How Are We Listening?
A few years ago, a colleague and I were invited to be guest lecturers at a graduate level course in communications being taught at a San Francisco University. We wanted to do something fun with the students so, when we arrived, we asked them to form two teams and we gave everyone markers and sticky notes. We then instructed everyone that they had three minutes to brainstorm in their groups and to write down every word and/or short phrase they could come up with that pertained to communication.
The results were impressive. Each team generated roughly the same number of words and phrases. There was a lot of overlap of course, and we ended up with about 60 distinct words and phrases dealing with communication. High on the list from this class were things like:?
And numerous other tech-centric approaches…
However, there was one word that did not appear anywhere on either team’s list. When we pointed out the missing word, virtually everyone in the room, including the professor, who had been on one of the teams, registered surprise, shock, or chagrin.
Care to take a guess as to the missing word??No doubt, you guessed that it was “listening.”
This is not all that surprising when you think about it. There are two main drivers that cause us to focus on the outgoing, versus incoming, side of communication: time and technology. Today’s world moves fast. In the financial sector, thanks to the speed of supercomputer-controlled financial exchanges, fortunes are made and lost each day in a matter of milliseconds. The business world is organized around the idea that time equals money, so a savings in former must equate to an increase in the latter. When it comes to talking, we’re told we need to make our point and make it quick. Focus like a laser and move at the speed of commerce. We laud the quick thinking among us while discounting those who are slower to respond. Complex news stories get reduced to sound bites and we’re urged to compress our most precious ideas into elevator pitches – and be honest, when is the last time you ever tried to sell anything on an elevator?
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In the online world, time pressure is even more pronounced. The average amount of time to grab someone’s attention when they are visiting a website has fallen from 20 seconds to something a tad shy of seven seconds. If we don’t arrest a visitor’s attention immediately, they’ll be off to some other site before we know it. This has been compounded by the rise of the phenomenon known as “click bait” which is carefully designed to pry your attention away from what you probably set out to look for when you first landed on that website. “Oh look! Shiny!”
Today’s communication technologies enable us to talk with virtually anyone, anywhere, anytime. However, the technology that allows for such connections does little to ensure that those with whom we connect find satisfaction, meaning, or fulfillment, or that our communication produces quality results and high use value for all concerned.
Sherry Turkle is an M.I.T. professor and the author of numerous books on how technology is shaping human thinking and interaction. In a 2012 New York Times post she writes of how once people put in their earbuds; they seal themselves off from the world:?
“Human relationships are rich; they’re messy and demanding. We have learned the habit of cleaning them up with technology. And the move from conversation to connection is part of this. But it’s a process in which we shortchange ourselves… We are tempted to think our little ‘sips’ of online connection will add up to a big gulp of real conversation. But they don’t. Email, Twitter, Facebook, all of these have their places – in politics, commerce, romance, and friendship. But no matter how valuable, they do not substitute for authentic conversation… Connecting in sips may be good for gathering discrete bits of information… but connecting in sips doesn’t work as well when it comes to understanding and knowing one another. In conversation we tend to one another. (The word itself is kinetic, it’s derived from words that mean to move, together.) In conversation, we are called up to see things from another’s point of view.”
Most teams are under significant pressure to perform at high levels and produce quality results. If they are only connecting via little sips instead of rich robust conversations, chances are good that the results they produce will not live up to their expectations. Additionally, most teams operate under time tight timelines as well which, can lead people to attempt to multitask, another major impediment to producing quality results.
When you listen, what do you listen for?
It seems timely for us to make listening a core competency for both business and personal relationships.?
Excellent comment. And it recall me a question: why is there such a great similarity between a human ear and a question mark?
Sr. IT Finance Manager | Sr. PMO Manager | Sr. Technical Project Manager
2 年Terribly bad and getting worse