Talk Lean: Shorter Meetings. Quicker Results. Better Relations. by Alan Palmer

Author:Alan Palmer
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-10-30T14:00:00+00:00

Listening to the Other Person

Before you can respond to statements like “I think this is a little bit over-engineered for our needs” in a way which will give you the best chance of achieving your desired outcome you first need to have properly heard the statement in its entirety.

How can you listen more effectively and hear what the other person actually says, rather than retaining only the things which make a strong emotional impact on you? How can you avoid instantly applying your analytical faculties to a phrase you've just heard, with the consequent risk of completely missing the next phrase?

The answer is to TAKE NOTES. This may appear to lack the characteristics of a “miracle solution”, particularly if, as I suspect, you already take notes in a meeting. But bear with me because I will suggest changes to the way you take notes which will radically improve your listening.

In a meeting (as opposed to, say, a student lecture theatre or a school classroom) taking useful notes consists of writing down what the other person actually says rather than your synthesis of what was said. At school or in college, you learned to apply filters when you took notes, to carry out instant mental editing which allowed you to “focus on the essential”, to “stick to the facts”, to “cut out the padding”. You have probably retained this learning and now apply the same approach to note-taking in meetings. In order to listen accurately in a meeting, you need to remove those filters. If in a meeting you try to take down “what's really important” or “just the key ideas”, then inevitably you will write down only what appears to be really important for you and just the ideas which are key for you – and you will probably miss much that is important for the other person.

If you'd been taking notes in a traditional way in the meeting example above, there's a strong chance that you would find yourself jotting down “over-engineered” and “budgets are frozen”, because these seem to be the key points, the things which appear to be most critical TO YOU in terms of making (or probably not making) your sale. It's highly probable that you would completely miss “it's interesting”, “at first glance”, “a little bit over-engineered”, “officially”, “until the end of the year” because you've dismissed this as so much blah-blah.

It's entirely possible that what the client means by “At first glance” is “This is hard for me to say because I don't want to disappoint you”; it's also possible that “At first glance” means “We haven't actually had time to read the documentation very thoroughly yet”. In either case, the fact that the client has chosen to say: “At first glance” makes it important. The order in which people speak and the words they use aren't the result of pure coincidence. The order of a person's speech reveals the way in which the thoughts came to him or her, at that moment and in that context.

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