Ignite the Third Factor. Peter Jensen

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ a “normal” conversation, when one person is speaking, the other ought to be listening and focusing on what is being said. Each person, ideally, takes a turn, alternately listening and speaking. The whole process works well when this occurs. Unfortunately, many people aren’t particularly good in the listening role—those who have a need to control, for example, or are in a rush, or have a high opinion of their own knowledge or intellect, or quite simply don’t care what you think or have to say. These are people who do not possess a “toggle switch” for alternating between speaking and listening. Over the years their switch has become stuck in a more limited, self-serving range that alternates between speaking and waiting to speak.

      These people—and some of them may have quite positive, pleasant personalities—will never effectively ignite the Third Factor in anyone. Listening—the act of being present to another human being with the intent of truly understanding what they are saying—is an incredibly powerful act, and it’s a skill mastered by effective coaches. Passive listening— paying attention and nodding—may be helpful in some instances, but active listening is the skill of choice if you really want to take on the role of developing others.

       The “Activity” in Active Listening

      Active listening is not only about truly paying attention to what others are saying, but also—and this is the active part—about letting them know that you understand them. According to leadership expert and author Stephen Covey, seeking to understand the other person is the first order of business in active listening. A really effective way to do this is to stop the other person every once in a while and let them know that you “get” what they are saying by relating back to them, in your own words, your understanding of what they have just told you.

      Active listening performs the following functions:

      • communicates respect

      • gives you insight into another person’s thinking processes, blocks and ideas

      • increases their self-esteem and confidence

      • guides you in assessing what the next step should be for their development

      Listening takes three forms:

      • Simple passive listening: eye contact, nodding, acknowledging.

      • Active listening: clarifying, probing, checking out that your understanding of what they are saying is accurate, seeking to understand. There are many blocks to understanding the message, which may include:

      • people not feeling free to say what they really mean

      • feelings being difficult to put into words

      • the same words having different meanings for different people

      • Keen observation of nonverbal cues: Observation involves not only using auditory skills but also watching for visual and kinesthetic cues. Often what you’re hearing does not match up with what you see and feel as you interact with the other person. Making that distinction and feeding it back to the individual can be very helpful to their development. For example: “Your words are indicating confidence, but I sense some concern or reluctance to commit fully.”

      Often, all you have to work with when trying to help someone develop is what you see and hear. Your ability to observe well and articulate to the individual those observations is critical. The most common errors occur due to “mis-hearing” or “mis-reading” what someone is trying to communicate. Their words confuse rather than clarify because they do not match what you are seeing, or they are inappropriate, out of place, or over the top. Keen observation and active listening—combined—are the most useful ways in which to ensure that

      • what you think you heard is in fact what the person intended to say, and

      • you are dealing with the real issue or needs and not some symptom or false front.

      What follows illustrates how anyone can become an active listener.

      I met Robert in a leadership program at Queen’s University. Let me describe Robert by way of his results on the TAIS instrument, a tool we use with executives and elite athletes that, among other things, gauges how they pay attention and in what ways they are distracted. On the interpersonal scales, Robert scored 98 percent on his need for control (just behind Attila the Hun!), 99 percent for self-esteem (“I’m right and I know I’m right”), and also extremely high in extroversion (97th percentile). On all three communication scales (intellectual, negative/critical, positive/support) he scored above 85 percent. I don’t think you’ll be shocked to learn that everyone from all levels of his organization indicated on his 360 feedback* that he needed to learn to listen!

      I should point out that Robert was an engaging fellow and wellliked by his colleagues and superiors despite his listening deficiency. I met with him for a 40-minute coaching session and asked him what he wanted to work on. He mentioned a small, obscure behavior from his 360 feedback. I let him know that I was more than willing to coach him in that area but asked, “What about listening?”

      “I’ve never been a good listener,” he replied with a laugh. Then he talked about his history of not listening, describing incidents from elementary school and the home he’d grown up in. He finished by saying, “Peter, I don’t listen; it’s something I’ve never been good at.”

      In the chapters that follow on imagery and blocks, we will learn that often what’s in the way, what is blocking someone, is that they can’t imagine themselves doing something. For Robert, listening was a monumental and unachievable goal. He literally couldn’t imagine himself as a good listener. The goal of becoming a good listener was, for Robert, an end goal. It was a very big hurdle and would be achieved only as the result of a series of smaller goals, called performance goals. (If the end goal is the top of the staircase, the performance goals are the stairs.) We learn later that good coaches focus only on performance goals.

      I asked Robert if he was willing to let me help him improve his listening skills. He said he was, but then added, somewhat skeptically, “Many have tried.” We narrowed the goal down to giving people who report to him his undivided attention when they came in to see him in his office.

      I started the coaching session by asking him, “Who do you know who is an exceptionally good listener?”

      He immediately responded, “Monique, my wife.”

      I thought, Well, she has to be. You’ll notice I wrote, “I thought”—I did not say this out loud. I didn’t know Robert well enough to throw out a quip at this early stage in our relationship. It was important to manage my own ego and curb my need to be clever and possibly contaminate the coaching environment. (We discuss the need for the coach to selfmanage in the next chapter.)

      “Okay, Robert,” I said, “I want you to be you and I will be Monique. I want you to coach me in acting and behaving the way Monique does when she is really listening to you. I want to know specifically what she says and what she does that make her such a good listener.” Then I walked to the other side of the room and stood with my arms crossed.

      His first comment was “She wouldn’t be way over there.”

      “Then where would she be?”

      “Over here, closer to me and on the same side of this table as I am,” he responded. I moved over beside him and started glancing around the room. “She СКАЧАТЬ