Can you hear me?

Do you have a brother or a sister? When you were growing up, did they ever pretend not to hear you? What did you do? If you’re like most other people, your response probably went along these lines. Firstly, you repeated yourself: louder, perhaps with some attention-grabbing techniques like shouting into their ear or poking them. When that didn’t work, you probably appealed to your mum or dad. When that failed to get a response, probably you hit them.

Time after time, I’ve asked groups the same question and time after time, I’ve got the same answer. And the interesting thing is, we follow the same pattern as adults. When we feel ignored, we repeat ourselves, we try to gain attention; if that doesn’t work, we appeal – to managers, to unions, to regulators, to the media – and if that doesn’t work, we’re left with violence. Perhaps not physical violence but some other way of registering our dissatisfaction, like this wonderful news report.

Not being listened to really gets to us, which is why it’s such a surprise to me that managers I speak to say that not listening to the people in their teams is their number one mistake – the one they make the most often.

It’s understandable that it happens. Managers have so much to do, so many different demands on their time, that setting aside some time to just listen to people, to pay attention to them, can feel like a waste. There are so many emails to reply to, so many other things to do, that the temptation is to multi-task, to pretend to listen whilst doing other things. The problem is, we know when someone isn’t really listening. We can tell when they’re just going through the motions and not really paying attention and so, just as we did when we were kids, we repeat ourselves. Which, of course, is an even greater temptation for the manager not to listen – after all, they’ve already heard that, haven’t they?

It may feel like it takes a long time but listening – really listening, not just to what’s being said but also to how it’s being said, and noticing the things that aren’t being said, too – is much quicker in the long run. It can be the key to unlocking all kinds of prizes: to helping people feel engaged and valued at work, to new ideas or proposals, to really understanding people’s talents and skills.

It takes effort and discipline to listen but the reward is worth it. Try it, the next time someone talks to you. Stop what you’re doing and focus on them. Ask yourself how it feels to be them; what is it that they’re trying to tell you? Why are they telling you? What do they look like, what do they sound like? What aren’t they saying? Do you really understand what they’re saying and what it means to them? If not, ask questions until you do.

It doesn’t matter what technique you use – techniques can be studied and mastered easily, with practice. What really matters is your intent: do you really want to listen to them. Do you really believe they have something valid and useful to say? Until you can answer yes to those questions, you’ll keep making that same mistake of not listening and we’ll keep repeating ourselves – or worse!

Empathy

I talked last week about my experiences playing – or rather not playing – Dead Space and I ended by mentioning that it had something to do with our capacity for empathy. Empathy is the ability, though the use of imagination, to “feel” the emotions felt by another person. It’s our ability to put ourselves in the place of another and feel what they feel.

From an evolutionary point of view, it obviously makes sense for us to be able to empathise with others – it helps us live together in groups. Neuroscientists speculate that mirror neurons in the brain are responsible for the feeling of empathy. Studying the experience or actions of someone else triggers the kind of cognitive and chemical processes in our brains that we would have if we were experiencing or doing what they were experiencing or doing. Mirror neurons are the reason why we yawn when we see someone else yawn, or why your foot twitches when watching someone play football – in your head, you’re playing football, too. The ability to empathise appears to be a perfectly natural process, present in most psychologically healthy people, regardless of gender.

If you have siblings, the odds are that at some point during your youth they would have pretended not to hear you. So what did you do? You will have followed three stages. First, you’d have shouted louder, maybe stood right next to them to get their attention. If that didn’t work, you might have appealed to your mum or dad. And if that didn’t work, you probably hit them! I spent six or seven years dealing with complaints and I can tell you that we never grow out of that pattern; the methods change but we follow the same pattern. When someone ignores us or doesn’t understand us we repeat, appeal and then act out in some way.

Why does everyone follow that pattern? Why does being ignored bother us, hurt us so much? It seems that we interpret someone ignoring what we say as meaning they’re ignoring us as a person. They’re discounting us, like we don’t matter or even exist. Learning to truly pay attention to someone else – not just through what they’re saying but also through what they’re not saying, their expressions, their tone, their body language – is the fastest route to really understanding them. And understanding is at the heart of empathy, which is so important in human relationships: we all want to feel that someone truly understands how we feel. We all need empathy.

Mehrabian Madness and the Lazy Trainer

If I showed you a pie chart with three slices, labelled 55%, 38% and 7%, the chances are you’d tell me it had something to do with communication. If I pushed you a little bit harder, you might (as a group did recently) tell me it means that when we communicate, 55% of our message is transmitted by the way we look, 38% by the way we sound and 7% by the words we use. You may be nodding as you read this, congratulating yourself on knowing that little statistic.

But think about it for a moment: if that was actually true, what would be the point of subtitles in foreign films? You’d be able to get 93% of the movie just by looking and listening. And why would you bother learning another language? You’d be able to get the vast majority of your message across just by looking and sounding right. This interpretation is such staggering nonsense that I’m constantly amazed that intelligent people are prepared to believe it. Not that I blame them, you understand: I blame the lazy trainer that told them in the first place.

The statistic comes from the work of Albert Mehrabian. He found that when talking about attitudes and feelings, the speaker’s body language tended to count for more than the words used when there was incongruence between them (ie, the words said one thing but the body language said something else). The application of the findings to other areas of communication is, to say the least, disputed and even Mehrabian himself doubts that they’re valid when the topic under discussion is anything other than the speaker’s feelings and attitudes.

So why is it that groups are still given a misleading (or, let’s be honest, a downright wrong) interpretation of the research? I’m afraid to say it’s because some trainers just don’t think about what they’re teaching groups and, for me, that’s a cardinal sin. I love my job and I take it seriously; without wanting to be precious about it, it’s a privilege to help people and make a difference in some small way. It frustrates me that some trainers seem to take their job so lightly as to repeat, parrot-fashion, such palpable rubbish – it’s their obligation to ensure that what they teach is correct. It’s vital that trainers engage with the material they teach and think deeply about it, at least as much as the delegates do, if not more. Anything less than that and they shouldn’t be doing the job.