveals that a busy manager spends 80% of her time listening to people, . . and still doesn't get half of what is said.

How to Keep Your Enemies Closer Than Your Friends

In April 2015, I wrote a blog questioning, “Why Should You Keep Your Friends Close and Your Enemies Closer?” With an excess of 28,000 reads of that post, it obviously identified a real need of a great many people.  The post provided a rationale for the issue, not least that you can learn a lot from people you dislike, gain a different perspective and make it easier for your allies to work with you. But it only addressed strategies for working with enemies and difficult people in a cursory fashion.

Near as I can tell, there are two vocations that absolutely require a person to keep their enemies closer just to keep their job: elected politicos and Protestant church ministers. However, most business people recognize early on that they’re going to have to work with “enemies,” people they don’t especially like or trust--or pay the price in performance and sometime job loss.

So how can you keep your enemies closer?
First, confronting your enemies is usually a waste of time and a bad conversational move. They’ve got their views and in a high percentage of cases you’re not going to change their mind anyway. You may feel good by confronting them, but that won’t make the problem go away. Sure, there are occasions when confrontation is useful, but they are rare. And sometimes confronting another is a form of suicide.

Furthermore. . .

Playlist for an Alzheimer's Death

I often refer to my wife’s early death from Alzheimer’s complications as a "good death." If you have experience with Alzheimer’s you’ll understand that comment. But what made death easier for her and us was our love of music.  An NYT opinion article by Mark Vanhoenacker, described some basic end-of-life planning and focused on his deathbed playlist. It rang a lot of bells because of my wife’s death from Alzheimer’s nearly five years ago.

Vanhoenacker’s very human insights resonate: the music that gives our lives meaning can bring comfort at the end. Lest you think I’m describing sad, gloomy funeral music, let me disabuse you of that thought. Paul Simon once said that music should continue “right on up until you die.”  And Simon’s music was never funereal...

Listening: A Simple Pattern with a Big Payoff

A few days ago while having lunch at a local grill, a young guy sat down beside me. Shortly, we were engaged in a fast and hot conversation and I found out that he was a residential architect and he learned I was an executive coach. Learning that I too was fascinated by architecture, he began to quiz me about my specific interests and background. Finding that I grew up in metropolitan Detroit in the ‘forties and ‘fifties, he wanted to know about some of the great residences near the still-beautiful Fisher building on Woodward Avenue. An enlightening conversation about the monstrous costs and impossibility of building such magnificent homes today followed.

The question
As he began to leave nearly an hour later, he asked one question I’d heard before: “what’s the most important communication rule I need to know for my business?” “Well,” I responded, “not the talking I’ve been doing here. Instead, ask a couple highly relevant questions and listen, listen and listen. Then clarify the responses with another question or two, and listen, listen, and listen some more. At the end of an hour you’ll know a great deal of highly useful client information.” He nodded in very strong affirmation.

Listening is frequently and sometimes naively associated with only information gathering about tasks and the background of an individual. Often the more important information from listening is assessing the talker’s intent or motives—what that person is trying to achieve. Many times the partner’s goals and motives are not explicit, sometimes purposefully kept private. Over time, listening can enable us to figure out why...

How to Read a Conversation

In business, as in other vocations, what’s not said is often far, far more important than what is said. Indeed, sometimes people lose their jobs, opportunities, a raise or a promotion because they fail to understand what’s not said. So, in many of my posts, when I write about “subtexts,” I’m referring to these covert meanings, hidden commitments, “undiscussables,”or what's not said.  

Reading a conversation can provide unstated information on such things as organizational politics, influence, needed adaptations, special expertise, and the potential, or lack thereof, for collaboration on specific issues. It reveals such things as how to...

