Leadership Thought #473 – The Disease of Half-Listening
Too many people aren’t fully listening.
As part of my work, I attend many meetings and conference calls. It’s fascinating and disheartening at times to see how the quality of these interactions can vary. There are moments where it feels like everyone is “dialed in” and paying rapt attention, but these are exceedingly rare. Often, you either see or hear participants focusing on other things, such as checking their email and text messages, surfing the web, engaging in internal conversations, or tuning out altogether. Because of this dynamic, we often stray off topic, must repeat points, answer the same questions more than once, and deal with feedback that is ill-informed. We also end up wasting the time of others who are engaged.
Almost everyone I know complains about the quality of meetings they attend. The questions I ask them in return are, “How are you showing up?” and What are you doing to improve them?” I’m convinced we could cut our meeting time in half and/or accomplish a lot more if people focused solely on the topic at hand.
As a child, I learned that ignoring someone who was talking to me was rude. Now it has become commonplace to check in and check out as we see fit. We have created a new disease of half-listening, and it is infecting organizations and families. Instead of others feeling like we care about them, we focus only when we feel stimulated to engage. Sadly, I’ve seen many adults behave like teenagers in this regard. What’s important is what we want, think, or feel, not how our actions are affecting others. We convince ourselves that we are only multitasking and juggling our multitude of responsibilities, but this is nonsense. Focus always beats distraction. And, the best leaders are still the best listeners.
Unless you live in a vacuum, you need to master the art of communicating with others, especially if you want to lead them. Communicating is only partially about talking. What you say is much less important than what the other person hears. The best relationships are a two-way street where all parties are equally engaged in the conversation. As one of my colleagues is fond of saying, “The conversation is not about the relationship; the conversation is the relationship.” It doesn’t matter whether there are two people or twenty in the room. None of us wants to feel less important than someone else. We want our voice heard. It is only logical that people tend to listen to others who they think are genuinely trying to hear them. Sure, some people may still dominate the conversation based on status or personality, but everyone in the room/relationship owns the outcome, whether they like it or not.
