Archive for 2010
More on Listening Blocks: Judging
When I think of the many denotations and connotations of the word, Judge, I see how complex it is.
For example, my brother is a Federal Magistrate, a judge, and he makes a lot of effort to refrain from being judgmental. He listens to the law in the case and does not let personal judgment color his opinions. Yet, his job is to judge.
He, like most of us, must use judgment in life. I watch my young grandchildren grapple with its development—“If I hit my sibling and don’t get caught, then is it OK? If I eat nothing but what I like, then will I grow to be big and strong?” No parent or teacher can provide all the answers. No legislation can govern morals. Individuals, courts, and nations must live by sound judgment.
But that’s a far cry from being judgmental. I’m a 100% supporter of my tender grandkids, even though I do not always support their behavior. I do judge their behavior by standards that I set, but I do not judge their worthiness according to those standards.
So it is with listening. In my opinion, it is not possible to be an open-listener and judgmental at the same time. Being judgmental puts a negative label on the speaker or information, which blocks communication.
Sadly, the world is rife with examples from psychology to experience to knowledge to prejudice. What tends to happen is the supposed-listener, instead of taking in information, has a knee-jerk reaction and shuts down, leaving behind most of what was said.
How do we deal with such a pernicious and powerful block? Foremost is to be strong and open enough to recognize your judgment. Let’s look at this scenario: I’m invited to a lecture on a subject I know well. Even before the speaker has ascended the podium, I look at the handouts and say to myself, “This is old research. I’ve known about these citations for several years.” I’ve judged the presentation before it even began. What might I have missed? Maybe this handout was to show the baseline research that the speaker used to begin work on the subject matter.
Another judgment at the same event: The speaker has an accent. A judgmental person could think, “How can someone give an address when s/he doesn’t even speak properly?” Or the equipment fails. A judgmental person could think, “How good will the presentation be if the equipment isn’t even working? Poor preparation.” Or the presenter is a movie star, rolls in in a wheel chair, looks like your least-admired professor, is wearing flamboyant clothing, and on and on. It doesn’t take much for a judgmental person to be triggered.
For that person to stop being judgmental s/he must ask about the purpose of the interaction, what s/he gets out of being judgmental, or what s/he might miss by not being open.
In the above scenario, the attendee who dismisses the handout as old research might have a need to be seen as the expert; therefore, making it impossible to learn from someone else. Or as long-ago as it might be, the presenter could look like a disliked professor thus triggering the listener to shut down. The listener has the power to look judgment in the eye and decide to loosen its grip.
The point of judging as a listener is to discover when it serves you and when it’s a hindrance. If it’s a hindrance, recognize you’re judging, listen for what is being said (as factually as possible), and ask yourself what it is you can learn.
Field Notes
In the past few days I’ve been with various people who’ve taken Hear! Hear? Your Listening Portfolioâ and attended The Fluent Listener workshop. I tend not to ask people in public settings if they’re using the information gleaned from the instrument or workshop because I don’t want to put them on the spot, especially in front of others.
So, when unsolicited, they made a beeline for me to say:
- You’ve ruined my life, now I can’t stop trying to figure out the listening habits of everyone I talk with.
- I’ve definitely changed from listening as a pure problem-solver to bringing in other styles.
- Being more conscious of all the habits is helping me interact with people who listen differently from me.
- It didn’t take me much time to figure out my team isn’t listening on all burners.
- It’s really hard work to stay “Here” when my mind wants to go “There.”
Once I got beyond being thrilled to get those comments, I began to wonder why they told me and what the comments had in common.
Sure, there’s the element of wanting me to know the assessment and workshop sunk in and they were using the information; but that was not all. When I probed a bit it was once again apparent that listening is one of the most vital attributes a person can display, yet not well understand.
The bottom line is that the assessment and workshop armed people with the capacity to be truly engaged with others–the greatest respect we can offer to another.
Inattention Barrier: Competing
When the listener is quick to disagree with the person talking, that speaker never feels heard. Instead, he has a sense that the listener would rather argue than learn.
That type of behavior is commonly seen in two-year olds and teens. While annoying, it is developmentally appropriate. Both of those ages are trying to assert and separate themselves from parents and want to be able to say, “I want control of my own life and my opinions matter.”
