You Hear But You Don't Listen

YOU HEAR BUT YOU DON'T LISTEN BY DAVID STUKUS

Many of my leadership stories can be traced back to my days playing team sports. In business and in life we can learn a lot from competitive sports. This installment involves listening, and this takes me back to when I was 17 years old. My high school coach used to shout, “You hear but you don’t listen!” He was right, and there are plenty of studies to back that up – most of us are poor and inefficient listeners. We spend about 45% of our waking hours in some form of listening. Yet, studies have shown that after listening to a 10-minute oral presentation, the average person has heard, understood, and retained 50% of what was said. After 48 hours, that number drops to 25%.

I view listening as one of the most important skills a leader can have. Leadership is the art of motivating a group of people to act toward achieving a common goal. A lot of people think that motivating others requires a certain charisma – “if they like me, I can motivate them”. To a certain extent this is true, but to truly be successful leading teams you need to do more than get your team to like you. You need to get to know your team. Understand them as people, know what they like and dislike - this helps build trust. But listening is not just the act of using our ears, and the best listeners use their eyes as well. They call this active listening, and it involves body language and facial expressions. As a leader, just like a sports coach, you can read body language to help to determine how to “motivate” an employee, or in the case of the coach, the player. The best coaches in sports know that players react differently to their style of coaching and that they do not treat their players the same. It could be that some have more potential, or can handle the pushing, or sometimes just need a figuratively swift kick in the butt to get them to work harder. Other players may crawl up in their shell with this type of coaching which is why you cannot always treat your players (or employees) the same. But you do not know this until you become an active listener.

In today’s scrolling world with all our mobile gadgets to distract us, it is that much harder to be an active listener. Some of the things I try to do to be an active listener:

• Close your laptop when sitting across from someone. Or move away from your screen. Put your phone away or at least turn it over. If you do this, there is a connection, and you can feel the energy from the conversation.

• If you are on the phone with someone, move away from your computer. If you are on the office line, put your cell phone away. You can always tell who is not engaged when on a phone call because you can hear the clicking of the keys or simply can tell they are engrossed in something else. I hope that post pandemic, we continue with more video calls to keep the level of engagement high.

• Create space in your day. Avoid back-to-back meetings so that you can prepare for the next meeting and as a result be prepared to be a better listener.

• Look people in the eye.

• Ask questions. Be Socratic. The Level 5 Leaders that Jim Collins writes about in Good to Great do this.

• Stop trying to formulate a response while you are listening.

• Do not prejudge.

Good listening translates to happier team members and retention. From Rainmaker Thinking founder Bruce Tulgan founder: “When we ask employees what they want from the people above them, the first thing they mention is never a raise. It is always more coaching, more guidance, clearer goals, more constructive criticism, and more recognition for achievements.

There are two parts to this – listening to understand and listening to help make decisions, and that is where the Chief Idiot comes in.

The Chief Idiot

I spent the first half of my career working as a leader in the field in a retail environment. If I had a dollar for every time I heard “what are those idiots in home office thinking”, I would be a rich man. I must admit, I had the same sentiments on several occasions. One of my jobs was as the lead merchandiser and I was the liaison between the operations team with the boots on the ground and those in marketing 300 miles away at the home office. I think we made a great difference and convinced the idiots to listen to the people who had their finger on the pulse of the market and business. When I moved to a different retail company in a position in the “home office”, I vowed I would never forget where I came from.

On a Zoom call the other day, someone asked me about this “award” on the shelves behind me. For those Christmas Story fans out there, this is my Major Award. Years ago, my team gave this to me (some team, right?) because I always tried to be a good listener. As leaders, we must listen – to our team members, to our customers, to our suppliers, to our front-line associates, and cannot make all our decisions without listening to these key groups. I view listening as one of the most important skills a leader can have. Funny that you rarely see it in job descriptions though... What do you view as an important leadership trait? And you cannot say “Idiot” – I have already locked that one up!