Communication skill #1 - listening

It wasn't until well into my career (mea culpa, in this respect I'm a slow learner!) that I realised that 'internal communication' in organisations is far larger (and more complex) than the formal apparatus of intranets, magazines, emails, speeches, videos and events that I'd been focusing my professional attention on. And it's taken me a little bit longer still to come to a better understanding of what I think is probably the most important communication skill of all: listening.

Maybe I'm wrong about that, though - because I haven't heard much in internal communications arenas about developing the personal human skill of listening.

There are reams of references to the importance of two-way communication mechanisms, and to impersonal and programmatic manifestations of organisational listening in the form of surveys, polls, focus groups, online social media, and the like. But much of the literature of internal communication and employee engagement seems to treat listening as an institutional imperative and process, not a personal way of relating. And while many managers and executives get sent on speaking and presentation courses, I haven't yet met anyone who's been sent on a 'Listening Training' day.

(Perhaps I just haven't been listening . . . but if I've missed something, do please let me know about it).

I suppose one problem may be that we ordinarily take listening for granted: like breathing, it just happens, doesn't it?

Well, no. I think it's very difficult to listen to someone. It really does involve more than just hearing noise through those two small holes in the side of your head. Indeed, I suspect it may have very little to do with that at all. I think listening well is an act of will - demanding of us a commitment to sustained attention to ourselves as well as to another; a temporary suspension of our own judgments and agendas while we try to view the world through someone else's eyes; and an effort to hold in our minds many possible meanings, feelings, intentions and contexts in 'real time'. I know I find it hugely difficult, and that's after training and practice as a psychotherapist (more slow learning, I'm afraid).

So what's this got to do with internal communications?

Well, for just one example - last week I heard Paul Barron, the former CEO of the UK's National Air Traffic Service (NATS), speak at a VMA masterclass. When he took on that job, he faced the difficult challenge of trying to transform a loss-making bureaucratic business, while trying to avoid a politically catastrophic strike by the professional union.

What interested me most about his success in turning NATS around was the personal time he committed to listening to the employees in the organisation. There seemed to be a wearying number of town halls, dinners and location visits at which he listened to employees across the organisation around the country. He started out in the role with a personal listening and learning phase, and it took him his first 11 weeks to visit all the company's sites to hear what employees had to say.

Of course he spoke too, and set out his personal 'brand' and goals. And yes, the transformation entailed far more than engaging employees. But it seemed clear from his description that his willingness and ability to listen to his colleagues - however strident, repetitive, mistaken or suspicious they might be - was an essential element of evoking the trust he needed in order to bring about the transformation without massive disruption. (Not to mention that he also learned more about the organisation than other senior team members had learned in a decade cloistered in their offices.)

I could be wrong. Perhaps it was his self-professed plain speaking, his choice to not wear a tie, or how he spent Sunday mornings that really mattered to his employees (one did ask him about the latter!). But I don't think so. Not from what I heard, anyway. . .

Tools of the devil - employee surveys

I enjoyed Chris Bailey's rant on one of the "idiotic things that organisations do" - employee surveys:

"If you really want to know what your employees think about their work, their managers, their colleagues, and most importantly, their relationship to the organization, step out from behind your desk and start asking questions face-to-face. Stop relying on surveys and making ritual sacrifices to the gods of quantitative measurement."

I agree. While some surveys may have their place, too often I suspect they end up as a routine and superficial anxiety-management tool for an organisation. Perhaps the anxiety may arise from an inability to conceive of and engage in certain kinds of conversations, or it may arise from need to be seen by peers to use 'best practice'.

The sad thing is that talking with people naturally leads to creative solutions, while many survey reports naturally lead to inertia. (And perhaps that's a further kind of anxiety avoided - the fear of the kind of change that makes personal demands on 'leaders', not just on 'employees'.)

Technorati: internal communications, employee engagement, organisation

Communication - not a 'sending' process

Corporate communications as it is practised today seems to rely often on the notion of communication as a conduit process - a sender sends a message to a receiver. This metaphor underlies many practitioners' thinking about their roles, the objectives and measures they devise, and the processes they use to 'reach' their 'audiences'. Indeed, the suggestion that this notion is a metaphor, and not a factual description of reality, would be seen as contentious by many practitioners.

From my own metaphoric bias - that communication can be seen as a behavioural coupling - it's helpful to hear that an empirical cognitive scientist such as Stephen Pinker has doubts about the validity of the conduit model: "Another misleading conceptual formula is the conduit metaphor, in which to know is to have something and to communicate is to send it in a package." That comes from his latest book, quoted by Shawn at Anecdote.

The question of how these metaphors conceal or reveal aspects of our work (or lives) needs a longer conversation, but my view would be that the metaphor we adopt (consciously or not) in part determines the intention and outcomes of our working. In organisational terms, if practitioners explore and adopt a variety of metaphors, that might lead to more flexibility in intention, and more variety in outcomes.

Technorati: internal communications, metaphor, Pinker

The way we talk at work - DeLillo

When it comes to language and innovation inside the corporation, in my darker moments I'm convinced Don DeLillo has it about right, when his protagonist describes the climb up the greasy pole:
"Once out of the mailroom, I began to learn more about fear. As soon as fear begins to ascend, anatomically, from the pit of the stomach to the throat and brain, from fear of violence to the more nameless kind, you come to believe you are part of a horrible experiment. I learned to distrust those superiors who encouraged independent thinking. When you gave it to them, they returned it in the form of terror, for they knew that ideas, only that, could hasten their obsolescence. Management asked for new ideas all the time; memos circulated down the echelons, requesting bold and challenging concepts. But I learned that new ideas could finish you unless you wrapped them in a plastic bag. I learned that most of the secretaries were more intelligent than most of the executives and that the executive secretaries were to be feared more than anyone. I learned what closed doors meant and that friendship was not negotiable currency and how important it was to lie even when there was no need to lie. Words and meanings were at odds. Words did not say what was being said nor even its reverse. I learned to speak a new language and soon mastered the special elements of that tongue." [From his novel Americana]