When was the last time you sat in a room and just listened to people?

The management literature abounds with entreaties for us to listen better, to develop listening skills, to be reactive listeners, and to listen first before speaking.

 But have we learnt the lesson? Experience would suggest not. 

The biggest communication problem is we do not listen to understand. We listen to respond. (Stephen Covey)

• we are waiting for the gaps, or the breaks, or when we think the speaker has finished or when our need to interject gets the better of us.

• we break the sequence of discussion, or inject content of little value, or just say the same thing again.

• we listen to respond, building our own ideas, not necessarily creatively building on the ideas of others, and not tuning into their concerns or problems.

We just fail to listen. 

In conversations we spend most of the time formulating our reply to the person we’re speaking to. So much so that we forget to actually listen to them. Which in turn prevents us from fully understanding and appreciating what they are saying - we miss the messages and opportunities they convey, or fail to understand their problems.

So listen first, test your understanding of what the speaker is saying, then think about your response. 

So, what not try a true listening meeting —use your eyes and ears and not your mouth. See what happens.