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Are you listening Well?
By Sujit Mundul
I am convinced that there are a few born good listeners. Somewhere along the way, they learnt to be good listeners. I suspect that they discovered that there were rewards for keeping your ears open.
One key to effective listening lies in recognising what kind of listening works best in different situations. For example, sometimes good listening simply requires keeping your mouth shut. Whenever I make this point, I think of a suggestion made by a pundit: “To say the right thing at the right time, keep still most of the time.”
Keeping mum isn’t easy at all. In fact, it can be a torture to hold your tongue and let someone else do the talking, especially if the speaker beats around the bush. Mastering your body language so that it shows that you are interested in what is being said is also difficult. Keeping quiet won’t get you very far if the speaker can see by the gazed look in your eyes or the impatient tapping of your pencil that you’d rather be somewhere else.
When you open your ears, open your mind too. Listening should be taken as an opportunity to learn. You won’t learn much if you make up your mind before you’ve had a chance to hear anything. It is especially important not to show a sign that signals ‘I’ve come to my own conclusions already’. It’s a good idea to be conscious of subtle, potentially negative signals that your listening habits might be sending out. Managers in particular need to be alert as to how they divvy up their listening time.
Sometimes good listening means not keeping still. It calls for action, to combat the natural tendency of employees to avoid telling their boss some bad news or rocking the boat. This more active version of listening requires asking questions in order to break through someone’s hesitancy and get to the heart of problem. I feel it is a particularly important skill for high level leaders (e.g. CEOs) who, by their lofty positions, often intimidate junior staff. I’m a great believer in the question, “What do you think?” It works wonders.
Ultimately, even the most skilled learning has limits. At some point, debate and fact gathering must come to an end. A decision must be made based on what has been learned. This is the juncture at which the true mettle of an organisation’s overall listening skill is put to litmus test!
(Mundul is the CEO of Standard Chartered Bank Nepal Ltd.)
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