LISTENING AND FEEDBACK
 

中国经济管理大学 名课教辅

 “Listening is hard work.”

I. Most recent studies have shown that adults now spend more than half of their daily communication listening to someone else speak.

II. Studies of listening skill show that the average North American adult listens at an efficiency rate of 25 percent.

III. There is a substantial difference between hearing and listening.

A. Hearing is merely an involuntary physical response to the environment.

B. Listening is a process that includes hearing, attending to, understanding, evaluating, and responding to spoken messages.

IV. Why should we listen?

 A. Poor listening can cause simple mistakes, lawsuits, and even deadly disasters.

B. Listening is the central skill in the establishment and maintenance of interpersonal relationships.

V. There are many good reasons to improve your listening.

A. The act of listening to another person demonstrates that you value him or her and care about what he or she is saying.

B. Listening to your employees promotes problem solving activities.  By listening carefully and reflectively, a supervisor can guide a subordinate to a solution that has a greater chance for success and greater levels of employee buy-in.

C. Listening increases your receptiveness to the thoughts and ideas of others.

D. Listening helps you to increase the self-esteem of the speaker.  Increasing your employees’ self-esteem can help them to concentrate on the tasks at hand and compete successfully.

E. Listening helps you to overcome self-consciousness and self-centeredness.

 F. By listening to the concerns and interests of the other person first, you are more likely to get what you want sooner and with substantially less angst.

VI. The first step in becoming a more effective listener is to identify poor listening habits we have developed over a lifetime and replace them with effective, productive habits.

A. Here are a few poor listening habits you must recognize and correct to improve your listening skills:

  1. Being preoccupied with talking, not listening.

2. Calling the subject uninteresting.

3. Letting bias or prejudice distort the messages you hear.

4. Oversimplifying answers or explanations.

5. Yielding to external distractions.

6. Yielding to internal distractions.

7. Avoiding difficult or demanding material.

8. Rationalizing poor listening.

9. Criticizing the speaker’s delivery.

10. Jumping to conclusions before the speaker has made his/her point.

11. Being overly concerned with your response instead of focusing on the message of the speaker.

12. Assigning the wrong meaning to words.

13. Listening only for facts and not context, connections, and rhetorical ligatures that link facts to human experience.

14. Trying to make an outline of everything you hear or trying to force information into artificial patterns.

15. Faking attention to the speaker.

  16. Letting your heightened emotions regarding word choice or subject matter distract you from the conversation or speech.

17. Interrupting the speaker to express your own opinion.

18. Wasting the differential between the rate at which we speak and the rate at which we think.  

B. Here are a few habits you may want to substitute to effectively improve your listening skills:

1. Stop talking.

2. Participate in only one conversation at a time.

3. Empathize with the person speaking.

4. Ask questions if you are confused, lost, or need information.

5. Although asking questions is useful, don’t interrupt your conversation partner for a bit.
  
6. Show complete interest in what is being said to you.

7. Attain the privacy or proper environment to discuss the matter at hand to ensure you will give the speaker your undivided attention.

8. Listen critically by evaluating all the facts and evidence.

9. Look beyond your assessment of the speaker to the ideas contained in the speech.

10. Realize that just because you want to hear it, that does not mean that the speaker is saying it.

11. Match your expectations of the speaker’s content against what you actually hear and think carefully about what has not been said.

12. Tune into the speaker’s mood and intention, as well as the content of the speech. 

13. Focus, concentrate, ask questions, and pay attention to what is going on to make sure you understand the message.

VII. To become an effective, empathetic, and skilled listener, you must participate in dialogue.  Here are five skills that may help to increase your chances for becoming a successful, active listener.  

 A. Paraphrase as others speak to show you are actually listening to their words.

B. Summarize the feeling of the speaker.

 C. Reflect the cognitive or logical content of a discussion.

D. Review what you have concluded.

 E. After you have listened, follow through with actions.

VIII. Periodically review your communication practices, and your listening habits in particular,   to monitor your improvement.

A. Here is a four-step process you should use to complete this review:

  1. Review your listening inventory.

  2. Recognize your undesirable listening habits.

  3. Refuse to tolerate undesirable habits.

  4. Replace undesirable habits with effective ones.

IX. You can significantly increase the probability of communication success if you understand the role of feedback in both personal and professional communication.

A. Here are some guidelines for constructive feedback:

1. Acknowledge the need for feedback to assist in bettering your organization.

2. Give both positive and negative feedback.

3. Understand the context of the feedback (i.e., where it happened, why it happened, what led up to the event).

4. Make sure you are using words whose meaning you both understand.

  5. Do not speak in a language your conversation partner is likely to misunderstand, misconstrue, or misinterpret.

6. Do not assume anything about the other person - ask for clarification.

7. Defuse the hostility, minimize the fear, and depersonalize the conversation by focusing your comments on the behavior involved not the people.
8. Know when to give feedback.

9. Know how to give feedback.

 B. Here are a few specific instances when you should not attempt to give feedback:

1. You do not know much about the circumstances of the behavior.

2. You do not care about the person or will not be around long enough to follow up the aftermath of you feedback.

3. The feedback, positive or negative, is about something the person has no power to change.

4. The other person seems low in self-esteem.

5. You are low in self-esteem.

6. Your purpose is not really improvement, but to put someone on the spot, or demonstrate how smart or how much more responsible you are.

7. The time, place, or circumstances are inappropriate.

C. Here are a few suggestions to provide helpful feedback to another person:

1. Be descriptive and provide examples.

  2. Be objective, if possible

3. Be clear, specific, and unambiguous.

4. Do not exaggerate.

5. Do not be judgmental or at least do not use the rhetoric of judgment.

6. Take responsibility for your own job - do not refer to absent, anonymous people.

7. Try to use first-person statements (“I” or “we”) so the effectiveness of your comments is not lost in accusation.

8. Phrase the issue as a statement, not as a question.
.
9. Focus on issues that are both important to improvement and well within the power of the other person to change.
10. Restrict your feedback to things you know for certain.

11. Use each opportunity for feedback to establish useful working relationships and build long-term trust.

12. Help people hear and accept your compliments when giving positive feedback.

D. Here are a few ideas to help refashion criticism so that it conforms to the rules for constructive feedback:

1. Take full, deep breaths to force your body to relax and allow your brain to maintain greater alertness.

2. Listen carefully to the person delivering the criticism.

3. Ask questions for clarity.

4. Acknowledge the feedback with both verbal and nonverbal indicators.

5. Agree to valid points.

6. Do not be defensive.

7. Try to understand the objectives of the other person.

8. Ask the feedback-giver for time to think about what was said and how you feel about it.