Listen Up or Lose Out

Robert Bolton, Dorothy Grover Bolton

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780814432020
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

Learning how to actively listen and absorb what a person is saying, thinking, and feeling can set the stage for dramatically improved relationships and increased personal success.

Most people retain only a fraction of what they hear, resulting in miscommunications and lost opportunities. In Listen Up or Lose Out, communications expert Robert Bolton highlights the underestimated and under-utilized tool of active listening and explains how it can be used to gather perspectives, bridge differences, and resolve problems.

Bolton teaches you key communication skills by:

• breaking down listening into a set of learnable skills such as avoiding the urge to criticize, question, or advise;
• focusing on the speaker's point of view;
• asking the right questions, in the right order;
• and learning how to read people's feelings and reflect them back

Listen Up or Lose Out explains how one can become a skilled listener who experiences fewer conflicts, makes better decisions, and discovers opportunities that others might miss. Whether personally or in business, could you benefit from better communication? Give listening a try!

PART I

WHY IMPROVE
YOUR LISTENING?

Of all the communication skills,

listening is the earliest learned and the most frequently used.

Yet it is the least taught and the least mastered.

Although we spend more than one-half

of our communication time listening,

much of it is wasted because we listen so poorly.

—EASTWOOD ATWATER¹

1

Quality Listening Enhances Work Relationships

Few people are successful unless a lot of other people want them to be.

—CHARLES BROWDER

LIFE IS LARGELY a matter of relating to other people. As far back as 328 BCE, Aristotle wrote, “Man is by nature a social animal.” Centuries later, in 1624, English poet John Donne coined the phrase, “No man is an island”—a metaphor so telling that it reverberated through the centuries and is widely known today by schoolchildren and literature-loving adults alike. Those were more elegant ways of saying what contemporary medical and social science research has confirmed: Quality relationships are crucial to human well-being.

This chapter discusses the importance of quality relationships to one’s success at work. Here we note that:

•Work organizations are clusters of collaborative relationships.

•The quality of relationships in an organization greatly impacts the organization’s success.

•The quality of one’s relationships affects customer retention.

•Poor work relationships can be disastrous to one’s career.

•Strong work relationships boost one’s career.

•Quality work relationships increase your access to useful information.

•The quality of your relationships influences the amount and value of the cooperation you receive.

•Weak ties can be unexpectedly beneficial.

•Evolution equipped the human brain to pay special attention to managing our relationships.

•Digital device overuse erodes empathy, shallows relationships, hinders learning, and hampers productivity.

•Empathic listening builds connections and enhances relationships.

Work Organizations Are Clusters of Collaborative Relationships

Most full-time employees spend a majority of their waking hours at work. The quality of their work relationships significantly impacts their sense of personal fulfillment, as well as their on-the-job effectiveness and satisfaction with their employment. These relationships are also crucial to long-term success at work. However, it’s not unusual for highly task-oriented employees who’ve been sent to an interpersonal skills workshop or executive development program to express puzzlement or annoyance over the assumption that it’s important for them to relate effectively to others at work. They’re convinced that in today’s streamlined organizations, it’s difficult to find enough time to devote to their all-important task responsibilities. Spending time maintaining and improving work relationships seems unrealistic. One manager expressed the sentiments of many when he said, “I get paid for results, and I focus on achieving those results without worrying about the state of my relationships with coworkers. They should get it; this is a business, not a social club.”

The problem with that line of thinking is that people are people—not robots. And organizations are not impersonal entities but are clusters of collaborative relationships. In fact, the word “company” derives from the French compain, which originally meant “companions.”¹ Work organizations have always been networks of relationships, and in our increasingly interconnected world, they’ve become much more interactive. Not long ago, 30 percent of work was collaborative and 70 percent the result of individual contribution. That figure soon reversed: 70 percent of all work became collaborative while only 30 percent (now probably less) is done individually.²

Good relationships improve one’s performance. Researchers observed two types of groups performing motor-skill and decision-making tasks:

1.Groups of friends

2.Groups of acquaintances—people who only knew each other casually

The results were clear: On average, the groups of friends completed more than three times as many projects as the groups comprised of mere acquaintances. In decision-making tasks, groups of friends were more than 20 percent more effective than groups of acquaintances.³ These studies parallel other research demonstrating that when it comes to decision making and productivity, good relationships make a powerful contribution.

