Episode #16 Listen To Win

Scrolling, thumb typing, constant checking on updates seem to be the new skill sets we need to make in this screen addicted modern business world. In reality, the key missing skill is the art of really listening to others. What we want to say may be astonishingly interesting to us but that is the point – everyone wants to be listened to and we need to build relationships, trust and credibility through becoming gold medal winning, world class listeners.

Before we get into this week’s topic, here is what caught my attention lately.

If you have visited Japan you may have been surprised to see people smoking in restaurants. Second hand smoke is estimated to kill 15,000 Japanese each year. The adult smoking rate is 19.3%, with 29.7% of men and 9.7% of women smoking. The effort to eliminate smoking in public places is always going to be a tough sell here. The Finance Ministry owns a third of Japan Tabacco, the world’s third largest cigarette seller. Tabacco represents 2 trillion of tax revenues and 90% of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) members oppose an indoor smoking ban. The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare got steamrolled by LDP opposition to it’s idea to eliminate smoking in clubs and restaurants larger than 30 square meters. Governor Yuriko Koike is planning to make Tokyo smoke free in time for the 2020 Olympics. Let’s see if she can change things here?

This is episode number 16 and we are talking about Listen To Win.

Soredewa ikimasho, so let's get going.

There is a tremendous amount of noise buzzing around in the world of business today. The noisiest portion is the bit going on between our ears, inside our brains. We are so busy, so immersed in what we are doing, we are forgetting some of the basics.

The blue screen addiction we have all become hooked on, means there is barely a minute of slow time anymore. We are texting, reading, surfing, jumping around all over the place. We are running our lives as a meeting conveyor belt, moving from one topic to the next, multi-tasking like demons on a cocktail of uppers and speed.

The upshot is that we are no longer really concentrating on what is happening around us, as we go internal and totally self absorb. The skill of communication has become a one dimensional activity, where we are selfishly excellent at getting out what we want to say, but are not really listening to what our counterpart has to say. We just go through the motions of pretending to listen, but in reality we are only involved in partial listening. Even worse, we are more often mainly specializing in selective listening. Seeking only the content we agree with, we filter out the delivery and all the hidden communication codes therein.

We are also so quick. From the get go, we are second guessing the turn of the conversation and rapidly forming our next intervention, well before the speaker has gotten to the point of the story. Significantly, the point of the story may not be only in the words. The delivery of the story has tremendous meaning, but if we are concentrating on what we want to say, we may be missing that vital part of the communication.

We are also pretty deadly when it comes to cutting off the story, as we believe we have cleverly guessed where the speaker was going with it, even if that is not the case. The central points of the discussion can easily get bogged down in some minor aside to the main point, because we have zeroed in on some inconsequential element, imagining it was key, when it was not. If we are habitual interrupters, we may be breezing through life existing on half conversations and never really plumbing the depths of what others are trying to convey to us. Are we even aware of this?

Reflecting on these observations I have made, do you feel you are a good listener, a gold medal winning listener? As we say in Japanese can you “Kuki wo yomeru” – can you read the atmosphere of the conversation, beyond just the words being spoken? Do you feel you might need to improve your listening skills? The good news is you don’t have to work it out by yourself. According to experts, "good listeners" display a pattern of distinctive behaviors and these can be easily practiced and mastered. Here are some simple guides on how to better at the art of conversation by being a better listener.

1. Stay focused. Minimize external distractions and pay close attention to what others say. A classic example is the fact that we are often guilty of complaining we can’t remember the names of people we have just met. Part of the reason for that is we probably did not focus well enough to clearly catch the name in the first pace. Maybe we were distracted by what was going on around us. Maybe we were so busy thinking about what we wanted to say, we were tuning the speaker out. Maybe the person mumbled their name or fired it out like a bullet and we couldn’t catch the sounds. If we can’t even get their name right we are at a big disadvantage. We need to really focus on the person and get their name correct as a starting point of business discipline.

