Man’s inability to communicate is a result of his failure to listen effectively, skilfully and with understanding to another person.

Carl Rogers

THE EARLY DAYS

Let’s take a trip down Memory Lane, back to our schooldays. Now, for you, that might not be a long time ago, but for me it was back in the dark ages. Do you remember being taught how to read? You probably even learned the basics of reading before you went to school. Remember all the stuff about, ‘The cat sat on the mat’?

Once we’d mastered that we moved on to reading more sophisticated books and I remember most of them being particularly boring; I’m such a Philistine. Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott was one I remember trying to get my brain around; nowhere as good as the television series I used to watch on children’s TV.

My mother used to buy the Children’s Newspaper. This was to improve my understanding of what was going on in the world and much better than those rubbishy comics that I loved so much; Dan Dare in the Eagle was much more interesting.

At school, the teacher would often ask someone in class to read out loud. As well as improving our reading skills it also taught us to speak better. The kids in my class were always being corrected when they mispronounced something or struggled over a particular word.

No one could ever understand what I was saying when it came to my time to read. Throughout my schooldays I wore braces on my teeth. These got in the way of my tongue, causing me to speak like some kind of alien from deep space.

Along with all this reading and speaking, we were also taught to write on lined paper, so neatly and clearly. All this reading, writing and speaking was to ensure we could communicate with the others of our species. However, there’s another communication skill that we used a lot and never received any teaching in how to do it, and that was listening.

Listening was probably the communication skill we were introduced to first; as we lay in our cot listening to all the adults cooing and telling us how pretty and clever we were. It’s a wonder that we didn’t all grow up talking baby talk.

We were never taught to listen, we just experienced it. It’s like breathing in and breathing out, like smelling something or seeing something. Nobody teaches you that stuff – you just do it.

However, because we’re not taught to listen, most of us don’t do it well. We don’t in fact listen – we hear.

‘Listen’ to the facts

Power Listening isn’t about hearing; it’s about really understanding the message that the other person is sending and letting them know that you understand and care about what they’re saying. That doesn’t mean to say that you agree or like what they’re saying, only that you really understand. And that’s where the difficulty arises.

I could listen all day to someone speaking in Cantonese but I wouldn’t understand what they were trying to tell me. (Sometimes I listen to people speaking to me in English and I haven’t a clue what they’re trying to tell me.)

Now you might consider yourself a good listener but just stop for a moment and think. How would the following people rate you as a listener: your best friend, your boss, your employees, colleagues and even your nearest and dearest? Rather not think about it, eh? Let me give you some facts and figures about listening that have been established by research.

• We spend 45 per cent of our waking time listening, 30 per cent talking, 16 per cent reading and 9 per cent writing.
• We learned to listen first, speaking second, reading third and writing fourth.
• We’re taught to listen the least, speak the next least, to read the next most and to write the most.

I hope that hasn’t messed up your brain, and I hope you can spot that the communication skill we need the most – listening – is taught the least.

As I’ve said, we spend 45 per cent of our waking time listening. We listen to our families, our work colleagues and our friends. We listen to television, radio, people on the phone and also all the noises that surround us. We probably listen more than we do anything else, except breathing.

Stop reading this for a moment, close your eyes and count the number of different noises you can hear. I’m sitting at my desk in a quiet neighbourhood and I can hear the occasional car passing outside my house. I can hear people speaking as they walk down the street, birds in the trees and some sort of humming noise coming from somewhere; maybe it’s the fan in my computer. All of these sounds are competing for space in my brain and that can make it difficult for me to listen to any other incoming message, but more of that later.

More facts and figures: G. R. Bell established in 1984 studies that adults typically practise listening at no better than 25 per cent efficiency. In 1983 G. T. Hunt and A. P. Cusella reported how well training directors in Fortune 500 companies rated the listening effectiveness of managers and subordinates in their organisations. Ratings averaged 1.97 on a five-point scale, somewhere between ‘fair’ and ‘poor.’

Other studies suggest that 60–70 per cent of oral communication is either ignored, misunderstood or quickly forgotten. After 48 hours people are likely to retain less than 25 per cent of what they heard in a conversation.

Now I’m sure this makes a lot of sense to you because one of the most common complaints I hear from managers and employees is, ‘My manager doesn’t listen to me!’

It’s also one of the reasons why difficulties arise in our personal life. How often have people headed for the divorce court saying, ‘He never listens to me!’ or ‘She doesn’t understand me!’?

Were we as eloquent as angels we still would please people much more by listening rather than talking.

Charles Caleb Colton (1780–1832, British sportsman writer)

Listening is a very powerful management skill. If you want to become a Motivational Manager and minimise your stress then you need to become a Power Listener.

I’ve never been a good listener. However, I work hard at it and I’ve become a great deal better. So I’m with you on this training exercise to become a Power Listener.

However, it’s not just about you as a manager becoming a better listener (and we’ll come back to this later). If you bear in mind all the facts and figures we’ve just looked at, it follows that the members of your team are probably not good listeners. So, you need to take this into consideration when you speak with your team either individually or in a group.

There have been many studies conducted on listening and it’s well understood that people only absorb about 10 to 25 per cent of what they hear. Now that may come as a bit of a shock because you probably assume that when you speak with people they do understand and remember what you say.

Let’s take a look at why people aren’t good listeners. As I’ve just been saying, the first reason is because we haven’t been taught. However, there are a whole list of reasons why people don’t listen; it’s important to be aware, so here are seventeen barriers.