To be successful in virtually any position in today’s highly interactive organizations, one must obtain cooperation from other people and work effectively with them. So being relationally adept is an important qualification for virtually every position. And one’s competence at building and maintaining mutually supportive relationships becomes even more important as one’s career progresses.

The Quality of Relationships in an Organization Greatly Impacts the Organization’s Success

Good relationships are a lubricant that makes the operations of an organization run smoothly. As University of Michigan professor of business administration and psychology Jane Dutton says:

Abundant research suggests that a fundamental key to increasing energy in the workplace, and thereby increasing the effectiveness of both individuals and organizations, is the building of high-quality connections—ties between people marked by mutual regard, trust, and active engagement. A focus on high-quality connections and their energy-generating capabilities . . . can transform the energy possibilities in both people.⁴

Cathy Carmody, a change agent at Monsanto, says of former CEO Bob Shapiro that he “believes that the company’s competitive advantage is how we relate to each other.” And Samuel Culbert, professor of management at UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management, says, “No more effective management tool exists than a trusting relationship.”⁵

Strong social networks facilitate learning by conveying information and knowledge, and transmitting the organization’s culture. Thus, as one might expect, researchers found that high-caliber work relationships were associated with more innovative output and the likelihood that people’s work will be satisfying to them. Researchers also found that when employees interact well with one another, productivity and profits increase, while absenteeism and job discontent decrease.⁶ Robust interpersonal networks also reduce turnover rates, decreasing severance costs and hiring and training expenses. MIT Professor of social studies of science and technology Sherry Turkle highlights the business impact of time spent in conversation: “Studies show a link between sociability and employee productivity.”⁷ Good relationships also enhance creativity.⁸

For years, the employees of Radnor Partners, a large high-tech consulting firm, worked mainly from their homes, and they loved it. Then in 2004 a new CEO, who was not a fan of telecommuting, headed the company. Shelly Browning, the vice president in charge of human resources, summarized the CEO’s message to the troops:

He said, “We’re a growing company. Change only happens when people collaborate. You can’t collaborate as effectively at home, where you don’t run into someone in the cafeteria. You don’t bring them up to speed on that thing; you forget to tell them the nine other things. It slows down the rate of change. . . .” So, he said, “All our leaders are going to be in offices. . . . Your job is in an office because that’s where we collaborate.”

Grudgingly, people came to work in offices. Over time, however, attitudes changed. Browning says, “But over eight years [the CEO] has changed every one of our minds.” The result? When everyone worked in the same location where they experienced face-to-face relationships daily, the company began to grow at five times its previous rate!⁹

In the book, Good to Great, Jim Collins emphasizes that companies that excelled consistently were noted for having collegial relationships so strong that many lasted a lifetime. As Dick Appert of Kimberly-Clark told Collins, “I never had anyone at Kimberly-Clark in all my forty-one years say anything unkind to me. I thank God the day I was hired because I’ve been associated with wonderful people. Good people who respected and admired one another.”¹⁰ Here’s Collins’s summary of his research on high-performing companies:

The people we interviewed from the good-to-great companies clearly loved what they did largely because they loved who they did it with.¹¹

Low-quality work relationships, on the other hand, have been found to impede the transfer of knowledge, decrease employee motivation, and in numerous other ways reduce personal motivation, job satisfaction, and organizational effectiveness. Mediator Daniel Dana, writes:

It has been estimated that over 65% of performance problems result from strained relationships between employees—not from deficits in individual employees’ skill or motivation.¹²

When you couple the benefits of good work relationships with the detrimental effects of poor work relationships, the implications are dramatic. So it’s not surprising that in Businessweek’s annual survey of business schools, a major reason that Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business received top ranking was that “Fuqua students are exceptionally good at collaborating.” As Bill Boulding, the school’s dean, put it, “To be a great leader you need to be great in a team setting, and I think that’s where we get credit from employers.”¹³

This is not to suggest that you should be buddy-buddy with everyone at work. But you do need to build sufficient rapport with people both inside and outside the organization to accomplish tasks effectively.

The Quality of One’s Relationships Affects Customer Retention

The strength of one’s relationships is also a primary determinant of customer retention. One of the nation’s large service firms surveyed its customers and found to its surprise that, while technical competence was necessary, it was not the most important factor in customer retention. Clients expected the expertise: The empathy and personal concern they experienced are what made them stay.¹⁴

Poor Work Relationships Can Be Disastrous to One’s Career

Talent that’s not supported by collaboration ultimately produces limited or negative results. Researchers found that, when people a...