However, in an interchange between two adults, verbal competition is destructive as we can witness in the following scenario:
Speaker: When interviewing a candidate I always take body language into account.
Competing Listener: Body language is not a science. It falls under pop-psychology and cannot be used to make hiring decisions.
That Competing Listener, wanting to be heard more than he wants to listen, so he searches for anything to disagree with as soon as the interaction begins. No sooner does the speaker make the first point than the Competing Listener begins to spar. The Competing Listener uses strong opinions (couched in knowledge) to disregard anything put forth by the speaker.
What’s the point? This Barrier represents someone who wants control and attention. By competing, the speaker’s voice is silenced.
How to deal with Competing? It’s so challenging to be accepting of these people because they are tiresome and make it unpleasant to try to interact. They make me think of when I had the privilege of working with Monty Roberts, the original horse-whisperer. He’d encourage a Competing horse to run and run until it tired. There seemed to be magical moment when the horse turned to look at Monty to say, “I’m tired and this game isn’t fun anymore. I’ll see if life will be any better for me if I collaborate.”
As soon as the horse stopped competing for individual control, it became possible to learn how to work together. I’d say it’s the same way for Competing Listeners: let them muster all their assertions until they too tire of being a lone combatant, and then begin dialogue.
Sometimes, if you’re the Competing Listener you can acknowledge one point that you agree with. The speaker will definitely feel heard and you will soften what it is you listen for—“What I agree with,” or “The point you made about xyz is supported by some research I’ve conducted” or “You put a new twist on so-and-so and I appreciate that.”
Often the best way to stop coming across as a combatant is to say, “I’ll be playing the devil’s advocate in this interaction. Please don’t take my questions as an affront. I do it to further my learning and for us to do some shared thinking.”
Inattention Barrier: Rehearsing
What causes people to stop paying attention when listening? By now, if you’ve been reading my posts, you’re quite familiar with the idea that disconnects occur among listening habits. For example, an Inner-Personal listener might be so involved with listening for information that pertains to her, that she’d ignore details that would grab a Problem-Solving listener. So, these two listeners, in the same interaction, would probably be inattentive to one another—as is commonly said, on different wave lengths.
Beyond that, there are other factors that contribute to inattention. Over the next few posts, I’ll discuss these barriers. As a community, we might help out one another and offer some ways to overcome them.
Barrier: Rehearsing.
Rehearsing is an internal form of interrupting. The listener starts out by listening, believes he’s grasped enough, and then begins to craft an answer. He’ll form the words in his head and continue to practice them until it’s his turn to speak out loud.
Because our brains are not equipped to both listen and speak (internally or externally), simultaneously, guess what happens? Listening stops, rehearsing starts and usurps all our mental capacity.
As a mini-experiment, try listening while thinking of the names of your paternal relatives in chronological order. Or calculate your medical costs for the year, or recite a poem you knew as a kid, or tell yourself your favorite joke. Doesn’t matter—you won’t be able to do either well. To test the outcomes of the experiment, tell the speaker to ask you three questions about what she was saying to determine what you retained. Then say out loud what you were rehearsing in your head. The question before us is: When you are rehearsing how attentive can you be to the speaker?
Tell us here how your experiment went and what you learned.
Quick Tool to Determine What Grabs Attention
I recently wrote a response on Linked In that received a lot of positive feedback, so I wanted to share the idea with you, as well as expand upon it a bit.
I forget what the original subject was, but I wrote about a tool that is a fun and enlightening way to demonstrate what draws people’s attention. If we can better understand our own interests, we can appreciate the interests of others—some people will attend to the exact same subjects and visuals as we, while others will opt for ones we’d never be drawn to.
The tool:
- Provide each person with a magazine such as Time or Newsweek—one that has a broad spectrum of topics and articles
- Instruct individuals to select the one article that is of greatest interest to them
- Put people in like-article groups
- In their groups, ask people to discuss the appeal of the article to them
- Debrief to make the point that people attend to different things and we build preferences around what appeals to us, often without knowing we even do that
Inevitably, the discussion that ensues is rich. And there are many ways to go with it. These days I steer the conversation to the ephemeral nature of attention. I ask people how they went about selecting their article.
Some people naturally gravitate to one section of the magazine while others flip around until I call time. Some people can’t choose unless I provide a context, e.g. choose an article that will help you make plans for the weekend, or add to your body of academic knowledge of a subject you enjoy. Some people choose by article length, layout, photos, or denseness of writing.
