Hearing Listening

HEARING, LISTENING

 
Listening is the front end of decision making. It’s the surest, most efficient route to informing the judgments we need to make, yet many of us have heard, at one point or other in our careers, that we could be better listeners. Indeed, many buyers take listening skills for granted and focus instead on learning how to articulate and present their own views moreeffectively. 
This approach is misguided. Good listening—the active and disciplined activity of probing and challenging the information garnered from others to improve its quality and quantity—is the key to building a base of knowledge that generates fresh insights and ideas. Put more strongly, good listening can often mean the difference between success and failure in business ventures (and hence betweena longer career and a shorter one). Listening is a valuable skill that most buyers spend little time cultivating.
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Show respect. 
 
Our conversation partners often have the know-how to develop good solutions, and part of being a good listener is simply helping them to draw out critical information and put it in a new light. To harness the power of those ideas, senior buyers mustfight the urge to “help” more junior colleagues by providing immediate solutions. Leaders should also respect a colleague’s potential to provide insights in areas far a field from his or her job description.  
Being respectful, it’s important to note, didn’t mean that the buyer must avoid asking tough questions—good listeners routinely ask them to uncover the information they need to help makebetter decisions. The goal is ensuring the free and open flow of information and ideas. 
 
Keep quiet. 
 
Some people have developed their own variation on the 80/20 rule as it relates to listening. Their guideline is that a conversation partner should be speaking 80 percent of the time, while we speak only 20 percent of the time. Moreover, they seek to make their speaking time count by spendingas much of it as possible posing questions rather than trying to have their 
own say.  
That’s easier said than done, of course—most buyers are naturally inclined to speak their minds. Still, you can’t really listen if you’re too busy talking. Besides, we’ve all spent time with bad listeners who treat conversations as opportunities to broadcast their own status or ideas, 
or who spend more timeformulating their next response than listening 
to their conversation partners. Indeed, bad listening habits such as these are ubiquitous. 
It’s not easy to stifle your impulse to speak, but with patience and practice you can learn to control the urge and improve the quality and effectiveness of your conversations by weighing in at the right time. Some people can intuitively grasp where to drawthe line between input and interruption, but the rest of us have to work at it. 
Experts advise buyers to think consciously about when to interrupt and to be as neutral and emotionless as possible when listening, always delaying the rebuttal and withholding the interruption. Still, he acknowledges that interrupting with a question can be necessary from time to time to speed up or redirect theconversation. They advise buyers not to be in a hurry, though—if a matter gets to your level, they say, it is probably worth spending some of 
your time on it. 
As you improve your ability to stay quiet, you’ll probably begin to use silence more effectively. 
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Challenge assumptions.  
 
Many buyers struggle as listeners because they never think to relax their assumptionsand open themselves to the possibilities that can be drawn from conversations with others. As we’ve seen, entering conversations with respect for your discussion partner boosts the odds 
of productive dialogue. But many buyers will have to undergo a deeper mind-set shift—toward an embrace of ambiguity and a quest to uncover “what we both need to get from this interaction so that we can come out...