Throughout this book you will be introduced to a number of skills that you will find useful in making communication effective and successful. Having looked at the different ways to communicate, and identified the spoken word and the written word as the two most important, let us consider two skills:
1 listening, which is concerned with the spoken word, and
2 reading, the skill essential for the understanding of the written word.
4.1 Listening
Listening is a skill of considerable importance. Managers need to do a great deal of listening – but how well do they do it? Often they are so concerned with getting their own views across that they fail to listen to others. It may be that skill in listening is not a natural ability, although we begin to learn to listen even before we are born. Is there, perhaps, a difference between hearing, which is the physical act, and listening, which is interpreting? The good manager not only hears, but also listens, decoding and understanding the message, and delivering feedback to show they have understood.
Remember too, that, as we have already seen, a message consists of more than just the words – there are also the paralinguistic and prosodic messages (see above). If the speaker and listener are in each other’s presence, non-verbal signals, such as body language, are also important. Listening, therefore, collects a surprising amount of data – not just about the message but also about the speaker.
Why should we listen?
● To gain information
● To get feedback
● To learn
● To create a relationship
● To show respect and value others
● To hear of someone else’s experiences and insights
● To be in control (information is power).
Listening ability
Listening ability varies according to:
● interest in the topic
● the importance of the information
● the length of the message
● the complexity of the message
● the delivery of the message
● distractions – e.g. personal problems or external things – noise.
Different ways to listen
● Empathise: This means encouraging the speaker, and getting information from him in a supportive, helpful way. Put yourself in his place, try to understand him;
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stay as silent as possible, but show encouragement by nodding, smiling, and the use of other non-verbal signals.
● Analyse: Separating fact from emotion and teasing out the information you need.
Ask questions, carefully but analytically, so as to discover what is behind the speaker’s statements; pick up clues from the answers and use them to help you frame your next question(s).
● Synthesise: This is guiding the exchange towards a specific objective. Make statements to which others can respond with ideas. Listen, and respond in a way which suggests the ideas can be implemented (even if they can’t), but phrasing your next statement/question in such a way that you move them in the direction you want.
Obstacles to listening
● Environment: Background noise, too hot, too cold.
● Bad presentation: Over-elaborate language, jargon, overload (too much information).
● Attitude and perception: Incorrect assumptions or selectivity (selecting what you want to hear).
● Filtering: Allowing prejudice to influence what you hear. Filters and filtering are covered in more detail in Chapter 2.
● Anticipation: Beginning to think about your reply instead of focusing on what is being said.
● Prejudging: Background knowledge and experience can cause us to prejudge, to hear what we want to hear rather than what has actually been said.
4.2 Active listening
The key to good listening skills is to regard listening as an active process. This can be demonstrated by employing the following techniques:
● give your full attention
● look at the other person
● smile
● nod
● make affirmative/encouraging noises
● use verbal prompts
● ask questions
● summarise.
A final word on being a good active listener. The more obviously attentive you are, the better. Show you are listening by restating or paraphrasing, by summarising, by being aware of and responding to non-verbal clues, and by being aware of and responding to feelings and emotions.
4.3 Reading
A famous writer, Walter Savage Landor, said that reading is ‘silent conversation’. It
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is tempting to think of reading as a lone occupation, but the model in Figure 1.1 earlier holds just as true for the written word as for the spoken. The writer (even if long dead) wants to communicate with you just as much as a speaker does. Writers, though, (and especially if long dead!) expect feedback to be slow, and sometimes non-existent.
It is tempting for busy executives, especially, to ask ‘why read?’ ‘Surely,’ they will justify, ‘anything I need to know will reach me eventually by some other means. I do not need to spend my valuable time on reading.’ The more you read (and, of course, understand) the better informed you are, and the faster you are informed, without having to wait for the grapevine or any other indirect means. Reading also helps to improve spelling, grammar and style.
A fundamental aid to reading is the art of making notes. These can be of points you want to remember, or of questions raised by the text which you hope to have answered later in the text. Notes are often written in the margins of books, a procedure
encouraged by some, but frowned on by others.
In all forms of communication, you will find great emphasis is placed on
understanding – or comprehension. This is no less true of reading. A common way of trying to improve comprehension is to read a passage slowly, or to read it normally and then go back over it. Reading slowly is not especially effective, since it has been shown that it has little or no effect on comprehension; regression (the second method) adds considerably to the time spent, but improves comprehension by as little as 3–7%.
Speed reading
There are a number of speed reading methods, and this is not the place for a detailed discussion. Many are based on eliminating unnecessary movements of the eyes. A simple way to speed up reading is to learn the art of skipping – running the eye quickly along and picking out pointers – usually key words – to passages needing closer attention. It may be a good idea to find ways which are suitable to you to improve your memory, too, since it is of little use reading more if all that happens is that you
remember less.
Selectivity in reading
Speed reading and memory improvement will save time and improve your effectiveness, but the greatest skill of all, when reading matter proliferates, is selectivity.
● First, be selective in what you choose to read, especially for business. Some items you will be unable to avoid. When you can choose – go for quality rather than quantity. Scan the many papers that will come your way and decide on their importance. Eliminate the unnecessary. Put your time into what is important.
● Second, be selective in how you read – in other words, scan the text looking for the keywords that interest you, and read around them in more detail.
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Summary
● Communication is essential to the human condition. We begin to learn some of the skills of communication before we are born, and most of us will continue to use them until the day we die.
● We communicate because of a need: a need to get our ideas across to others. Like animals, we communicate with sounds, although unlike animals, we have evolved speech, which can convey complex ideas. Unlike animals, too, we can encode these sounds into symbols, thus giving the ideas their own extended and independent life spanning the generations.
● Communication can be seen as a circular process. Someone has an idea they wish to pass on. They determine who is to receive the idea, and how it is to be recorded and transmitted. The chosen recipient becomes a sender when they deliver feedback to the originator of the idea to show that it has been received and understood.
● Communication takes two forms – verbal and non-verbal. Although non-verbal is important, verbal communication is the way that we communicate the ideas, thoughts or instructions we need to pass on. We do this in two ways: spoken and written.
● For a communication to be effective it has to be received and understood. There are two particular skills concerned with understanding: listening and reading.
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Q Q
A A
Putting the case 1.1
Imagine you are Jane Taylor – newly appointed, taking on the management of staff for the first time, threatened by too many telephone calls and too much paper. Fortunately, you have managed to find time, in this relentless schedule, to read the foregoing chapter. What do you think would be the three most important lessons Jane would learn from it from the point of view of making her life a little easier and her management more effective?
Jane needs to learn most of all the art of listening, the art of reading, and the skill of selectivity. She needs to improve her listening skills so that, while
she may not be able to avoid the telephone calls, she will listen effectively and make the calls as brief as possible. She needs to improve her reading skills so that she also reads effectively, quickly but with comprehension. She needs to appreciate what being selective can do for her: it can reduce the amount of paper she feels she needs to read, but selectivity can also be applied in other ways, in the meetings she sets up or attends, the one-to-ones she conducts, and in the phone calls she accepts, or allows to continue for more than a few minutes.
State briefly why reading and listening are so important in the communication process.