On Listening

One of the highlights of the last month for me was to attend a series of training sessions organised by CMP Solutions around HR Investigations. However, much experience you think you have there is always more to learn, and not a little to unlearn. Thanks to all those involved, it was a very helpful experience and useful refresher.

One of the many things stressed by the course was the importance of listening. There was, of course, the stress placed on critical listening on the part of the investigator. Listening to all those involved in the case, from the needs of the organisation commissioning the investigation, through to each of those being interviewed. The course also stressed the importance of listening to the advice of colleagues where appropriate. However, perhaps more surprising was the emphasis on the fact that a break down in listening is so often the cause of conflict and discord within the organisation.

I am currently writing a book on myth, or rather on the role of the story in religion. To do this, I am reading backwards, looking at those who have written about and theorised about myth in the past. I have gone back beyond the usual suspects in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century (Frazer, Malinowski, Freud, Campbell etc.) to the philosophical writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. One thing that this has taught me is the obvious lesson that there is nothing new under the sun and that the ideas on myth are recycled in each generation with slightly different foci. However, what fascinated me more was the way in which many of these early nineteenth century philosophical texts are written as lectures. One lecturer in particular, a German philosopher, Schelling, complains about other scholars, who have attended his lectures, passing his ideas off as their own in their own lectures in another part of Germany.

What struck me, which had not occurred to me before, was that scholarship at this time was based primarily on listening to lectures and reflecting on them before commenting on them in your own lectures. Writing appears to have been something of a by product of this activity when the lectures have been honed through repeated tellings with discussion and criticism, often some years after the lectures have originally been given. This is a process that is known from the academic traditions of India and China.

We are all aware of the classic Oxbridge tutorial (I have no idea whether it still exists) in which the students read their essays to the tutor and the tutor critiques the ideas on the basis of what he has heard. I have also been attending academic conferences once again, for the first time since leaving Swansea. I am even giving a paper at the beginning of September. These conferences traditionally relied on an audience listening to a half hour, or even hour-long, lecture. These days the length is often twenty minutes, and everything is accompanied by PowerPoint. This certainly makes the papers easier to follow and aid concentration, especially at the end of a long day, but does it really encourage sustained and critical listening?

One of the buzz words of social media and mental health today is that ‘it is good to talk’. I couldn’t agree more, but for someone to talk, the rest of us need to listen. It is good to listen. However, in a social media saturated world, we have perhaps forgotten how to listen, especially over time and in a critical, concerned and helpful way.

HR Investigation is all about listening. There is the need to hear what each party is saying. Being heard is one thing that many of those who bring grievances rarely experience, and being heard may, in itself, be enough. However, it is also important to listen to those who are accused, whether in a grievance or a disciplinary. As investigators we must never assume that we know what we are going to hear.

Surprise is always something I encourage my students of ethnography to be aware of and to experience. The same is true of the investigator. We must listen, often beyond the words that are being spoken to us, and we must probe, in an attempt to understand. Sometimes it is important to listen over considerable length of time. We must always give people, complainant or respondent, the time to say what they need to say, but, once again, as with ethnography, recognise that time brings out greater understanding and awareness.

Listening, however, is not only the bedrock of investigation. It also needs to be cultivated within an organisation that wants to reduce the risk of grievance or disciplinary cases. So many cases come from an inability, or refusal, to listen, from people making assumptions, whether in terms of stereotyping or about what it is that they expect to hear. Cultivating a culture of critical listening, as I noted in my last newsletter, is essential for all organisations. It may not solve all the problems, but it will make for a much more happy and stable community.