Listening Helping Learning

Process Consulting is a specific approach to walking alongside Clients. Whether one works inside a specific company to manage complex change, or works with a variety of companies and their leaders to accomplish the same, the twelve core competencies of Process Consulting are needed. In this brief article, Mark L. Vincent explores listening, helping, and learning, the categories under which the competencies fall.

LISTENING

Dacia Coffey prefaces her recent book?Corporate Caffeine ?with these words:

Communication deterioration is a human condition?(p. xiii)

The remedy she suggests?

Putting servant leadership at the heart of your communication?(p. xix).

Being a servant leader who communicates well begins with the listening side of communication. Or, as described in the book?Nonviolent Communication ,?by?receiving empathically.?This is not listening for a hook by which to begin speaking. Neither is it passive, waiting until someone finishes speaking. Real and active listening grows from bringing love to a conversation, an unconditional positive regard for the people across from you.

This work to serve communication by making your listening the center, rather than your message, puts you in partnership with others rather than competing with them for airtime. Especially in an organization, the conversation, this working session to understand, develop and share insight, requires safety -- enough safety to get past?amygdala hijackings ?to consider the benefits of a change a working group will implement together. This safety is possible because someone is serving the conversation through listening. Once someone starts listening this way, it becomes far more feasible for others to join in that listening.

As listening becomes something done jointly, the language of our communication shifts from statements to additional questions--from?Let me tell you something,?or?I just wanna say?to,?Do I have this right??and?Have I missed anything??and?Is there anything else?

With this shift, we begin actively and comprehensively listening together. Now we can become sensitive to conceptual insight and the context in which our problem or opportunity is showing up. We can begin listening for the architectural elements of a process we will engage in and then move into that process better able to recognize adaptive moves we will need to make. We can do all this because we lean in to listen rather than lasso the conversation away from someone else.

Servant leadership brought to communication requires such intentionality that a person must do their personal work--listening to themselves--outside of conversations not to be personally distracted or derailed within them. Being honest about this, I admit that even in writing this blog post, I had to stop and get in touch with the irritations of the day -- an e-mail response to me I did not like, ironically, because I did not feel listened to, a personal concern where I might not like the answer when I ask an essential question of a friend, a deadline I need to meet yet today, as well as the next item on my agenda once I complete this. All these crowd in and start me rushing, writing sentences distractedly, being elsewhere than this moment I'm in. I breathe deeply and call my intention and attention back to capturing thoughts and begin again.?

Listening in this way, I'm not just listening to a person or a thing. I'm not just listening to my being or thoughts on a subject. And, I'm not just listening to the audience I hope will read this, trying to adjust my words to gain their interest. I am being present and growing my awareness of a moment in which we all might share. I'm not just pointing to or describing the subject of listening with words. I am in its presence, taking it in--hopefully in such a way that you and others join me--and our understanding grows together.

• We can't do this type of listening when we are talking.
• We can't do this type of listening when we look like we are listening but only are waiting our turn to speak.
• We can't do this type of listening if we are thinking about listening.

We can begin listening in this way in our intention to serve good communication by bringing our whole and highest self to the problems and opportunities we join with others.

Listening--the kind of listening that ripples out to others, until a whole team is engaged in thoughtful collaboration--is an art form. We need more of these artists at the helm.

Helping

What is your definition of the word help??

For some - especially if they have been in social work or relief and development - it might be a troubling word, sounding colonialist and superior, as in?I am here to help you.?This can be experienced as disempowering and arrogant, especially if a need for help is assumed and was not requested.

For others it is a plea:?Help me!?It is an expression of helplessness. While some might make this plea in order to manipulate the sympathy of others, it more often comes after experiencing harm, incapability, and even desperation. Needing to ask for help can be kin to humiliation.

For helping professions such as law or medicine, help is the work, the expertise, the offering of service that could not be gained otherwise.?Here is how I can help.?The question is whether it is actually help, as in aid,?or a transaction because the "help" is usually priced as a service.

There are other subtle nuances around the word help, and it is good for both the Helper and Helpee to take the time to enter the experiences of each other to better understand what is meant.?

For those of us committed to?Process Consulting , help is something done in a partnership, especially where?adaptive moves ?are concerned. What will actually be done in the end is not known. The Client has work to do in figuring out how to approach an opportunity or challenge. The Process Consultant is experienced in walking alongside the Client in designing and facilitating a process to figure it out. Working together, help is rendered in addressing the opportunity or challenge.