I use their comments to cement the learning about how lifelong habits manifest themselves in what we give our attention to in all aspects of our lives. Then when we examine results of Hear! Hear? Your Listening Portfolioâ, the participants are already primed to look at what they listen for and what they might ignore.
I’ve thought about giving everyone about $500 of play money and ask them to select the appropriate amount for each bucket marked:
Listening Profit, Listening Loss.
Listening Profit is: value of what I learn when I listen
Listening Loss: value of what is left on the table when I don’t listen
But I don’t think I’ve got the right questions. I’d like some suggestions for a better way to use those two buckets. Help???
The 4 Habits of Listening for Tech Entrepreneurs
By Sylvie Leotin (Atelier Leotin) and Marian Thier
Entrepreneurs the world over would be blessed with a sixth sense to understand and anticipate customer needs before bringing products to market. Can it be cultivated? This post will explore how entrepreneurs can broaden their listening skills to improve their understanding.
Contrary to common belief, listening is not a bimodal activity. Research has shown that there are 4 modes of listening. Fluent listeners masterly tap into those 4 modes to best suit any situation.
1) Inner-personal listening
Inner-Personal listeners seek meaning for themselves. In conversations Inner-Personal listeners select information that relates to what they know and think about. Engineers typically excel at this mode of listening. They get deeply involved in technology, and keep their focus on information that pertains to their line of work. Inner-Personal listeners also have a tendency to listen and quickly continue the conversation inside their heads. They don’t feel the need to verbalize what is going on inside their heads — thus losing the benefit of debating their thoughts with others. He or she might say: “I am listening for the information I need to build my product”, and unconsciously filter out the rest.
Pros: Inner-personal listeners can develop a deep understanding of a subject matter by keeping razor-focused on what they do.
Cons: An entrepreneur using this mode of listening, in exclusion of others, could fail to learn pertinent information that does not fit into his pre-determined point-of-view, or miss vital insights on customer and market dynamics.
Example: In this blog article “Learning Lessons from13 Failed Software Products,” many founders mention building products and finding no buyers.
Inner-personal listening is vital to build great products, but not sufficient.
2) Extra-personal listening
Extra-Personal listeners seek meaning for others. In conversations, Extra-Personal listeners seek to understand what goes on inside their interlocutor’s head. They seek out other people’s viewpoint, and genuinely care to learn the needs and pains of their customers. They can relate to a wide variety of people, and are sensitive to competition and market trends. Such a person might say: “I am listening to understand why a user would buy my product.”
Pros: Extra-personal listeners are able get a good pulse on customers and market dynamics related to their ventures.
Cons: An entrepreneur using this mode of listening, in exclusion of others, could take everything customers say at face value, and build only derivative products.
Example: Henry Ford famously said if he had asked his customers what they wanted, before coming up with the Model T, they’d have asked for a faster horse.
Extra personal listening is vital to understand customer needs but not sufficient.
3) Problem-solving listening
Problem-Solving listeners seek meaning in facts, proofs and numbers. In conversations, Problem-Solving listeners seek out and zoom in on the logical information they need to solve problems. Engineers excel in this type of listening, because they favor an objective approach to problem solving. They can keep focused on a problem, without being swayed by extraneous information. This person might say: “I am listening for data points to get to an objective answer.”
Pros: Problem-solving listeners are good at looking at a problem with critical lenses, separating the real problem from opinion and bias.
Cons: An entrepreneur using this mode of listening, in exclusion of others, could fail to learn, or be oblivious to, vital qualitative feedback from customers.
Example: Quantitative customer feedback methods (such as A/B testing, surveys) are favored among engineers. Although they provide very useful feedback, one cannot rely on those methods solely as the answer to all problems. Real life customer interviews are quintessential to find product/market fit. As Steve Blank relentlessly says: “you need to get out of the building!”
4) Conceptual listening
Conceptual listeners seek meaning in possibilities and ideas. In conversations, conceptual listeners tend to listen for triggers to stimulate their creativity. Technology visionaries are great at conceptual listening. They can create a vision for a product nobody has thought of. When they hear information, they quickly connect it to something else they’ve seen or heard, webbing their way into creating a revolutionary new product. This person might say: “I am listening to find more options than are on the table so far.”
