Managing Knock Your Socks Off Service, 3rd Edition

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Listening Is a Contact Sport

Two ears, one mouth—do the math.

—author unknown

Listening well is a rarity in our society. That helps explain the popularity of psychologists, the scale of the divorce rate, and why there are so many self-help books with communications as their central theme. As a manager, you have to serve as both listening post and traffic analyst. Neither is as simple as it sounds.

Part of the challenge of listening is filtering out the noise of bias and defensiveness. When your frontline workers hear customers suggesting ways your business could do more for them, the instinctive response is to determine how much additional work that might mean. When service employees hear negative comments from customers about their or the ...