Using?Ed Schein's definition :?“Helping is a common yet complex process. It is an attitude, a set of behaviors, a skill, and an essential component of social life. It is the core of what we think of as teamwork and is an essential ingredient of organizational effectiveness. It is one of the most important things that leaders do and it is at the heart of change processes."

The Client and the Process Consultant are joint investors in the helping process and co-creators of any solution.?

And yet, let's not too quickly gloss over the varied conceptions of what help is, and assume that just because we know a definition of help where Process Consulting is concerned, that everyone in the room will assume the same definition.?Whether personally or organizationally, we don't readily ask for help - not from each other or from outside assistance - unless we feel safe and have learned to trust the players.?For someone's Process Consulting practice, creating and holding safe spaces where help is performed is critical to effective Client relationships and outcomes.

So how can we recognize that the possibility of jointly rendering help is a possibility that can become a reality??The Core Competencies of Process Consulting give us some guidance.

Helping is:

• Client-centered -- Help centers on Client-defined objectives and according to the Client's definition of done.
• Client-owned and inspired -- The Client is doing the work, and wants to.
• Client-specific - Listening alongside the Client provides clarity about the unique context of the Client. Client-defined objectives are tailored to that context rather than assuming one solution works everywhere.
• Client success -- The Process Consultant and Client are able to say they did what the Client set out to do.

Helping in this way brings a Client and Process Consultant together at a point of mutual vulnerability. It is okay for us not to know what needs to be done exactly! At this intersection of mutual vulnerability, the helping relationship becomes a shoulder-to-shoulder effort of figuring out an approach to a challenge or opportunity. And it is at this intersection that discoveries are made and new to the world solutions are born because we set aside our fears of incompetence and took up the courage to learn.

Learning

Learning and knowing are overlapping postures. Overlapping, rather than either separate or identical. We can't know unless we learn. We can't learn without at least some awareness that we do not know.?

But here is the difference: learning implies an ongoing desire to know while knowing does not necessarily mean a continuing desire to learn.

If someone's basic posture is knowing, they interact with the world through their desire to hoard, teach, sell, or perhaps keep their knowledge a secret. A person becomes too busy talking or feeling smug to stop, look, listen, and learn.

If the basic posture is learning, however, a person interacts with the world through their desire to listen, study, reflect, purchase, gather, and synthesize. They are moving more deliberately and openly and cannot help but learn.

Can you feel this difference?

For many of us in Process Consulting, our journey of moving into the world and trying to influence it based on our expertise gave way to this conscious development of a deliberate, restrained, and non-anxious presence. We hold space with a Client while we listen to a problem or opportunity together. We determine what help looks like and co-design a process to address it. We then have the opportunity to learn together.?

The knowing approach can be a way to convey technical, fixed knowledge, yet it cannot adequately address adaptive changes because it resists ongoing discovery. It's too busy talking to listen and observe. Taking the learning approach, however, people notice things they would otherwise miss. They ask,?What do we have here??Observing unexpected things is where differentiations come from that become new to the world products, innovative service offerings, and on rare occasions, a solution that makes an enormous problem disappear. We don't get to the new by knowing but through our openness to learn.?

The simplest expression of the twelve core competencies of Process Consulting is via the three categories of listening, helping, and learning. They are often identified in this order because of how they build into each other, just like nesting dolls do. Deep listening invites the Client to join in and begin listening to itself. The Process Consultant and the Client are now joined together in rendering and carrying out what help looks like. Along the way, everyone learns. It is a sticky learning that can be offered to those who come after us, rather than proprietary learning, where we prevent others from knowing unless it can be sold because we think this knowledge belongs to us.?

For this once, however, let's reverse the order. A partnership of learning with the intention of the world's flourishing can only happen because there is a communal effort to help?figure it out .

And the trust needed to figure it out jointly is possible because of the trusted relationships that grow from the time invested in listening to one another.

Here is yet one more way to consider these categories of competencies:

• Learning?builds a common future while knowing only celebrates the individual's past.
• Helping?brings widespread communal accomplishment while performing seeks the momentary spotlight.?
• Listening?invites many voices while telling seeks many ears.

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You can read more about the core competencies of process consulting in the recently released book.

About the author: Mark L. Vincent is a founder and course facilitator here at the Society for Process Consulting. He recently authored the book?Listening Helping Learning: Core Competencies of Process Consulting, ?which contains a wide variety of case studies from some of the Society's members.