5
Listening Is a
Contact Sport
Two ears, one mouth—you do the math.
—Unknown Author
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 lis-
tening 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 front-line workers hear
customers suggesting ways your business could do more for
them, the instinctive response is to determine how much ad-
ditional work that might mean. When service employees hear
negative comments from customers about their or the organi-
zation’s ...