Pros: Conceptual listeners are great at envisioning innovative products, and out-of-the-box use cases for new products and services.
Cons: An entrepreneur relying on this mode of listening, in exclusion of others, could lose sight on what is marketable today, or the barriers to market adoption.
Example: As this Economist article illustrates, “Mr Segway’s difficult path: Dean Kamen is best known as the inventor of the Segway scooter; his career illustrates the difficulty of turning innovative ideas into reality.”
Conclusion:
To create successful ventures entrepreneurs need a balance of the 4 habits. The ideal technology entrepreneur will ensure all four habits are considered from the conception, to bringing the product to market (and beyond). If not in one individual, startups must master the 4 habits as a core team. The trick then is to develop sufficient listening awareness, skills and flexibility to adjust one’s listening habits to fit the requirements of the situation.
Assumptions
Peter Drucker recognized Frances Hesselbein, former CEO of the Girl Scouts, as the greatest leader he had ever met. A quote from Frances, “Why should we be entrusted to control anything else, when we cannot even control ourselves?”
There are many ways to interpret her remark, and one is to examine the impact of making assumptions. Every time we make an invalid assumption, we lose control of outcomes.
Let’s look at a couple of common work scenarios.
Mid-manager: After studying the question that you posed to me, I suggest we take the following actions to meet marketplace demands.
Senior-manager: What’s the cost-benefit ratio?
Mid-manager: Let me show you. I’ve created some slides that will tell the story.
The mid-manager assumes her suggestion will be accepted because it meets market needs. She’s even created a presentation to support her position. Most probably her presentation will be full of marketplace information.
The Senior-Manager assumes the decision is based on facts. He’ll expect the presentation to be data driven with proof that the decision will have a positive impact on the bottom line.
We can only imagine what the remainder of their interaction will be like. It is unlikely that either party will be satisfied because neither one checked out assumptions of the other long before this meeting ever occurred.
Not only is it critical to spend time surfacing assumptions, it is as important to understand that each of the four listening habits will most likely hold different assumptions.
Let’s look at the four listening habits and the types of assumptions might surface
Inner-Personal: Assumes there is something in it for me.
For example: This listener assumes anything that is said has some value to himself, and that the speaker will provide information that is interesting and relevant to this listener.
Extra-Personal: Assumes there is something of value for others. This listener assumes anything that is said has some value to others, and that the speaker will provide information that could have impact outside of the relationship or organization.
Problem-Solving: Assumes there is something relevant to the problem. This listener assumes anything that is said has some bearing on the problem at hand. And this listener also assumes there will be facts, data and proof.
Conceptualizing: Assumes there is room to generate more ideas. This listener assumes anything that is said has room for elaboration and the information serves as a platform for options.
I’m positive outcomes will be better when we understand how each of the four habits brings different assumptions to the work table.
Reports about Ms. Hesselbein’s leadership are legend, and one is that she practiced inquiry to achieve common understanding before starting out on any project. She dug to get at assumptions in her belief that it was time well worth investing at the beginning rather than having to pay for un-surfaced assumptions at the end.
Field Notes
Today I interpreted the results from Hear! Hear? Your Listening Portfolioâ of a senior leader in the marketing division of a global company. During our conversation she asked how to make a quick assessment of her conversation partner’s listening habits at the same time that she is intently listening to what that person is saying.
A great question.
I suggested she listen for the types of words someone uses, their body language, and the questions the person asks. She thought for a minute then shook her head quite vigorously and said, “One of my global licensees asks very detailed questions and holds his body just like you described for a problem-solving listener. He knits his brow, holds his head and looks down while he’s thinking. So, when I see him listening in that mode, I can make sure I’m communicating in a similar way to get the most out of our conversation.”
We went on to discuss the other listening habits and their tell tale signs (I’ve written about them in previous posts, and will gladly reiterate if you’re interested).
My big aha was once again about why active listening lands shy of developing skill in a lot of people. Active listening doesn’t really address all four habits. Its construct is for extra-personal listeners. For example, one of the major hints for active listening is to connect with someone visually. Well, extra-personal listeners do that, but the other three habits do not usually make direct eye-contact when listening.
