Listening: a lost art

Is listening a lost art? Harvard Professor James Heskett has outlined in his HBR article his views. He says several argue that the skill of listening is on the wane. I list here excerpts from the article. He refers to Shari Morwood who said: "It starts at the top-if we as management don't listen or don't know how, we can't tap the full power of the amazing talent in our own organizations. Listening is learning." He refers to Gael who raised the question to a more universal level with her comment: "Listening to oneself requires sometimes crude and painful honesty that most people feel they can't afford." That is why, she continued, it is so important to have real friends with good memory who can be our sounding boards. "Listening to others works better if you can show empathy and put yourself in the other peoples' shoes." In his new book Quick and Nimble, based on more than 200 interviews, Adam Bryant concludes, that, among other things, managers need to have more "adult conversations" —conversations needed to work through "inevitable disagreements and misunderstandings" —with our direct reports. Such conversations require careful listening. In the same book he reports that CEOs expressed major concerns about the misuse and overuse of e-mail, something that they feel encourages disputes to escalate more rapidly than if face-to-face conversations had taken place instead. The latter, however, would require people to listen. Edgar Schein, known primarily for his work on corporate culture, pursues the subject from a different direction in a little book, Humble Inquiry. In it, he asks and answers a question we discussed here several months ago of why CEOs talk too much and listen too little. And he proposes an antidote, something he calls "the gentle art of asking instead of telling," describing the kinds of questions designed to elicit useful information. At the same time, according to Schein, the mere act of asking, if done sincerely, requires that the questioner make himself temporarily vulnerable to the person being questioned. This in turn, builds trust so lacking in many organizations today. There's a catch, however. It requires that the questioner know how to listen, something many CEOs have forgotten. To read the entire article visit http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/7414.html For details of training programmes to inculcate the art of listening please email subra@smrhrgroup.com

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