Can PMs become great at active listening?
One of the most important aspects of Product Management is people management. As shared in the previous article, I believe that working with people has the highest impact on our career as Product Managers. Most of our working time is spent communicating with them. And roughly 60% of that time is about listening, not talking. Unfortunately, only 25% of it remains in our memory.
Are we prepared for that? Do we accept that all of our coworkers want to be heard, want to share their ideas, concerns and wait for a response? Have we ever thought, whether we are good listeners or not?
As a matter of fact, I never focused on becoming a better listener myself until when I started my master’s degree in pedagogy and had to select the theme for my thesis. The selection was based on the 4 basic skills that a person acquires learning a language:
Perhaps because I knew I had visual and sensory memories developed and needed some work done for the auditory.
The process started with research over listening and then it became such a blast for me, that I got deeper into what people call a good listener.
After a year of working on the thesis, I received the title of a good listener from almost all of my friends and close ones. The exercises I was planning for my students affected my own auditory memory and listening perception.
Some of those explained:
1. Counting sounds
This is a fun exercise that can be practiced everywhere. The main idea is to count how many channels of sounds you can hear. The more you concentrate, the more sounds you notice.
I’m sitting in our living room near the fireplace and writing this article:
- the clock tick-tocks
- the keyboard clicks
- the sound of the fire
- the sound of my husband changing his position on the leather couch
- a car passing by
- the hubby yawns
- an ambulance sound in the distance
- the sound of me breathing
- a TV sound in distance… that’s our neighbors
I could even hear my belly for a moment, cause the baby moved inside. You never can tell that there are so many sounds surrounding you before you pay attention.
The same technique might help when listening to a person or sitting in a meeting room and losing attention for a moment. Counting will bring the focus back and you’ll start to notice details in the conversation or discussion.
Here is a video from rainy New York, you can try the exercise just for a minute or so. But I suggest not looking into the video, just counting the sounds.
2. Loving audiobooks
We all have the perception that audiobooks are evil, as they don’t give the same effect as books. But we never focus on the fact that they can actually improve our listening skills a lot.
The main problem that we notice is that we get distracted by other things easily. What keeps us from fighting those distractions? Why not practice good listening using audiobooks, like:
- Lost an entire paragraph in thoughts? Why not bring it back to listen one more time? It was just a 5 min step back, nothing more.
- Speedups: it’s better to ignore them, even though we want to read as many books as possible, become as smart as possible, to train listening skills is to train details we perceive. Normal 1x speed is the most optimal.
- Knowing when and how to listen to audiobooks is crucial. The best is while doing some mechanical work like washing the dishes or other housework. Walking by streets also works, but if there is busy traffic, be careful while crossing the streets. It’s better to concentrate to be safe.
And like in every sphere, practice does it all. The more we practice listening audiobooks, the better we get at listening in general.
3. Listening to real people
When done with training generic skills it’s better to focus on people.
While we might think the most important in listening is the actual act of listening, there is much more to acquire to satisfy the person you have a conversation with:
Receive. Everything starts with this one. If we’re not ready to listen and understand the person we’re talking to we can’t become better, well not be useful as a companion and learn something for ourselves as well.
Appreciate. Or better to say showing that we appreciate it. It’s important not to just listen, but make little sounds to remind the other person about actively listening to him and give non-verbal signs on the things said.
Summarize. Help the conversation to come to a conclusion at some point. Summarize things by repeating some parts told in the beginning or by simple. “So you say….”.
Ask. Better not to come to conclusions without asking questions and clarifying things. It’s very easy to hear the person and agree on things told, but by asking some questions a whole new thing might be discovered by both sides.
Another interpretation of the above mentioned is the active listening techniques summarized in 6 points:
4. Accepting the need for becoming a better listener
We always hear about successful people, millionaires, businessmen:
“He knows how to sell it.”
“She is smart and can convince you to work for her.”
“He talks in a way, you can’t say no.”
But no one ever explains the connection between being able to listen and transferring it into knowledge that will help to succeed. If a person doesn’t want or is not able to listen well, he may not become better at anything else.
Why is that? Simple, because listening is wisdom, the more we listen, the more we start separating truth from lie, smart from bullshit, important from unimportant. The more details we acquire, the more we use them in our interpretation. It’s the first skill for learning new things and it’s the first skill for avoiding the same mistakes again and again.
This is actually a big topic and we can go much further. If you think you have something to tell or you disagree, please feel free to comment. And if you start trying any of the exercises, let me know about your progress.
