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REFLECTIVE LISTENING

"He who has ears to hear, let him hear." -- Mark 4:9

In the wake of the corporate bribery scandals of the 1970s, a University of Georgia business professor named Archie Carrol interviewed hundreds of corporate managers to find out whether or not they felt they were being pressured to bend their principles in order to beef up the bottom line. One of his findings was especially disturbing. It was that there seemed to be a severe "breakdown of understanding" between various levels of the business hierarchy over issues like book-cooking and bribery, and quality control. Apparently a lot of middle managers were hearing mixed or confusing messages, and as a result were "behaving unethically out of a fear of reprisal, misguided sense of loyalty, or distorted concept of the job."

You come across this problem a lot in big organizations, and not just with regard to ethical problems. The "mixed message" or "missed message" syndrome surfaces constantly when managers hint, or suggest, or imply that such-and-such an operation be carried out without actually spelling out what they mean. Their subordinates take a noble stab at what they think is being asked of them, and a lot of the times they guess wrong. So you get a quality control officer, for example, fudging an inspection report because his boss has said, "We're running way behind" and he interprets that to mean, "It doesn't have to be good. It has to be Tuesday."

The situation isn't only unfortunate, it's a little ridiculous too, because there's really a fairly simple way out of the problem. It's for the confused subordinate - or the confused manager at any level - to come out and ask what is meant. It's for everybody involved in a mutual enterprise to talk to each other regularly, so that everybody knows what the rules are, and how the game is supposed to be played. In other words, the solution is communication.

This has a direct relevance to motivation. If you as a manager want to get anybody to do what you want, the one type of skill you must become good at is the skill of communicating with others. You can set up the most beautifully Pinpointed set of objectives in the world, and the most rigorous Recording system, and you can deliver those positive Consequences in exactly the right 4:1 ratio, but if you can't communicate with your people, it will all be wasted effort.

In this chapter, and the following chapter, I'm going to be talking about communication, laying out the specific interactional skills and techniques that my company has found effective in making the P.R.I.C.E. motivation system not just a well-designed blueprint, but a working reality.

There are two aspects to communication: listening to what others are saying, and telling them what you want. The first aspect, listening, is extremely important to anybody who wants to turn anybody on, for the simple reason that if you can't hear what is being said to you, you will have no idea who you're dealing with: you'll be in the ridiculous situation of the manager who assumes his people understand him - and ends up with a record run of defective merchandise because that's what they "knew" he wanted.

The good Lord gave us all two ears and only one mouth. Yet most of us, in and out of business, behave as if the allotment were exactly the reverse. In this chapter I'm going to be emphasizing the importance of those two essential organs, the ears, because they're so often neglected.

In my experience both on the playing field and in our company's business motivation workshops, I've found that there is a specific set of listening skills that most quickly and effectively serves to clarify who it is you're dealing with, and what he or she understands about what you want to get done. We call them Reflective Listening skills. This chapter will show you how to use these skills to improve the communication process in all your personal interactions, so that you can avoid the "missed" or "mixed" message syndrome.

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