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Rosheen Rodwell

Good leaders can bring out the best in  their employees by paying attention when they speak
Business leaders come in all shapes and sizes and when it comes to soft skills, such as effective listening, they are particularly dissimilar.
Some bosses sit back in their chairs, arms folded, checking e-mails and interrupting when others speak, while others give their staff a chance to speak, listen attentively, and make sure that they fully understand what they are trying to say.
Those who took the listening approach did so deliberately because they understood the power of effective listening, said Sidney Yuen Tat-man  director, global consulting services  for Convergys Hong Kong,  who has taught several 'Listening Leaders' courses in Hong Kong.
He said effective listeners made people around them feel trusted, valued and understood, and consequently brought out the best in them.
They were also invaluable in a business environment that was ever-more international and demanded sensitivity and awareness of how different people behaved and what made them tick.
But despite the obvious advantages of effective listening, particularly for those who have many people reporting to them, it seems that the more senior a person becomes in a company, the less able they are to listen.
'The more senior they are, the more ego they have and the more they think, 'why should I listen to a 22 year old'?' Mr Yuen said.
Unfortunately, having a leader who does not know how to listen results in unhappy, unengaged staff who will ultimately move on to greener pastures. It also leads to unhappy customers, whose comments and complaints go unheard.
'How many companies really listen to their customers?' Mr Yuen asked. 'Companies say that customer satisfaction is their number one  goal, that they listen to their customers, when in fact they do the opposite.'
The difficulty stems from the fact that listening does not come easily to us. Although most of us assume that we are good listeners, the average person's listening effectiveness is only 25 per cent, according to Mr Yuen, which means we don't properly understand and remember the things we are told.
The reason for this is partly that we have not been taught to listen in the way we are taught to speak. There are endless courses on public speaking, but  few  on how to listen.
In addition, we hear five times faster than we speak and, Mr Yuen said, this gave us too much time to wonder how we were going to respond to the speaker, during which time we were not properly listening to them.
'In many incidences when somebody says something, we react immediately, we short-circuit the interpretation and evaluation and we jump to conclusions. Without that evaluation and interpretation stage you make assumptions. People react rather than respond,' he said.
Mr Yuen is particularly impassioned about this subject because learning about listening has transformed his life. As a consultant in the telecommunications industry, communication is a vital skill for him, but until recently he was not a good listener.
'Many times I was interrupting and I wasn't listening to people, to  the point where people would say,  'hey Sidney, stop talking and listen to me!' It was a wake-up call,' he said.
Since then he has learned how to listen effectively,  and  this had helped him to build better personal relationships, increased his efficiency at work and improved his quality of life. Surprisingly, a skill that was so transformative was also relatively quick to learn, he said. 'It is so simple to learn, but it is so powerful once you grasp the essence of it,' he said. Two years ago, Mr Yuen convinced Lyman Steil and  Richard Bommelje,   the authors of  Listening Leaders,  to run a course in Asia to certify a handful of people in the region to teach this skill. Mr Yuen was one of the graduates, and he has since run up to 15 courses which, he claimed, helped business leaders to become more effective in business and in building relationships
Mr Yuen begins his courses by establishing the level of listening skills that his trainees have. Each trainee responds to 50 statements, such as 'I remember the names of those I meet' or 'I avoid allowing my mind to wander when listening', and their answers point to the areas where they fall short.
Once leaders have identified their individual needs, they can concentrate on the areas they need to work on, and Mr Yuen advises leaders to adopt a three stage process to learn how to listen.
Firstly, they needed to explore their attitude, skills and knowledge and begin to develop a listening habit, he said. During this preparation stage they would build a solid foundation for their learning process, exploring their attitude, skills and knowledge and would begin to develop a listening habit.
Once this grounding is in place, leaders need to learn some of the principles of effective listening, and so the second stage of their  education involves learning how to take primary responsibility for fully understanding what others are  saying to them and for making themselves understood to others. At this point in the process, Mr Yuen also encourages leaders to acquaint themselves with the concept of SIER, where messages are sensed, interpreted, evaluated and responded to, and so are carefully and properly understood.
During this stage it was also helpful for leaders to identify and align their working values with their purpose for working in their  position, Mr Yuen said.
'People are not happy because their values and purpose are misaligned. You could be very good at what you do for your company, but you are not happy because your values are different,' he said. Finally, leaders need to learn how to put their newfound knowledge into practice. They should learn ways to control their emotional response, to take responsibility for not getting upset when they hear words that normally provoke a reaction. They also need to learn to identify and minimise potential distractions such as e-mails and  phone calls.
At this stage, they should  learn how to take notes in a way that works for them. 'Seventy five per cent of what I say to you, you are going to forget and that is why you take notes. But people remember things differently, so we teach people to build a structure of note taking that fits them,' Mr Yuen said.
He explained that the process of learning how to listen effectively was highly individual. Leaders of large organisations, for example, needed additional skills to cope with the volume of staff and customers that they had to listen to.
'The larger the organisation,  the more tools you need, with multichannels for listening, whether that be by e-mail, by phone or face-to-face.
'When you have an organisation that employs 10,000 people, listening to everyone is not practical. Time is key, so you need tools to communicate and to summarise information. You also have to have particularly good listening skills with the people who immediately communicate with you and trust them to communicate as well with their subordinates,' Mr Yuen said.
Once leaders had grasped the ideas and practices needed for effective listening, they should practice for 10 weeks with their family, supervisors and peers, Mr Yuen said. At that point they had usually improved their effectiveness by 25 to 30 per cent simply by learning to listen properly.
'One of the participants on my training course called me two weeks later and said it had changed his life,' he said.
The ear of the leader must ring with the voices of the people
Woodrow Wilson
28th president of the United States



Power of listening