All of us listen. From morning to night we listen to spouses, kids, clients, friends, coworkers, and employees. But the very fact that we do it so much fools us into believing that we do it well.
The reality, of course, is that our superficial and often scattered attention is no more listening than communication is simply telling people stuff. It is a rough approximation, but little more.
Like so many leadership behaviors, effective listening begins below the line in the internal world of attitudes and beliefs. To truly listen, we must genuinely value the thinking of those around us. We must respect them and believe that their thoughts are worth our time and attention.
True listening also requires an unequivocal acknowledgement that we don’t already have all the answers we need. It demands an admission of the reality that our thinking can be enhanced by others’ input.
Listening of this kind is as profound as it is rare. Celebrated semanticist and author S.I. Hayakawa describes the difference between this kind of listening and what most of us are accustomed to:
Living in a competitive culture, most of us are most of the time chiefly concerned with getting our own views across, and we tend to find other people’s speeches a tedious interruption of the flow of our own ideas. Hence it is necessary to emphasize that listening does not mean simply maintaining a polite silence while you are rehearsing in your mind the speech you are going to make the next time you can grab a conversation opening. Nor does listening mean waiting alertly for the flaws in the other person’s argument so that later you can mow him or her down. Listening means trying to see the problem the way the speaker sees it . . . Listening requires entering actively and imaginatively into the other person’s situation and trying to understand a frame of reference different than your own.
In this light listening is less a skill or behavior than it is a mastery of our own self-centered tendencies. Listening in the way described by Hayakawa requires us to set aside the concerns of our own ego, shelve our personal aims and priorities, and sincerely try to understand another person’s point of view and enter into their frame of reference.
It means working to go past what people are saying to search for what they are meaning. It is, above all else, an act of will. In this sense it is no hyperbole to suggest that human beings can live for years at a time without ever really listening to another person at all.
It becomes clear, then, that in cases of communication difficulties, the problem is often not that we don’t know how to listen well, but rather that we don’t really want to.