SECTION 8 TOOLS FORCOMMUNICATION 251
8.7
ACTIVELY LISTENING FOR CONTENT,
FEELING, AND MEANING
Inspired by David Godfrey, Carl Rogers, and Stephen Covey.Human nature being what it is, we tend to take rigid positions when emotions are running
high. As such, stress and conflict can cause a leader’s listening skills to wane. The steps listed
here build on each other, and will help you develop an extra antenna for hearing others, even
in stressful times.
- Set the physical and mental stage for good listening.Physical: Arrange the physical aspects
of a room for optimal listening. Mental: Clear your mind to allow room to focus on
what the other person is saying. - Prepare your ears and eyes for listening.Research suggests that words represent only about
10 to 15 percent of people’s communication. Most information is contained in the
nonverbal aspects of the communication—tone of voice, rate of speech, eye contact,
body posture, gestures, and so on. - Keep appropriate silence.Remaining quiet at appropriate times can yield surprisingly pos-
itive results. Given an extra few seconds, another person might just go a level deeper.
Also, give people at least about 50 percent of the airtime. It’s an excellent way of mod-
eling how you would like to be heard. - Ask good questions.Ask questions that allow and encourage people to arrive at their own
analyses and solutions. This is a particularly powerful form of communication known
as the Socratic method. The ancient Greeks honed this method to perfection. Asking
thoughtful questions also shows that you are listening deeply. - Listen for content.The content is the whatof the problem; the process is the how.By con-
tent, we mean the technical or business part of a problem (i.e., the facts) as distinct
from the process—how the problem is being solved. A bread-and-butter skill for lead-
ers is actively listening at the content level. - Listen for process.Listening to process means listening to howa person is solving the
problem—the steps being taken to reach a solution. Many leaders prefer to stay in the
comfort zone of content, often jumping to causes, solutions, and action. Actively lis-
tening to process as well as to content, however, allows a leader to provide both good
content advice and effective process suggestions. After all, effective process is the very
essence of leadership, whether a planning process, an interpersonal process, or a prob-
lem-solving process. - Listen for emotion.No matter the concern—accounting problems, systems difficulties,
maintenance issues—human emotions will be involved. Not infrequently, people have
difficulty expressing their emotions during stressful moments (e.g., when disappoint-
ment or anger is expressed). This is a moment of truth for a leader, not a time to deny,
downplay, or ignore the situation. Leaders can learn how to be comfortable when emo-
tions are running high. Since you can process information at a faster rate than others