You Can Hear
More If You Learn to Listen
The
art of shutting your yap and opening your ears isn't an easy one to learn for
entrepreneurs. But it is an essential skill and a potential competitive
advantage.
Executive director, Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation
and Tech Entrepreneurship, Illinois Institute of Technology
There's
absolutely nothing harder or more important for any entrepreneur to learn than
how to listen, carefully and effectively. To everyone in your life -
family, friends, and peers. And to everyone in your business - customers,
investors and directors. One of my favorite INC. pieces is called "What I Learned from My Waitress",
which I wrote years ago and which I re-read every so often just to remind
myself how important listening is. For young entrepreneurs,
listening is a skill to master. For more seasoned entrepreneurs, it's a skill
that's easy to forget because we figure we already know everything. Seems that
as you get older, not only your hearing goes, but quite often so does your
listening.
Aggressive
listening is a professional practice that takes vigilance and constant exercise
because the inbound messages are continually changing and only rarely do they
present themselves on a silver platter. In fact, by the time they eventually
become obvious, it's usually (and painfully) too late to do anything
effectively about them. That's the exact inverse of good ideas. By the time
everyone agrees that they make sense, it's too late to make anything valuable
out of them.
The
best businesses listen carefully, adapt quickly and respond immediately to the
progressive and ever-expanding demands of their customers. And
"customers" in this context means a cluster of constituencies far
more populous than simply the actual consumers of their products and services.
Vendors, partners, media, regulators, legislators and even competitors are all
part of the essential mix. And, in some ways, keeping a careful eye on your
competition might be the most important job of all.
Listening
to competitors isn't something you do because you necessarily plan to react to
or replicate everything they're doing. You do it because you might learn a lot
from them about what not to do or even things - amazingly enough - that
you could and/or should be doing. Good companies rarely lose to the
competition; they lose because they've lost their way internally and they no
longer understand what it takes to satisfy their customers. They take
themselves out of the game through indifference, inattention, or simple
ignorance. Today, it pays to pay attention and be willing to learn from
everyone because someone else may have simply figured things out sooner than
you. In fact, given the pace of change these days, the ability to learn
faster than your competition might be the only remaining and sustainable
competitive advantage. If you're not listening, you learn nothing.
Our
daily lives are so cluttered and noisy, and the constant flow of information is
so overwhelming, that we are, increasingly and of necessity, opting to filter
out, simplify, and often just outright ignore potentially critical data and
other inputs. Because we have no time to do otherwise. Think of this as
attention triage. We take our best guess and our best shot, and we keep our
fingers crossed that we didn't let any of the really good stuff slip by while
we weren't looking.
FOMO is
very much alive and well although it's more properly called information anxiety
in this case. We're constantly jumping from place to place, source to source,
and site to site and we're spending less and less time at each stop along the
way. So, we're gathering and absorbing less and less. In this
frantic and "phygital" world, we're all like dogs chasing squirrels.
And, of
course, the easiest things to shut off (and shut out) are the things that we've
already decided we disagree with. Why would anyone waste time listening to
someone whose views are so clearly and demonstrably wrong-headed? Our
technologies increasingly cater to and abet this studiously ignorant approach -
they feed us what we want to see and hear so we'll stick around. The filter
bubble makes it almost impossible to discover anything new or
different. It's always the same old news. And the process spirals
ever more inward where we seek out only those views and visions which reinforce
and comfort our cozy little world views.
But
there's a way to break this vicious cycle if you're willing to learn to listen
in a new way. This isn't pretending to listen while you're actually just
waiting to talk. And it's not tuning the talker out as you plan your next
remarks. This is about listening in a way that makes it possible to learn. And
there are several keys to learning how to listen effectively.
(1) Listen
even if you don't like what you're hearing. Tune in, rather than tuning out.
(2) Listen
with the specific intent to try to understand where the other person is coming
from. To hear their side of the story and their perspective.
(3) Listen
to understand the real differences between you and the other side because they
might be a lot less substantial than you think.
(4) And
finally, ask what the others really need to get to some agreement.
I
learned this last lesson from the new Bohemian Rhapsody movie.
Freddie Mercury and the guys have had their final falling out and now he's
trying to get the band back together for one last performance. There's plenty
of hard feelings and tough talk to go around and things don't seem to be going
anywhere.
And
then Freddie asks his mates a simple question: "What's it going to take
for you all to forgive me?" This is an open-ended question, but
it helps to move the conversation from feelings to facts and, while the demands
may not be realistic or reasonable or achievable, at least they're out there on
the table and up for discussion. Sometimes all those differences and
disputes are far more manageable than anyone might have imagined.
All it
often takes is taking the time to listen.
