There appears to be a lot of well meaning advice on how to train someone who doesn’t listen to you to actually listen. Unfortunately, the advice is all very formulaic and I’m not sure it will work.
Having had this problem in the past, I have some degree of experience and frustration on the subject. The problem is that when you try to train someone to listen, you are trying to change their behaviour and that is a hugely complex task.
I first tried all the standard ways of getting them to listen like yelling at them, brow-beating them and stomping my feet but that just turns people off.
I have tried giving people a structured memo pad to write things down on. (I really loved the memo pad but almost no one else did and they resisted using it.)
I have tried getting employees to write down what we agreed on and send it back to me in an email. That too was pretty much a failure as who has the patience to police that type of action?
What I finally decided was that I had to marginalize and eventually get rid of people who don’t listen. You just can’t spend the time necessary to teach them.
Either people are learners who can see a problem and work to improve themselves or they aren’t. If someone is a learner, they’ll figure out what to do if you just tell them what they need to learn.
If they aren’t a learner, there is nothing you can do about it. So give up and get rid of them.
I just discovered that there is an International Listening Association. Who knew? They are a professional organization whose members are dedicated to learning more about the impact listening has on all human activity.
“One advantage of talking to yourself is that you know at least somebody’s listening”. — Franklin P. Jones
While at first I laughed when I heard of their existence, the more I think about it, the more I can see what they might have to offer.
Having had employees in the past who didn’t do what I really wanted done, I wonder if their problem was that they were bad listeners. While the responsibility for communication is in the hands of the sender, if you don’t have an active listener on the other end, you might as well be barking in the wind.
But how do you know whether you’re not explaining something properly, someone is just ignoring you or whether they might really have a problem listening?
And if listening is a skill that can be learned, how do you teach people to be better at it?
Today’s TED Talk by Sarah Lewis contains an interesting discussion on Success versus Mastery. I’ll let the video speak for itself but wanted to extend something I was writing about a few days ago on perfection.
If success is doing something right one time and mastery is about being able to do it time and time again, Sarah has stated that it is important to celebrate the near wins as small failures are necessary to achieve mastery.
This means though that a perfectionist will never achieve mastery due to an obsession with small successes. Instead of being able to let go when perfect success is not achieved and trying again, the perfectionist will devote entirely too much time to each success and thus never achieve mastery.
The perfectionist will never produce the volume of work necessary to learn to become a master so in itself, perfectionism is the ultimate failure.
Anyone, enough of my sometimes incoherent ramblings. Watch Sarah.
Within minutes of posting yesterday’s blog on Founder’s Syndrome, I got a call from Guy Burry who regaled me with tales of the founders he has worked with. He also told me about a syndrome that I had never heard of before. It’s called Dentist’s Syndrome.
This is something that CEOs get and it’s pernicious. Think about every trip you have made to the dentist in your life. You sat there in the chair with the dentist sticking things in your mouth all the while she is asking questions and chatting with you.
Chatting may be too nice a way of putting it because dentists do all the talking. All you can say with your mouth full of fingers and instruments is something that sounds like “Mhwp flub falbin.” How a dentist can understand what you are saying is beyond me. After a while you stop trying to say anything intelligible and just grunt yes or no.
After ten years of this, a dentist is pretty much relegated to one-way conversations. She doesn’t expect to get any answers and basically just has to fill in the answers for herself.
And this is exactly what happens to CEOs who are in place for too long.
They start out asking questions and trying to understand the answers. After a while though, the answers sound pretty much all the same and eventually end up sounding like a bunch of grunts and whistles.
As a result the CEO ends up having a conversation only with himself, not listening to those people around him and voila, he has Dentist’s Syndrome: a case of asking questions but not hearing the answers and pretty much filling in the answers that he wants.
I had an interesting conversation in Waterloo the other day with Trish Crompton, Communitech‘s Digital Journalist about Founder’s Syndrome. I’ve thought much about the syndrome since and realized that it doesn’t apply just to founders of companies but to everyone who works. It is in fact the foundation of the Peter Principle.
First, let’s look at Founder’s Syndrome. According to Wikipedia “The passion and charisma of the founder or founders, which was such an important reason for the successful establishment of the organization, becomes a limiting and destructive force, rather than the creative and productive one it was in the early stages.” This usually means that it is time to turf the founder and get a more experienced CEO.
And the Peter Principle says that people are promoted one level above their level of competence because companies promote people who are great at their jobs, not ones who will be great at the next level. (Which pretty much means that all managers are incompetent.)
So what is it that causes the founder’s syndrome or the Peter Principle? In thinking it through, I’ve realized that what stops people being effective is their inability to learn and to adapt to new situations.
When you stop learning and adapting, you’ll stop being effective and will stop being able to handle the next new challenge. As I’ve said before, you have to wake up every morning thinking that absolutely everything you know could be wrong if you want to continue to learn.
So learning is the key to continued success. As long as you can learn at the same pace as your situation changes, you’ll not fall behind and be subject to Founder’s Syndrome or the Peter Principle.
There appears to be a lot of well meaning advice on how to train someone who doesn’t listen to you to actually listen. Unfortunately, the advice is all very formulaic and I’m not sure it will work.
