Say It Again, Sam
by Kathryn F. Clark (from Human Resource Executive - December 1997)

What's happening to the art of listening in these waning years of the 20th century is not a pretty thing. People are hearing more and listening less.
 
Words not heard can mean ugly misunderstandings and costly errors. They can chew away at profits and sink a business. While corporations aren't doing an awful lot to correct the problem, they may have to do some serious wrestling with it soon.
 
Listening, a prime survival skill, is under constant assault - and ironically some of its worse enemies are the very tools modern technology has designed to speed up communication.
 
"People look like they're dressed for combat with their cell phones and beepers, but are they listening?" asks Charlotte Damato, vice president of Marshall-Qualtec, a business management firm in Scottsdale, Arizona. "There are so many interruptions - a pager going off, a cell phone ringing. Things like call waiting interrupt people's listening skills. There's no way you can be a good listener with call-waiting ever present," she says.
 
She also wonders just how much value employees get from car phone conversations as they negotiate their ways on thruways, dodging vehicles against a background of beeping horns and screeching brakes. "Listening skills are paramount in today's business world. Today's big challenge is learning to listen without seeing each other face-to-face. Listening is vital, and people are not doing it well," she says.
 
"With more and more virtual workplaces and satellite offices, it's becoming rare these days for a manager to have all his or her employees at one site," Damato adds. That being the case, good communication is more important than ever.
 
Gone are the days when a worker can clarify his or her understanding of a memo just by walking into the boss's office or checking with the gang at the water cooler.
 
Damato is particularly aware of this because she is a telecommuter, keeping in touch with her office from her Florida home. While she enjoys the benefits of modern technology, she also sees its problems.
 
The entire concept of remote listening is especially frightening to her because she's seen what can happen through the experiential learning workshops that she conducts. "We divide people up, put them back to back and ask them to make paper airplanes. They're allowed to talk to their partners but they just don't do it. They make their airplanes alone in silence," she says.
 
Listening carefully, always a challenge, is becoming even more important as companies cope with complex problems such as employee retention and global expansion.
 
Managers who learn to listen and observe how others communicate their needs will be better mentors, more accurate judges of performance and more successful at developing the talents of their workers. Those who need to deal with foreign competitors here and on other shores will need listening skills in a way they never have before. And those who deal in customer service at all levels simply must listen carefully.
 
Coffee Calling
 
At Starbucks Coffee Co. stores, for example, employees are taught a procedure for hearing and calling orders which was developed about four years ago to improve service company-wide.
 
"It's a drink-calling system designed to offer a consistent pattern," explains Alan Gulick, a spokesman for Starbucks, which is based in Seattle and posted revenues of $966.6 million in the fiscal year ending Sept 28, 1997. Starbucks has more than 1,400 stores and 25,000 employees, who are known as partners.
 
"Drink orders can get pretty complicated," says Gulick, "with requests like 'a touch,' or 'chocolate' or 'extra, extra hot'." He notes the system not only helps Starbucks' baristas, or coffee pourers, but it also "ensures the customers get the drinks they order."
 
Gulick says Starbucks trains all its partners. The calling system also is valuable when workers transfer to other stores, he notes, "because they already know the system."
 
Additionally, the marks now placed on the side of cups mirror the calling system. "That reinforces the consistency and quality of service," Gulick says.
 
But if anyone should know about listening, it's sales representatives at Land's End. The direct merchant's sales staff handles 14 million phone calls annually. During the weeks before Christmas, more than 100,000 calls a day pour into Land's End's Dodgeville, Wisconsin headquarters on more than 1,100 phone lines. On an average day during the year, calls drop to 40,000 to 50,000.
 
Some sales reps, however, still sign up for listening training.
 
Although the company does not teach a formal listening course, Diane Smith-Hole, manager of clerical operations, says employees do learn about listening carefully as part of their standard training. Sales representatives undergo 70 to 80 hours of product, customer service and computer training as new hires, she says. They receive an additional 24 hours of training annually.
 
The trainers, too, are taught listening skills, Smith-Hole says.
 
Pam Peterson, senior training and development specialist in the employee services department (Land's End version of HR), says her department often provides suggestions and tips about listening.
 
She says the company offered an effective listening course last summer in conjunction with a local technical school. Employees taking the course came not just from sales and customer service, but from a variety of jobs, she says. Feedback showed a definite demand for the course, and it will be offered again next summer.
 
Empowered Hearing
 
"Listening is power," says Diane DiResta, an international communications coach and corporate trainer. "It's the No. 1 communication skill and the most underutilized, but we get little if any training in it."
 
