Listening

The fundamental skill of hearing, understanding and accurately interpreting what someone else says.

Listening is one of the key skills involved in the acquisition of knowledge but unfortunately many people are bad listeners and this considerably hampers their learning and development. Bad listeners are easy to spot. They frequently:

• interrupt
• misinterpret what was said
• hear what they expect to hear rather than what was actually said
• look bored and uninterested
• talk nineteen to the dozen
• look impatient or distracted
• do other things while claiming to be listening
• think what to say next rather than listening to what is being said
• can't paraphrase or 'read back' accurately what someone else said.

There are a number of ways you can use to force people to develop their listening skills. The simplest is to impose spot checks by asking someone without warning to paraphrase what has just been said. The threat of being called upon to paraphrase concentrates the mind wonderfully. A more considerable challenge is to give a poor listener the job of recording things on a flip-chart or white board. Insisting on itemised responses is another no-nonsense way of getting people to listen hard.

Perhaps the most ruthless way to improve listening skills is to play the wallflower game. You can adapt this to suit your purposes and time scales but typically you go through the following routine:

• Invite a bad listener to describe to a small group of colleagues a current problem or concern he/she would like some advice on. Allow only a maximum of five minutes to brief the group.
  
  
• Ban the bad listener from saying anything else for twenty to thirty minutes while the group discusses his/her problem. The bad listener has to 'sit out' (like a wallflower at a dance) for the duration of the discussion watching, listening and making notes without intervention. The more the group drifts from what the bad listener perceives to be the point, the better. The bad listener still has to sit there listening to it all without being allowed to speak
  
  
• After twenty minutes or so invite the bad listener to paraphrase the ideas he/she has noted without demure while the group members check that all their ideas were heard.

Bad listeners suffer agonies while playing wallflower because they are committed to the topic under discussion and yet are condemned to the role of silent note-taker.

However you choose to go about it, providing people with opportunities to develop their listening skills is an invaluable contribution to all their learning and development. Tempting though it is, it is never safe to take listening for granted.