Tag Archives: listening

Experience Meets Experience

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Every conversation can be calibrated. Every conversation has a platform. Seven levels of listening –

  1. Ignoring completely, oblivious, engrossed in your smartphone.
  2. Pretending to listen, glancing up from your smartphone.
  3. Listening selectively, attentive only during downloads on your smartphone.
  4. Listening to respond, smartphone holstered.
  5. Listening to understand, to understand the other person, to understand the situation.
  6. Listening to learn, to learn something new, something interesting, something that matters.
  7. Listening for the intersection where someone else’s experience meets our experience on which we can build trust.

Thinking about your relationships, as a manager, as a friend, as a stranger, as a parent. Where is your intersection with reality?

The Value in a Manager’s Role

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“What do you mean, bring value?” Joan asked. “Sounds easy to say, but I don’t know what you mean. How does a manager bring value to the problem solving and decision making in the team?”

“Do you bring value by telling people what to do?” I asked.

Joan sat back, looking for the odd angle in the question. “No,” she replied.

“You and I are sitting here talking,” I nodded. “And in our conversation, am I directing you, telling you how to be a manager?”

Again, the answer was “No.”

“And would you say that our conversations are valuable, valuable to you, in your role, as a manager?”

Joan followed the nod. “Yes,” she said slowly.

“I am not telling you what to do, yet, am I bringing value to the conversation?” I could see Joan making a leap in her mind to follow. “How am I doing that? If I am not telling you what to do, what kinds of sentences am I using?”

“Questions,” she responded. “You are not telling me what to do. You are asking questions and listening. And your questions are bringing value to the decisions I have to make and the problems I have to solve.”