People automatically assume the speaker is in the power position but nothing could be further from the truth. The power is in the listener. The listener is the one learning and in these days of knowledge workers and learning organizations that's extremely important, she says.
 
DiResta, president of DiResta Communications in Staten Island, N.Y., and a professor at New York University, previously worked as an assistant vice president at Drexel Burnham Lambert, where she recruited and trained MBAs in sales and trading.
 
Good listening skills make good managers, she says. "As we move from being product driven to customer driven, as we move from a single culture to a global culture, listening will be the key to both surviving and thriving. We are dependent on numerous people to give us information to do our jobs effectively. That requires listening."
 
But, DiResta says we haven't been trained to listen. "The schools go about it backwards. Listening begins as early as three to nine months in babies. Speech develops from eighteen to twenty-four months and writing at around age six, but the schools concentrate on writing."
 
"Upper level executives are particularly poor listeners, and that's a shame because they got to where they are because they're so good technically and business-wise," she says. "They need to learn to listen-and there's such a return for the investment."
 
Business speaker Elaina Zuker, author of The Seven Secrets of Influence, agrees with DiResta. "It's a mind-set," says Zuker. "Upper level executives, who are mostly male, are trained to be experts and in America that means you have to show how smart you are by talking."
 
In her book, Zuker notes John Naisbitt, in his bestseller, Megatrends 2000, claims our high-tech capabilities have raced ahead of our "high-touch" needs.
 
"We are investing increasingly larger blocks of time and energy in learning how to use those new technologies most effectively," she writes. "But as our communication becomes more technical, we are spending less time developing the interpersonal communication skills that enable us to produce the best product or provide the best service that we can."
 
It is paradoxical, she says, that the ability to listen well is decreasing just when it's needed most.
 
Out of Style
 
A consultant with slightly different spin on listening problems is Michael O'Brien of O'Brien Learning Systems in Milford, Ohio. O'Brien says listening training has fallen out of fashion.
 
During the '70s and '80s listening skills were taught as part of communications training but now are included only with leadership and supervisory training, he says.
 
"But, because more and more people are working on teams, nobody can afford to be a poor listener. Over the years I've come to think you don't need to be taught to listen. Most people are naturally good listeners. From the moment we're born we can identify sounds."
 
The problem occurs when another person's words trigger our minds. We have no ability to stop thinking and continue listening, he says.
 
"What we have to learn is to stop that internal talking so we can listen. When we do our dialogue training among executives, we teach them how to notice when they're not listening.
 
"It's a phenomenon of the mind that we can consciously pay attention to only one thing at a time, so we have to learn to manage our attention. If we realize we're not listening, we have to go back to the speaker and ask him to repeat what was just said."
 
But the reality is that perhaps a person is busy with 15 others things and when someone approaches him with still another he only pretends to listen. As a result no good communication occurs - and no good work.
 
Another consultant concerned about the lack of listening is Wicke Chambers, a partner in Speechworks, a speech and media training firm in Atlanta. "Listening is a tough issue in today's world," she says.
 
Her firm started out coaching people to talk "to woo and win business, but then the tail started wagging the dog."
 
She says she and her partners detect problems with listening because they're constantly trying to figure out what makes people want to listen.
 
Part of the problem, she agrees, is due to the super-fast pace of modern life. But, "it's more fun to talk than listen. People think listening is boring. There's that old joke about the opposite of talking is not listening, but waiting to talk. That's what a lot of people do. They just wait to talk." Then, in some cases, they just talk and talk and talk.
 
"Listening touches everything in the business world-everything. There's an immediate need for listening training, and it needs to be broken down into categories for specific kinds of listening in terms of customer service, order taking, giving directions, and staff relationships."
 
Measuring Listening
 
Laurie Ribble Libove, the author of a new program, Learning to Listen, from HRDQ in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, says her firm developed a listening test because of an overwhelming request from its customers.
 
"The No.1 request was for a piece on listening," she says. "Those interested in improving and measuring listening were customer-service firms, professional sales people, team workers, and those leading teams."
 
Libove sees the increased interest in listening skills as part of an emerging back-to-basics move in business. Listening cuts across so many of the foundation skills, she says, and the lack of ability to listen prevents the person from learning more advanced material.
 
"Listening is particularly important now with globalization and virtual projects. We're all being asked to listen in a different way, not just face-to-face, but over the phone or through video conferencing - even with e-mail. People don't think of that as listening but, in fact, it is. In addition, we're communicating on the run, so to speak, so learning to listen well has become particularly important."

©1997 Courtesy of Human Resource Executive Magazine. All Rights Reserved.