How You Listen Makes A Difference In Business Relationships
We all know that listening is important to any relationship. Of course, we have different ways of listening in various situations. What's interesting is that how we listen impacts a relationship. We listen in eight different modes. Here's a description of each of them and how you should listen:
Build. Understand what someone else is saying in order to help expand your thinking and build on it. Listen for connections to what you know and how that may help.
Judge and Find Flaws. Assess the accuracy or worthiness of what you hear and find flaws, and even opportunities, to nitpick. Listen for what's wrong or incorrect.
Absorb/Learn. This helps us gain information and sometimes fit it immediately into our personal view of the world. Other times, we listen to gather information without simultaneously fitting it into what we already know.
Solve. This helps us find solutions. Listen for what makes this issue meaningful to the speaker, and how your insight might solve the issue.
Sympathize. This mode of listening provides comfort and presence. Listen and respond with full support, and certainly without judgment.
Forensic. This can also be called “deep listening,” which musters all your senses to focus deeply on words, tones and non-verbal communication.
Understand/Empathize. This shares in another's emotions, viewing something from his or her point of view. The key here is to keep your own self intact. There's a duality here: feeling another's emotional state while maintaining your sense of self.
Manage a situation. We use this mode when we feel we're at risk and listen for ways to keep ourselves safe. Be aware that when we're in this mode, our emotions are high and consequently, our hearing is low. We are likely to miss a lot of what's being said or misinterpret what we're hearing.
In business relationships, we often default to two styles: judging and safekeeping. In business, we want to stay on track by, for example, needing to make sure something's right or identifying mistakes, for example, so, we're critical of what we hear. In judging, we're likely to miss information because our minds are busy analyzing what we're hearing, why we think it's wrong, and listing our points for correcting or rebutting. We think we're listening, but we're really moving in and out of listening. You may find yourself saying things like, “Oh, I didn't hear that part.” Or, “Could you repeat that again?” Listening to find flaws is very useful, but many people fall into the trap of using the Judge and Find Flaws mode as their default.
Likewise, when we're feeling unsure of our situation (be it performance review/feedback, meeting someone for the first time — such as in an interview or with a new business prospect — we listen to manage the situation. Our internal voice says things like, “Can I find a way to impress this person?” Or, “Where is this going?”
Our minds work much faster than anyone can speak. Our internal voice activity level varies with each listening mode. Clearly, the type of listening we use shapes what we hear because we're listening for different things. Being aware of the mode we're in makes a profound difference in what we hear. Each mode focuses our minds on different details; thus, we hear different things even though we thought we were listening and heard everything. Further, we readily shift from one mode to another with little to no conscious awareness of the shift.
Likewise, the speaker can sense the mode you're in. Haven't we all sensed it when someone is judging us as they listen? It usually affects how and what we say because it raises our emotions; we start to pick our words carefully. Likewise, haven't you sensed when someone is listening to absorb what you're saying? We don't feel defensive, and our words flow readily.
Here are two pieces of advice:
1) When you present something to someone, ask him or her to use the mode you think is appropriate to your presentation. For instance, “I know this still needs work, so I'd like you to listen to build this further.” Or, “I'm thinking this is ready for our client, so please focus on finding flaws.”
2) Try to pay conscious attention to how you're listening. It not only impacts what you hear, it actually impacts what is being said to you.
(NOTE: Candis Stevenson Cook, co-author of How To WHO: Selling Personified, was a major contributor to this column.)
Ken Cook is managing director of Peer to Peer Advisors and co-author of How To WHO: Selling Personified, a book and program for building business through relationships. Learn more at www.howtowho.com.
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