REMEMBER when we as little kids we would listen to something that we liked; any unpleasant statement and we would throw a tantrum until such time that the statement was modified to our liking. Well, we all grew up to be bad listeners!
In context of the workplace, listening holds a paramount importance. Instructions are passed on with an expectation that it will be complied with bringing the desired results. However, more often than not, things go wrong largely because of defective listening. It is therefore imperative for an organization to ensure that the people who work there realize the importance of effective listening and embark upon training programmes that would help its workforce to work to improve their listening skills.
Poor listeners create confusion, misunderstanding, resentment and anger, whereas good listeners help in team building, respect, minimizing misunderstandings, and most importantly the job gets done right the first time, thus resulting in increased productivity.
Becoming a better listener requires determination to make the effort to understand the various components of listening and then conducting a self-audit in order to identify the weak links. The listening process has four major components: Sensing, Filtering, Understanding and Remembering.
SENSING: Nature has given us this great ability to receive stimuli through five senses: seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting. However, human brain is capable of rejecting any stimuli received through these senses.
In context of listening, a human brain can ignore the tick-tock of the clock while reading. The ticking sound of the clock has enough intensity to reach a human ear but it is blocked by the second major element of listening process, filtering
FILTERING: A human ear is capable of receiving thousands of stimuli at any given moment. For instance: the stereo in the car, honking of the passing cars, people chatting in the car, the engine’s hum, the noise on the street, and so on and so forth.
However, human mind has learnt to select the stimuli that are important to one person and ignore the others. Some may choose to listen to the stereo and what is being said in the car and ignore the rest, while others will be more concerned about the honking by other cars.
The same filtration could occur while a person is listening to another. A person may choose to filter out important pieces of information.
UNDERSTANDING: The third component is understanding, which can be defined as comprehending and appraising what comes in through the five senses. It is the most important component of listening process because a person can sense and attend a message but if he or she is incapable of attributing meanings intended by the speaker, the process fails.
Many of us reading these lines have experienced this situation where we passed on an instruction and asked, “Do you understand?” only to find out later that it was done wrong. I think we all have. The listener in these cases where instructions were not followed failed to attribute the intended meanings of the speaker.
REMEMBERING: For most people, remembering is the most difficult part of listening. Remembering is like filtering, you remember what you choose to remember. For instance, you would come across a number of people in your life, but then you find yourself in a situation where you know that you have met a person but cannot remember his or her name. It is simply because remembering is selective. The brain is programmed to erase out “spammed or corrupt” files from your memory.
The same principle applies in listening; your brain will only retain the segments of a message that are acceptable to you and the rest would end up in the trash bin.
Having highlighted the major components of listening let us now examine the problems associated with each individual component.
PROBLEMS IN SENSING:
* Physical impairment
* External noise
For argument’s sake let us assume that we are talking about people with no physical impairment that leaves us with noise only. Any unwanted noise: a telephone ring, chatter of the people around, even the hum of the air-conditioner in the hall can impair a person’s ability to sense an incoming message.
PROBLEMS WITH FILTERING: Problems associated with filtering or attending are far greater in number that of sensing. Five aspects of attention inhibit listening:
* Selective Attending: Accepting the stimuli we select to receive
* Poor Attending Habits: These may include fake attention or pretending to listen yet thinking about something else.
Avoiding difficult listening or difficult material that is presented and is not accepted.
The listener would miss out on important cues while registering only the facts.
* Listeners Attitude and Needs That Interfere: Listener’s perception vis-a-vis their superiors, co-workers and subordinates determine their attending or filtering of a message. For instance, a subordinate who considers his superior inadequate will not listen to him or her carefully, just a like an employee who has been forced to attend a seminar by his or her company.
A manager who considers it to be inappropriate to listen to his workers would pay little attention to what is being said to him or her. A worker, in disagreement with other’s implementation method, is less likely to hear what his or her colleague has to offer.
The other two factors that can diminish a person’s filtration process are: low intensity of the message and the message being too long.
PROBLEMS WITH UNDERSTANDING:
* Different field of experience: An engineer would have a different meaning ascribed to the word ‘delivery’ compared to a purchase manager. Delivery for an engineer would mean delivery at site, whereas for the purchasing manager it would mean goods in transit.
* Inability to empathize: As illustrated in the example above people with varying experience have varying values. It is the inability of a person, purchasing manager in the example above, to relate his value system to that of the engineering manager and vice-versa.
* Poor use of feedback: When an instruction is passed on, each one of us assumes that the other person has understood the instruction and we never bother to ask if the recipient is comfortable with the instructions just passed on to him.
PROBLEMS WITH REMEMBERING: A study suggests that you will forget 80 per cent of what you have listened in the past twenty-four hours. Social scientists have come up with various do’s and don’t about effective listening, but the bottom line is that you will become a better listener if you were to:
* Stop what you are doing. When someone walks up to you to say something, be ready to receive and if you are not ready then ask the person to come some other time.
* Watch for non-verbal communication. Such as tone, animation, facial expressions, etc.
* Ask short clarifying questions. Alright, what would you have done, what can be done; why is it so difficult to do it this way, etc.
* You must encourage the person to speak his or her mind
* Focus on solutions. Stay focused, ignore the personality and instead focus on solution.
* Don’t get into power struggle. Don’t pull rank on the other person.
* Don’t argue. Listen first and argue later
Many organizations include listening training as part of their effort to improve communication.
REMEMBER when we as little kids we would listen to something that we liked; any unpleasant statement and we would throw a tantrum until such time that the statement was modified to our liking. Well, we all grew up to be bad listeners!
