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So What I'm Hearing You Say Is....
By Laura Thomas
Studies show that babies can hear while still in their mother’s womb. We have been listening longer then we have been speaking; but just listening doesn’t mean we always understand what is being said. Listening is natural, but understanding takes practice. Fine-tuning your listening skills can be accomplished through two steps: first, learning to avoid traditional responses; and second, learning how to show empathy and request concreteness.
Step 1: Avoiding Traditional Responses
Traditional responses are just what the name suggests: responses to communication that are overused, and often take control away from others. There are three traditional responses, in particular, that great listeners try to avoid: the ignoring response, the advice-giving response, and the personal experience response. All of these common mistakes can lead the speaker to feel belittled, berated, or brushed off, despite the responder’s good intentions!
Let’s take a look at these three traditional responses in detail, so we can see how to avoid them:
The Ignoring Response: This can be done nonverbally by avoiding eye contact or turning your back on the speaker. It can also be done verbally by short sayings that don’t connect to what the speaker was saying such as “oh, that’s nice,” right after they finished telling you about the death of their pet. (hopefully the listener wouldn’t be that unfeeling, this is an extreme example!) When people say things that are hard to accept, others often choose not to acknowledge what was said. For example, a fellow member of your leadership team may complain about the lack of organization in your meetings. An ignoring response to this complaint might be, “It’s ok, don’t worry. Everything always gets done.” Note how the responder completely ignores the original point, trying to direct attention away from it. This is a total ignoring response, and one that’s destined to cause negative feelings and poor teamwork in your group!
Brush-off’s count as ignoring responses, and if you ignore one of your teammates or coworkers, you’re heading down the road to total communication breakdown.
The Advice-Giving Response: Advice is one of the easiest responses to give, and most people are eager to dish it out. Giving advice can sometimes be helpful, but it often overrides the main focus of showing the speaker that they have been heard. Additionally, if you give advice you remove the responsibility for the issue from them to you; in essence, you are crippling them and overburdening yourself! For example, a business partner has run into a challenge with her boss and grumbles to you about it. Let’s say you give her an advice-giving response… one of two results will emerge from this. If your advice works out perfectly and fixes the problem, your coworker will now run to you every time a new issue arises (instead of the better method of arriving at a solution herself). Or, on the other hand, your advice could work out poorly, and result in your coworker suffering. Then, she blames you, because it was your advice that made it worse.
If a teammate or friend asks you for advice, that’s one thing; but often we’re tempted to start doling out suggestions when that’s not really what’s being looked for. Don’t offer advice just because you can; it may be better for your friend or teammate to come up with his or her own solution.
The Personal Experience Response: When you share a similar personal experience after a person speaks, it shows the speaker that you want to shift the attention to yourself. We often do this in hopes of showing connection, often as a lead-up to an advice-giving response, but the attempt will usually backfire. It may lead to the original speaker feeling ignored (because you just want to talk about yourself) or unimportant (since you felt the need to stop talking about their experience to talk about your own). For example, someone tells you about a great leadership conference they went to, and you turn around and say “Oh yeah, I went to a conference once and we did________ and _________ and then_________ and so on. And it was a ton of fun.” Suddenly the original speaker finds himself in the middle of a competition… and they don’t want to compete. They leave the conversation feeling like they have been “one upped” when all you, as a listener, were trying to do was show them you understood what they were talking about. You know this one all too well; avoid being the “one time at band camp…..” listener.
Listening to Understand
The most effective leaders are the ones that can get to the heart of those they lead. Nothing is more effective then showing empathy and truly understanding what the speaker is trying to say. This can be difficult to accomplish because we all think and feel differently, but doors fly open left and right when you as a leader can understand what it is those you lead are trying to say. But it’s not enough for you to know it… they have to know it, too! You can accomplish that by listening well, and then avoiding the traditional responses listed above.
Step 2: Showing Empathy
When an opportunity comes to listen to a problem or an experience, the first thing to do is show empathy. An empathetic leader is sensitive to the person’s thoughts and feelings, out loud. At its simplest, an empathetic response looks a lot like the following:
“You’re feeling feeling word because paraphrase of content.”
For instance, a friend tells you that his dog contracted rabies and passed away. Your reply, using the above model, might be along the lines of, “You’re feeling terribly sad because your pet has died.” Obviously you wouldn’t use those exact words; as I said, this is the empathetic response at its simplest.
As you practice, you can personalize your response so that it feels natural to you. This response says to the speaker that you know what was said, and that you can identify with what he’s feeling. You may not always feel it yourself, but by identifying the feeling word you show the speaker you can connect with them on his own emotional level. Here’s a more complete example of an empathetic response:
Speaker: “That stupid test, it wasn’t anything like the chapters in the book. If it wasn’t for that one test score I would have had an A in the class.”
Listener: “I bet that made you so angry. The test wasn’t what you had prepared for and now your grade is lower then you like.”
Step 2 and a Half: Requesting Concreteness
Now if you were to leave the conversation at that point, the speaker would have felt that their feelings had been validated, and that’s a good thing. But, active listeners want to do more than just validate; they want to help the speaker come to some sort of closure. You can accomplish this by requesting concreteness.
Requesting concreteness encourages others to be more specific in their challenges. In the case above an active-listener listens for on vague words such as “stupid,” “anything like,” and “would have.” Requesting concreteness is done through asking simple questions such as “What do you mean when you say “it wasn’t anything like the chapters?”, “Stupid?”, or “Explain how you would have gotten a better grade.”
These short questions quickly turn the focus back to the speaker and allows for the listener to better understand the situation. In getting the speaker to talk more about the issue, it also allows them to work through the challenge for themselves. After the listener has listened, the speaker may realize it really hasn’t ruined their grade, or maybe it wasn’t a big deal after all. With more active-listening from the leader, teammates and friends can develop their own methods to control their thoughts and feelings and to create constructive methods of dealing with their problems.
So, what I am hearing you say is… listening doesn’t always equate to understanding, but when a leader practices basic active-listening skills, they can form deeper connections with those they lead. This is one of the very best ways that leaders can enhance their own management ability, gain respect from their team, and strengthen the individuals they interact with.
Portions of this article are based on information given in the “Counseling Skills Workbook” by Richard A. Heaps, Scerinda Johnson, and Kenneth P. Schwab.
Laura Thomas, a former coach at the Leadership Training Cabin, is a Trainer with TRI and a frequent contributor to the Leadership Solutions Network. Click here to learn more about Laura and how to contact her!
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