Vulnerability: A Virtue, Not a Vice

 
If you want to be a successful professional in today’s tough business environment, you’re going to have to be willing to ask for help—and know how to do it. Indeed, asking for help in today’s rapidly changing and complex workplace has been found again and again to increase learning, foster creativity and enhance change as well as organizational performance.  A great deal of research has revealed that seeking help can contribute very positively to one’s success. Yet, seeking help,  especially by men, is often viewed as a sign of incompetence. And so, paradoxically, when leaders engage in these very useful behaviors of vulnerability, many are fearful of threat or embarrassment, believing that their skills and abilities as leaders may be questioned.  

Why this frustrating paradox? And what can be done about it? An extensive summary of previous research as well as two studies by the authors, Rosette, Mueller and Lebel, in the December Leadership Quarterly, confirm the issue, explain the roots of the paradox and point to some resolution...

How High Is Your Listening Quotient?

Listening is one of those behaviors that most people take for granted. Until, that is, they miss something very important that impacts their job and career. So when interviewing for a developmental client, I inevitably ask about my client's listening skills. Nearly always the first response is that the client is a "good listener." Then I start chunking the listening competency, ultimately revealing the client's listening failures.

The chunks start with a question about "parroting," then to paraphrase, summary, and on to implication questions including the client's competency and effective use of questions surrounding the messages from senders. Smart interviewees understand that...

No, You Can't Become a Better Listener by Listening Harder

Listening is far more difficult, more fatiguing and often more frustrating than talking. But no, you can't become a better listener by listening harder. And furthermore, even the best listeners have to bite their tongues to stop from reacting, interrupting or verbally identifying with the person talking. But there are a few simple ways to make certain your listening is truly effective.

Effective listeners listen for different levels of meaning. 
The linguistic 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...

The Four Competencies of Leadership

It’s wonderful—perhaps because it’s so rare—to reread something that you started using thirty years ago and discover that it’s still highly relevant. Desktops were just beginning to show up and technology organizations were starting to use organizational networks. Organizations began to flatten and the need for leading started to surface. The talk was all about leading, not managing.

The Pillsbury CIO had a lot of money but little leadership talent on his team. So he tracked me down and asked me to work with a number of his new managers. I had done some coaching in R&D--as an experiment--and on a fluke, he brought me in.

I’d first encountered leadership material in grad school in the 1960s. I understood the distinction between managing and leading and could observe the differences. I was also quite certain leadership could be learned—a minority position at the time...

Effective Listening Is Not About Trying Harder

Gaining responsibilities in organizations is about getting things done through other people. That means influencing people. But few understand that one important key to that success is listening: it's the primary means for understanding another's attitudes, priorities and commitments.

A case in point that I referred to in a previous blog is Teresa Taylor, COO of Quest.  Taylor admitted that very often, rather than listen, she was formulating ideas in her head.  Her task, she soon realized, was to listen not formulate ideas. But that, she said, was not as simple as she once thought. The traditional ways of learning to listen were just not working for her.

So how do you go about becoming a better listener?  Most people decide to "try harder" at listening.  But "trying harder" will bring little positive results...

Mind Reading 101

Or. . . How to succeed in the prediction game.

The other evening after listening to a neighbor talk about her family I asked whether she was "rules oriented." I was certain she was, but I wanted to double-check my prediction. "Of course," she said. That's the best way to raise kids. Aren't you?" Amused by her shock at my negative answer, I was more intrigued by the fact that in spite of a number of personally-revealing conversations, she was clueless regarding my orientation.

Her lack of mind reading tools resulted in prediction failure.

As a business person, you can’t afford that kind of prediction failure. Your ability to predict others’ thinking and behavior is not only necessary for working with your boss, peers, subordinates, clients and teams, it’s also necessary for overall career success.

Mind reading tools grow out of two disciplines: the rhetorical competency of "close reading" and the communication competency of “barrier resolution.” Close reading tools are mind-reading competencies that enable you to go beyond the words and evidence that's presented. Barrier-resolution tools are competencies related to the recent stuff in the “ladder of inference.”   

Ultimately, mind reading is built on the well-accepted fact that ways of thinking tend to be systematic. People tend to hold well-connected kinds of values and convictions in their thinking...