Inner-personal listeners tend to roll their eyes upwards as though trying to look inside their heads to show they are literally taking into their brains what is being said. Problem-solving listeners look down to disengage with the speaker’s body language and listen to the facts without interpersonal distraction. And the conceptualizing-listeners often look right past the speaker at the horizon to see possibilities in the distance.
If you observe any of the signals in a listening situation, let us hear about your experiences.
Listening and Improvisational Theater
A friend is taking improv classes, and when we were talking about her experience, I immediately connected what she was saying to my work on listening. Of course, a major part of improvisational theater is a person’s ability to listen.
Following are some thoughts on the matter:
“One of the things I love about improvisational listening skills is the concept of the “yes.” Your job as a listener in improv is to accept all offers, say “yes” and add on. There is a habit of competitive listening in our culture that disrupts the fecundity of group thought. In improv our job is to make everyone’s offer look good – and say yes to unknown possibility.”
Kirsten Wilson, Improvisation for Work and Life: Playback Theater, Boulder, CO
The key to improvisation is the “Yes, and” principle, and it’s an idea that is particularly relevant to business. In performance improvisation it means listening to what someone else says, accepting what they say, and then building on that. In business terms it means accepting any idea that’s brought to the table and then taking that idea further.
Robert Kulhan, adjunct assistant professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and Lakshmi Balachandra teacher of Improvisational Leadership at MIT Sloan School of Management
Kuhlan goes on to say that there’s a misperception that we have to 100% correct 100% of the time. While we only have to be correct about 10-15% of the time, we do need to be listening at least 50% of the time to make good decisions.
Improv Principles – Listening
From: newchoiceimprov.com/principles/listening.html
Improv can be scary and intimidating.
That’s why this site approaches improv with an emphasis on scene and character creation, rather than emphasizing “getting the laugh”. When the performers do the work of establishing who, where and complication, the humor will appear as a naturally-occurring by-product.
So, focusing on the scene and the characters takes the pressure off of you, the player, to ”be funny”. Another way to make the improv easier is to Listen.
One of the magical effects of improv is the group chemistry and collective unconscious that develops among the players. Inevitably, someone in the game or exercise will say or do something that sparks an idea or reaction in you.
This is serendipity, the gift of improv, the valuable and lucky idea you come across by accident.
You will miss it if you are not listening.
You will miss it if your mind is racing ahead in the scene to the next time you get to say something.
You will miss it if you fail to admire the creativity of your fellow performers.
Train yourself to listen by doing the following:
- Incorporate something the previous speaker just said into your responding comment or action
- Maintain eye contact with the other players
- Expand on what the previous speaker just said
Improv isn’t about being funny or comedy; it is about being present and listening.
Sound-Pollution
I recently returned from the magnificent surroundings of Canaan Valley, WV. If you don’t know West Virginia, you’d never know where Canaan is, but think rolling mountains, lush forests, and piles of snow in the winter. With two other dear, long-time women friends, we stayed at the home of the fourth part of our group, The Babes, as my kids have dubbed us.
To say that the location is remote is an understatement. Nothing is close, there are no street lights, neighboring houses are rarely within view, and deer walk around with impunity. We took long walks, watched the US Open (I watched more TV in my time there than in the entire last year), ate and ate, and talked and talked.
One evening I went out on the deck, hoping to see a bear—not up close, but at the end of the cut lawn before the woods and drop off to the river. None appeared, or, at least, none showed itself to me.
A very interesting phenomenon occurred, though, while I was out there—the voices from inside the house sounded like choir bells—clear, uncluttered, distinguishable. For me that has become a rarity with my hearing loss from a recent car accident. Usually, even with expensive hearing aids, I miss lots of what is being said, tones are muffled, and there’s interference.
Maybe the purity of sound was the result of no sound-pollution (like light pollution—when there’s so much sound that it becomes challenging to discriminate). The air was crisp and still other than the rustling of nearby trees, so maybe the sound waves could move more freely, unimpeded by competition (you can tell I’m not an audio engineer).
Whatever the cause, I felt as though the voices inside the house floated into my prefrontal cortex with ease. The moment was as lovely for me as when I looked up at an equally unpolluted sky full of an unimaginable number of stars. I wonder just how much sound pollution we steel ourselves to and what it causes us to miss—every time we try to listen.
So what is the listening lesson? You tell me.