People Follow You by Jeb Blount

Author:Jeb Blount
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781118173909
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2011-10-12T16:00:00+00:00

The Fine Art of Listening

Have you ever noticed how often you have a conversation with your spouse, friends, children, boss, customers, and most importantly the people who work for you and then, shortly afterwards, one or both of you disagree on what was said or agreed to? If you really think about it, you'll be shocked at how often this happens. How is it possible? You were both there, either on the phone or staring at each other face to face, and you each walked away with a different understanding of what happened?

I read a good many sales and leadership books each year. Almost every book, in one form or another, admonishes that effective listening is a key to real success. In virtually all leadership trainings, business professionals are taught communication and listening skills. There are thousands of seminars, books, and audio programs dedicated to communication and listening (13 million results returned for “listening skills” on Google and more than 10,000 books on “listening” listed on Amazon). Yet, time and again, in conversation after conversation, messages get scrambled and there is disagreement. One party or the other wonders aloud, “Why doesn't anybody listen?”

Back when I was in fourth grade, my teacher, Ms. Gibbons, took the entire class outside on a warm spring day. She lined us all up, about 25 kids, and on one end of the line whispered a message, that she read from an index card, into the ear of the first child in line. That child then turned to the next person in line and whispered the same message. The process continued as each fourth grader whispered the message to the next in line until we reached the end. Ms Gibbons then had the last child repeat the message out loud to all of the other children. There were giggles and snickers. We were all shaking our heads. The words that came out of the last child's mouth was not the message we had passed on. Finally, Ms. Gibbons read from the index card. The words she spoke were foreign to almost everyone except the first few people in line. Over the course of 25 repetitions, the message had been so convoluted that it no longer resembled the original. The demonstration of how poorly we listened was so impactful it has stuck with me for the past 40 years. I think about it each time there is a breakdown in “communication,” which is actually a result of a breakdown in listening.

Despite all that we have been taught and all that we know, listening is still the weakest link in human interaction. Of course it is likely that you already know this because you are interacting with people and they are not listening to you. It is likely that you have thrown your hands up in disgust and said, “Why won't these people listen to me?” or “What do I need to do to get my message through to them?” or “My [kids, husband, wife, friends, employees] just

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