Listening
like a leader
By Garrison Wynn
Our studies of the most effective people
in corporate America show that the top 2 percent are effective
not because they executed best practices well. They did not
make the most phone calls or have the best processes. They
simply understood the truth about trust:
1. People do business with people they
like.
2. They like people they trust.
3. They trust people who have a detectable level of compassion
and competence.
Does it take time to build trust? The truth
is that you have known people for five years who still don’t
trust you, and you’ve known some for five minutes who
do. Our research shows that trust is usually created by showing
a detectable level of concern. When people truly believe you
are concerned for them, they tend to think you possess good
judgment. After all, if you care about them, you must know
what you are doing.
So what is the fastest and most effective
way to show people that you care and you’re competent?
Make sure they feel heard, which is more than just listening.
I call it listening like a leader.
You are not a leader unless you have followers;
a leader without followers is called a failure. Regardless
of your skills, if your staff doesn’t feel heard and
doesn’t trust you, they will always do the minimum.
They will watch the clock and be ready to leave at 4:45 every
afternoon. They will do just enough each day to avoid getting
fired, and they will hope the idea you came up with without
their input fails. That’s right—you can spend
your life delegating to people who want your projects to fail.
How smart is that?
OK, you have to listen; I am sure you already
know that. The issue is, how well do people really listen?
Most studies show that 75 percent of the world’s population
does not listen well. Here is an insight that you won’t
find in many books, keynote speeches or training programs.
As a whole, we don’t listen very well and it’s
not our fault! That’s right, I am sure you are used
to hearing and reading that all of our communication problems
are of our making. However, most experts agree that from birth
to 5 years of age, we learn more than we will for the rest
of our lives. Even if you earn 15 doctorate degrees in your
lifetime, you still acquired most of your knowledge in early
childhood. In those formative years, if a child does not feel
heard by the adults in its life, it does not possess good
listening skills. The bottom line is that it’s hard
to listen when no one ever listened to you. Listening is not
hereditary. It’s an acquired skill.
Are we going to blame the parents? No!
It’s difficult to listen to young children when we are
trying to look out for their welfare. When my stepdaughter
was five, she asked me if Dracula drives a taxi cab. I said,
“Well…, I guess if it’s a night job. Uh,
wait a minute! What kind of question is that?” She also
asked me if she could have a tattoo—not a fake, stick-on
tattoo from an ice cream parlor vending machine, but a real
one. I said, “No, because you’re in kindergarten—and
I’m taking the TV out of your room just for asking that
question.” People are more likely to follow your example
than to follow your advice. We create better listeners by
being better listeners.
Unfortunately, we don’t have much
evidence of people returning from communication-training programs
as better listeners. It doesn’t take a lot of research
to figure out that poor listeners get very little from seminars
on listening. So we don’t listen and it prevents us
from being effective leaders. If we can’t do much to
improve our listening skills, we have to focus on what we
can do in the condition we are in. The key, then, is to focus
on making sure people feel heard. And the first step requires
recognizing and recovering from distractions.
One day, as I listened to an employee talk
about his wants and needs, my mind started to wander. There
he was, sharing his core issues, and I’m thinking to
myself, “Look at the size of this guy’s head!”
It was hard to focus. Once I was trying to listen to a prospect
on a sales call when I noticed he had red hair, blonde eyebrows
and a black mustache. I remember thinking, “It’s
Mr. Potato Face! Something has to be a stick-on; that’s
not all him.”
After we recover from our own distractions,
we have to deal with the real issues at hand. The first of
these issues is what I refer to as “the pitch in your
head.” It can be anything from a preconceived idea that
a manager has about an employee, to a practiced presentation
that you are dying to spew on your unsuspecting sales victims
(prospects, I mean). Sure, you ask a question just as you
were taught to do in your sales or management training program—you
know, a question like “Based on what criteria are your
decisions made?” As they talk and you diligently pretend
to listen, the pitch in your head starts to play; and when
the prospect says something that strikes a chord in you, triggering
how much you know, your pitch finds the pause it was looking
for and off you go. “I know exactly what you are talking
about because I have had many people just like you with this
exact same situation. As a matter of fact, it was this time
last year and they even looked a lot like you.” You
then project your opinion, experience or spiel onto the person
as a solution to his or her problem. Instead of feeling heard,
the person feels quickly judged, and communication does not
take place. It was dead before the spew was finished.
The problem with this scenario is that
you rob people of their uniqueness. When you tell them you
know exactly what the problem is, they tend to want to show
you how unique they are. You actually create your own resistance
and prevent your skills and even your empathy from making
their mark. When people are talking, you are thinking about
you or about what you can do to help them help you. It’s
a natural thing for us to do, and it forces us to pitch hard
and focus on convincing rather than on gaining agreement.
So what do the most effective people do
differently? They make sure the people they are dealing with
feel heard and can retain their uniqueness. If you make people
feel important, you will be important to them!
But an even bigger realization comes from
all of this. When you focus on how people feel about what
they are saying, you increase the level of true concern you
have for others. You actually start to become the person you
thought you were pretending to be: a true leader!
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