Staying focused also means suspending the desire to say anything and just let the other person speak. Everyone loves to talk, especially about themselves, so let them. Focus on them and they will appreciate it. Ex-President Bill Clinton is renown for his ability to charm the people he meets. The common thread amongst those making the “charming” comment is that he spoke to them in a way that they felt they were the only person in the room. He would ask them a question and get them talking and the result was they felt they were having a one-on-one conversation with Bill, despite the noisy, crowded venue and the hordes of on-lookers. He was absorbed in their answer to the exclusion of all else for that brief interlude. That is the type of focus we need to adopt.

2. Interpret both words and emotions. The words people use are just one part of what they're saying. You can capture the whole message by also paying attention to the emotions behind the words. Japan is particularly challenging in this regard. The suppression of emotions or the disguising of the real emotion is well entrenched in the culture, so it can be very hard to gauge what is really behind the words. Foreigners sometimes complain that Japanese are “two-faced”. They haven’t yet understood how the culture tolerates the subtle difference between tatemae(public truth) and honne(real truth). This distilling of what is behind the words requires full power of concentration on that person and a total visual interrogation of every morsel of body language and voice inflection that we can muster.

3. Do not interrupt. Interruptions decrease effective communication. We assume we are smarter than the person speaking, because we have super powers that allow us to anticipate where the conversation is headed, even before it gets there. Maybe we should be more humble and polite and let them finish first. This type of patient attitude shows respect and courtesy, two commodities which are increasingly in rare supply these days. Another reason people interrupt us is because they are nervous and can’t control their emotions. They talk to mask their inadequacies but are actually highlighting how socially unsophisticated they are. This is a fatal flaw and says a lot of negative things about them, that perhaps they don’t want to broadcast to the entire business community.
We have some more solid techniques for you to become a better listener. Find out all about them when we come back from the break

4. Resist filtering. Be open-minded; don't judge what someone says by your values only. Offense is often taken in error. We attach a certain interpretation to something said which was never thought or intended. This does not stop us though from reacting and reacting quickly. We get ourselves into knots and lots of trouble because of this tendency. Social media comments can be land mines. We make some comment intended one way which is then interpreted in an entirely different way and before you know it that relationship is dead.

Pathetic attempts at humour or sardonic wit can also become socially combustible when they are way short of the mark or the cultural differences are too great to understand the joke. Very few Japanese ever get the sardonic, ironic, self flagellating style of humour, because the cultural context is missing or because the comedian is fundamentally hopeless in the first place.

Having spent 12 years here working in the international trade arena, I noticed that my fellow Aussies were notorious at this use of incomprehensible humour, in a failed effort to lighten the atmosphere. Actually, it does work a charm, but it needs to be preceded by the consumption of large amounts of alcohol after business hours. During the day it tended to bomb badly.

5. Summarize the message. Be sure you've heard something correctly by offering a quick summary of what the other person has said. This need not apply to all parts of a conversation or to all conversations, but when we are getting down to it, this is the time to clearly indicate you have fully understood what you are being told. The military worked this out a long time ago and even though we don’t have to adopt their jargon, roger that, we can adopt their basic idea of repeating the key information as a checking mechanism to eliminate future problems.

6. Try not to jump in too soon with your own opinion. Be sure to “wait your turn” to speak. Japanese is a great language for teaching us to be patient and wait until the punchline. In Japanese grammar, the verb comes at the end of the sentence, so as we are listening, we don’t know if the statement is going to be positive or negative, past, present or future. No point jumping in and cutting someone off when speaking Japanese, because you have no clue where they are going with the story. This is a good discipline to adopt for ourselves in general. If you are an ardent interrupter, an unreformed impatient, a spirited replier, a seasoned sentence finisher, then buddy ease up. Purse your lips together and let no sound emerge until the other person has stopped. This may be just killing you to have to wait, but your listening skills will skyrocket in proportion to your degree of patience.

The lost art of real listening needs to make a comeback and we need to all become the poster children for the revolution. Let’s get back to business basics and listen our way to great success.