You Just Don’t Listen!

One executive I have recently started working with has a constant complaint about the members of his team that, "they just don't listen!". His evidence for that assertion is that things he (thinks) he has communicated clearly are just not understood or acted on by people.

When he started to examine who listened to him and who didn't, he was not sure. What he was sure about is that his messages were not getting through - most of the time. "You see, the problem is, they just don't listen. You need to help them listen better".

Putting aside for the moment the "externalizing the source of the issue", what is accurate about the accusation? Is it accurate that, "they just don't listen"?

It is a familiar accusation for sure, familiar perhaps because we often make it of others – “the problem with John is that he just doesn’t listen”. How is it that so many of us can claim to be good listeners and yet, at the same time there is this general and pervasive accusation that people don’t listen?

The truth is however, we do listen. We are listening all the time. In every conversation, in every interaction, we are listening. The big question that is worth serious inquiry is, “to what are we listening?”

The easiest answer and the one that most people give is, “well I am listening to what is being said of course”. That is accurate for sure. However, if we press the inquiry we will soon discover that the “what is being said of course” that we are listening to is being said by us, to ourselves, in what I call our background conversations – the conversations that go on in our own heads.

As far as I can tell these conversations are going on non-stop, sometimes more loudly than others, but non-stop nonetheless. If that the notion of background conversations is not something you are familiar with, at this point stop reading, and for about 30 seconds and just listen.

It won’t take long for the internal commentary to start up: “What am I supposed to be listening for?” , “I don’t hear anything!”. Whatever the content was, what you were listening to was your background conversation - the constant commentator.

What we will begin to discern, when we start listening to our background conversations, is that we have an opinion about everything. We are constantly commenting on everything that is going on around us. We will even notice that frequently we are commenting on our own comments. We are constantly expressing our likes and dislikes, our judgments and evaluations, our preferences and prejudices; this is why we get accused of not listening. Because in fact, we seldom actually hear what is being said to us – the "just what is being said to us" - because we are also listening to our own commentary about what is being said, it as if we are trying to listen through a filter of interference that keeps interrupting what is being said to us that we are trying to listen to.

Often, and more often that we know, this filter of interference, is our own internal commentary. And often it is louder and more insistent than was is being said to us by those who are trying to get a message through to us.

We even have a whole repetoire of techniques to cover up the fact we were listening to ourselves and not the person speaking to us, for example, "can you just say that more more time, I want to be sure I heard you accurately?"

So it is really important for leaders to pay more attention to what is being listened, than what is being spoken. Too many "leaders" broadcast rather than communicate.

"What's the difference?" my man asks.

"Well, that's your first inquiry - Oh, and start from the perspective that you are the problem, not your people. A useful starting perspective, don't you think? Given there are ten people on your team not listening (they are the problem) and one person on the team not being listened to, who thinks he's not the problem".