Listening to Learn; Learning to Listen

Renderas:sect2. The Price of Poor Listening Skills

The opportunities for understanding or misunderstanding in a typical workday are countless. A working person spends at least 30 percent and sometimes as much as 60 percent of his or her day listening. If people in an organization have poor listening skills, the costs may be high and include many of the following:

• wasted meeting time

• inaccurate orders and shipments

• lost sales

• inadequately informed, misinformed, confused, or angry staff and customers

• unmet deadlines

• unsolved problems

• wrong decisions on interviews

• lawsuits

• poor employee morale

Of course, poor listening is likely to affect people's private lives adversely too, and an unhappy private life may be a distraction or disaster that diminishes ...