Listening In Business: Vision, Craft and Communication
Listening is the premiere communication vehicle in any
organization.
Yet, it's dying a slow death on the vine in our modern business
culture. Think of it. The information age has blessed us with
the ability to impact an organization's direction in a
heartbeat. But this same blessing of technology can be a true
curse. Blackberries...text messages...IM's and emails often
flood a system with chatter making organizational listening
fairly impossible thanks to the technology of distraction.
How can today's leaders fight the tide?
Never lose sight of your audience...even if he is 5,000 miles
away on the end of a teleconference! Listening is about people.
Boettinger(1975) created a management lens that may help leaders
simplyfy their own attempts to make listening a valued by people
in the organization again. His lens featured three views:
Vision, Craft and Communication.
Vision and Listening
Know what you want in your organization. What will it look like
when people begin to consciously choose to work on listening?
Spent time seeing the difference in meetings you lead. How will
you raise the awareness of the skill? Who can help you?
These are questions that can shape a vision for listening in the
organization, a real vision,and not just lip service. Spend time
creating a listening time line. It might be your own personal
time line. Then reflect on what the organizational timeline for
listening has been. A leader that does a simple audit which
includes talking to the rank and file about listening in their
own lives and in their business day is building the begining of
a vision that may at first be part of the oral culture. Shaping
the vision into a written tenet shows all that listening is not
taken for granted, and it is certainly held in high regard
through thoughts and action!
Crafting Listening
Now that there is awareness, begin the process of becoming
resilient listeners. Address skills of pausing and paraphrasing
in your own listening life. Be aware of how your emotions set
the course for your listening in meetings, and demonstrate this
for your colleagues. When fsced with conflict or a difficult
conversation in a meeting, learn to question rather then react.
Saying in an approachable voice, "So, tell me more about your
impression of my thinking...", can open the door to listening
when you seem to be at a stand-off in a meeting. Pause before
you respond and paraphase even the most biting comment, and
finally, try to draw your colleagues into thinking bigger, even
without tension by asking open-ended questions like..." "What
hunches do you have about the response we have received from our
clients to date?"
Communicate Listening Power
Elevate the cause of listening in as many ways as possible.
Choose anvenues and forums for the language of listening to be
advanced. The three P's of Listening: Pause, Paraphrase and
Probe can become banners for e-zines and newsletters. In one to
one meetings, set the intention to listen as a goal between the
two parties, direct managers to set this as a goal for review,
but allow training to weave the culture of listening together
before evaluating listening performance.
Just remember...research says that the teleconference you are
usually involved in is a garden of multitasking: people check
emails, sort messages, or write a memo as they "listen". So how
can listening flourish when the vines of technology wrap
themselves around our conversation to the point of distraction?
The savvy leader becomes a conscious gardener who knows the
right balance of information and exchange, and who can, with
careful pruning. polish up the garden of communication through
purposeful listening in an organization.