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How Do You Listen?

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Conversation by Patrick Bohnen

Conversation by Patrick Bohnen (Photo credit: Kraemer Family Library)

Those without hearing impairment can hear, but are they listening? Ear buds allow the outside world to be ignored and an entire new world of escape to tune in.

When you speak with someone face to face, you can tell if they’re listening or distracted. It’s pretty easy, and then when the phone vibrates in the pocket, that instant intake of breath and dart of the eyes take focus from a conversation and onto a device. Onlookers can see the internal question posed by brain waves — who’s calling, emailing, texting, pinging?

How do you listen?

Can you hear a conversation on the phone and tune in without multi-tasking? Do you focus entirely on the caller and give him or her undivided attention? How do you listen to your kids’ stories from school — the drama among BFFs or the playground battles that are so critical to the kidlets?

Listening to clients means you can provide better services and deliverables and work product. Listening to conversation means you can create blog fodder like this (inspired by a phone conversation). Listening intently means you listen with purpose, and what that breeds is respect.

Next time you’re having a meeting or gathering with anyone and you’re face to face, please give that person your undivided attention. They deserve that courtesy and you deserve to be respected.

Listening is the product of communication. We’re creating a society of non-communicators especially amongst millennials and teenagers. Parents are to blame, and today’s youth are this nation’s business future.

When you listen, do this:

1. Shake hands to get the tactile going. If you’re not IRL, then ask a question about the caller’s well being to personalize.

2. Look people in the eye when speaking.

3. Keep all hands on deck and out of pockets or purses; that iPhone is not going to sprout legs and run away.

4. Hear what people are saying by tuning in.

5. Respond in kind and with meaning; and I mean FOR REAL.

6. Erase all invasive thoughts from that moment and focus.

7. End with a smile and a thank you.

What think? Resonate?

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Listening?

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I’m curious about this new phenomenon called “listening.”

In the April 5, 2010 Advertising Age, a sub-head of a larger story says “As social media continues to grow, marketers place more emphasis on listening to consumers instead of just asking them questions.”

In the last three years I’ve heard one of my clients tell me they listen to their corporate customers and as a result they provide better client service; really? I’ve stated that blogging makes you listen differently. (I still concur with myself.) Now this headline about marketers who listen versus ask.

Social media has adjusted the balance between marketer and consumer. Where before consumers were preached at by integrated marketers, now they are sending messages in the reverse direction. The balance of power has shifted, and listening is indeed a new phenomenon, although now a different one-way street.

Online buzz provides much of the fodder for companies and organizations to grasp the conversation via monitoring and tracking and, hence, listening. Perhaps social media defines listening as new consumer-driven positive or negative content about brands being created every minute via word-of-mouth marketing with no pattern, no campaign, no budget, and no director in charge.

Perhaps.

Although I understand the point about the need for more listening, shouldn’t this be an innate, basic skill? Isn’t success embroiled in listening?

Strategic listening requires comprehension and action. One can hear, but without full comprehension, there’s no action, and potentially failure. For a story to suggest listening is now being emphasized because consumers are armed with social media tools implies to me we’ve not been listening too well of late.

What’s your opinion about how you listen? Is social media forcing improvement of listening skills, merely pointing out how poor our skills were to begin with, or making listening temporary until another something comes along?