Organizational Leadership - Module Two

Listen Like A Leader Response:

I found a website for the ‘International Listening Association’ which purports to be an organization dedicated to teaching better listening and communication skills to business, medical, and other sectors. The site provides this list of poor listening habits:

• Calling the subject uninteresting

• Criticizing the speaker &/or delivery

• Getting over-stimulated

• Listening only for facts (bottom line)

• Not taking notes or outlining everything

• Faking attention

• Tolerating or creating distractions

• Tuning out difficult material

• Letting emotional words block the message

• Wasting the time difference between speed of speech and speed of thought”

I asked my husband to read the list and comment on my ‘status’ for the points mentioned. His response was quite surprising – he said: “But that’s not fair. You’re a teacher.” (I should mention here that although he now works as a copyeditor he was originally trained as a music teacher himself.)

I was very surprised and asked why that made the activity unfair. He responded that, as teachers, we are trained specifically to avoid all of these habits not only by our formal teacher training but also by our daily interactions with students. If we fake our attention to a student’s heartfelt upset one day, we can expect to receive little in the future in the way of trust or confidence from that same child. Similarly, teachers as a group are more or less hard-wired to prevent and end distractions and are experts at absorbing over-stimulating environments while still functioning normally. He has a point!

I did manage to press him to pick something for me to improve and he eventually suggested that I have a habit of ‘listening only for the bottom line’ when I am in a hurry which sometimes means that I lose sight of the smaller details. An example: he was recently telling me about a phone conversation with his mum in which they discussed when his parents would be coming to stay with us after the upcoming birth of our first child. In my head, I was fretting that I wouldn’t have time to properly clean and ready the room for them so I interrupted his tangent about what our nephew was up to to demand details about the visit. I wanted the bottom line that affected me first, and the details that didn’t affect me afterward – probably to allow my mind to work out details while I continued to half-listen to information that didn’t directly require any action. Not a good habit at all!

I want to try to address this bad habit by being consciously more present in conversations, particularly when I start to feel antsy about tangent-taking ones! I want to be able to identify when that sense of impatience begins so I can bring my attention back to the bigger picture (accepting the details while waiting for the punch line).

Source:

Nichols, R. G. and L. A. Stevens (1957). Are you listening? New York, McGraw-Hill.