Effective Listening

Welcome! I am Barbara Davis and I will be guiding you through this brief podcast style workshop on Effective Listening. Effective listening is the ability to hear and understand a message being conveyed by another person. All too often, we hear without listening and listen without hearing. That means we dont pay enough attention to the detail of the message and pay attention to all of the other cues of the medium in order to fully understand the message and there are times we can sit there stone-faced looking at the person without understanding what they are saying. Effective listening is a way of listening that will ensure you heard and understood the message that the sender intended to send. The truth is sometimes the sender ends up giving the wrong message. Because of the way our brains work and then combined with how others perceive information, we may think said one thing when in fact we said another, and we would never know if people didnt go off and do the wrong thing. What does effective listening look, or rather, sound like? The general rules of effective listening are: 1. Clarify 2. Ask for more information or details 3. Respond

Clarifying:
Clarifying (what mediators would call clari-phrasing), is a means of verifying your understanding of the message you heard by paraphrasing the persons message or statement. That does not mean parroting their exact statement word for word but rather, putting what they said into your own words. Lets listen to how Gina uses clarifying in a conversation with her co-worker Rob. Rob tells Gina: We are going to finish the requirements after we have completed reverse engineering the code so we can show that our requirements match the final product. Gina clarifies: So what youre saying is youre going to complete the requirements after you have finished development? Rob responds: Yes.

Asking for more information or details:

The next step in effective listening is asking for more information or details. We do this in order to accomplish a few things: It gives the person an opportunity to explore their statement and opinions, beliefs or information behind the statement and possibly change them, but it also engages them in a discussion about their perspective that helps them feel heard and provides us as the listener with more information about the situation. Asking for more details and information is simply that: ASKING. Clarifying should always be followed with questions about the persons position, opinion, beliefs or information because it allows a more full exploration of the topic and if it is not the persons real objection that will become obvious because they are not able to back it up with specific details.

This part is also called asking probing questions, because you are trying to get the person to elaborate on their statements and explain their position. This means you limit and try not to ask Yes or No questions. Lets go back to Gina & Rob. Now that Gina has established what Robs plans for the requirements are, she wants to gather more information from Rob. She does this by asking Rob a few more questions. Gina asks: How can we ensure that the product matches the business objectives? Rob tells her: The developer that built the prototype based it on market research. Gina: Do we know if the research was quantified to ensure it was clean data? Rob: Im not sure. Gina: How does the market research align to the business objectives of this project? Rob: We wanted to build something that customers would buy. Gina: Okay.

Responding:
The last step in effective listening is to respond. Now that you know about the persons position, opinions and beliefs, you can address them. This is where you get your chance to talk about the issue from your perspective and share your position, opinions and beliefs. You may be privy to information the other person is not and this is where you would share that. The best outcome for this is that both people go away with a better understanding of each others position and maybe their own perceptions have even changed as a result of this type of communication. When we look at the scenario between Gina & Rob, she now has enough information to respond back to him with her understanding of the situation. Lets listen in. Gina (first clarifies again): So were building a product by reverse engineering a prototype that was built based on research? Rob: Yes, thats right. Gina: I cant really see how this aligns to the business objectives we defined. Based on the market research, we defined objectives that included the most commonly requested features. My concern is, we cant prove to anyone that we built the product that will sell or will be cost-effective for our customers. Without mapping back to a set of business objectives and the project charter we cant really establish the benefit our customers will see by using this product. Lets run through another scenario. A person is talking with their manager about the work on their project. Employee: Ive done as much as I am willing to do. Any more changes and I think you should hire someone else to do the job. The Manager could respond with anything from get out of my office and pack your things to something more positive. Lets explore the positive with possible responses for the manager: Manager: So youre saying youre unwilling to make any more changes? Employee: Yes. Manager: How many changes have you made since we signed the document?

Employee: Twelve. Manager: What were the reasons for making those changes? Employee: The stakeholders cut back on some of the scope and then changed the focus of the project. Manager: Were all the changes made for those reasons? Employee: No. Some were made because they didnt give us the right requirements in the beginning. Manager: Could any of those changes have been avoided? Employee: Not really. Manager: So the changes were made because of the change in scope and because we got the wrong requirements from the user? Employee: Yes. Manager: Well, lets look at how we can validate the requirements better so that there will be fewer changes next time. OR The Manager could simply have said the following: Manager: You think were making too many changes? Employee: Yes. Manager: What makes you think that? Unfortunately, effective listening is not an innate skill that we are all born with. We have to learn it, practice it and apply with consciously in order to make it work and stick.

Homework:
Try a few for yourself and email me your responses. Please make sure you email them as ONE document. If you complete all three exercises, and provide me with your address, I will send out a Certificate of Participation and track this against criteria for CRRSP Certification. The email is bdavis@e2consultinginc.com. Scenario 1: Two colleagues are having a discussion: Beth tells Cathy: If you criticize my work one more time, Im dumping the project and transferring to another department. [Repeat the scenario for the listener!!] Scenario 2: Greg tells Susan: You seem to get all the recognition when we do a presentation together. I might as well not even bother to put in any effort. [Repeat the scenario for the listener!!] Scenario 3: A Manager tells his Employee: I guess Id let you do it if I was confident youd get the project done on time. Right now, I think youll barely be able to finish the three other projects youre struggling with. [Repeat the scenario for the listener!!]

A transcript of this podcast is available in the CRRSP Forum.