“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” ― Stephen R. Covey

… And Listening

When I was in my early teens, I had an aunt offer me the today-equivalent of 5 dollars if I were to shut up for five minutes. I embarrasingly failed to win the cash, and not even by a short margin. If you want to understand an aspect of human behaviour, search for the rare currency. When it comes to conversation, the ability to listen is definitely scarcer than that to speak, and examples abound. Anyone who raised children knows that for the vast majority, teaching them to not rudely interrupt is a long term effort. Listening is not sapiens’ strongest attribute.

Nelson Mandela, who I imagine had to answer over and over for decades on end the same interview question on leadership, speaks of a crucial childhood lesson on what makes a great chief (and I would argue a great person).

As a boy, Mandela was greatly influenced by Jongintaba, the tribal king who raised him. When Jongintaba had meetings of his court, the men gathered in a circle, and only after all had spoken did the king begin to speak. The chief’s job, Mandela said, was not to tell people what to do but to form a consensus. “Don’t enter the debate too early,” he used to say.

Mandela: His 8 Lessons of Leadership

This is genuinely hard to habitualize. Our nature disposes us to speak and not listen. We love to talk, so much so even introverted or shy individuals, once engaged in an interesting conversation, seem to speak more than listen. In the very worth-listening-to audiobook “The Elephant in the Brain”, the authors argue that the main purpose of conversation is not the exchange of useful information as we would like to believe, but to “show off our mental ability”.

If exchanging information were the be-all und end-all of conversation, then we would expect people to be greedy listeners and stingy speakers, instead we typically find ourselves with the opposite attitude: eager to speak at every opportunity. In fact, we often compete to have our voices heard, by interupting speakers or raising our voice to speak over them.

… and so it is with conversation, participants evaluate each other not just as trading partners but also as potential allies. Speakers are eager to impress listeners by saying new and useful things, but the facts themselves can be secondary. Instead it is more important for speakers to demonstrate that they have abilites that are attractive in an ally.

The Elephant in the Brain

Professinal meetings are a perfect display of speaking to show off rather than to exchange information. After sitting through hundreds of meetings, one fact painfully stands out. The amount of useful information exchanged is disproportianetly small to the amount of chatter going on. Meetings almost always end with the disparaging feeling that “this could have been settled in 10 minutes. Why were we here for an hour?”. The exception proves the rule: when the information exchanged really matches the effort and time spent, several people comment in delightful surprise how effective this meeting was.

I have learned, at least at work, to take my time in formulating a question, ask said question, and then simply shut up. In the beginning, the few seconds of silence that follow will be overwhelming and the drive to fill the silence with words will threaten to overpower. I would literally whisper to myself, “Shut up and wait.” Sadly, I am not yet this far in my personal life.

A pragmatic habit to adopt: every time someone speaks directly to me (calls me by name), I will say (silently in my head of course) the phrase “listen with the intent to repeat every word this person is saying”.