SMART SKILLS
It takes more than a pair of ears to listen
Usha Albuquerque

HOW often have you found that the man you go to see at an office is signing papers, shuffling files and attending to a number of other chores while talking to you. How often have you found your mind wandering during a business meeting, and lost track of what’s being said?

Most people in the presence of others make an effort to be listened to, but seldom listen. Communication is often misunderstood as the ability to speak. But it is not a one-way process. Listening is as crucial to the conveying of information, as is speaking.

Practice makes perfect

Listening is not something that comes naturally. It needs to be practised. Although once labelled a passive skill, listening is very much an active process of selecting and interpreting information from auditory and visual clues. To be effective and successful as a manager and a professional it is as important to listen, as it is to speak. A recent study of Fortune 500 Corporations, found that listening was perceived to be crucial for communication at work with regards to entry-level employment, job success, general career competence, managerial competency, and effectiveness of relationships between supervisors and subordinates.

Communication experts say that 10 per cent of communication is conveyed by the words we use, and another 30 per cent by the sound and tone of our voice. The remaining 60 per cent comes through our body language. Real listening, therefore, takes place only when we hear with our ears, and listen with our hearts and minds and grasp with our eyes.

Demanding task

Listening is a demanding process, not only because of the complexity of the process itself, but also due to factors that characterise the listener, the speaker, the content of the message, and any visual support that accompanies the message. Listening happens when the listener:

• determines a reason for listening;

• takes the raw speech and deposits an image of it in short-term memory

• attempts to organise the information by identifying the type of speech event and the function of the message

• predicts information expected to be included in the message

• assigns a meaning to the message; and

• determines what information is to be held in long-term memory, and deletes from short-term memory what is irrelevant

Listening is a complicated process and so it’s not surprising that there are several reasons why people fail to listen:

• You anticipate what is going to be said and if it does not interest you, you switch off.

• You are thinking of what to say when your turn comes, and possibly rehearsing lines, or trying to find a way to make an intelligent remark, interrupt the conversation, or rebut the points put forward by the speaker.

• The communication is poor

• You may be tired or worried, or be distracted by some problem or be under stress.

• You have little regard for the speaker and what he/she is trying to convey.

2-way process

Listening is also a two-way process. If you want to be understood and appreciated you need to understand and listen to what other people have to say, points out Stephen Covey in The Seven habits of Highly Effective People. According to Covey, when someone speaks we listen at one of four levels. The first is when we ignore and fail to listen at all. The second is when we pretend to listen. The third level is when we do selective listening, hearing only parts of the conversation, while the fourth is when we practise attentive listening, making an effort to pay attention and focus on what is being said. According to Covey, very few people listen at the fourth level, but still less reach the fifth level. This is emphatic listening which involves not only listening and understanding what is being said but also absorbing the tone of voice and the body language of the speaker.

Strategies

Here are some tips to help you listen more effectively:

• Figure out the purpose for listening.

• Attend to the parts of the listening input that are relevant to your purpose

• Select top-down processing techniques, which implies using background knowledge to facilitate understanding of the topic.

• Be an active listener.

• Remove distractions. comprehension.