The Single Most Important Communication Tool You'll Ever Use

According to a University of Minnesota study 80% of all business misunderstandings are due to ineffective listening. Also only 20% of what top management says is understood three levels below. We fail to exhibit good listening skills yet we spend over 80% of our day communicating. How can we be so inadequate at something we spend so much time doing? It is a sobering thought.

You may not think improving your listening skills is worthy of your priority list. I suggest you reconsider. Your ability to listen well impacts every facet of your life and contributes directly to your success or lack thereof. Take a moment and think about situations you've experienced or witnessed where poor listening skills contributed to problems: missed deadlines, unmet expectations, losing good employees, losing good clients, personal conflict, or the breakdown of relationships.

Just as brushing your teeth is important to prevent tooth decay, developing good listening skills is important to success at work and home. Assertive listening is a set of skills that requires practice, patience, and even biting one's tongue from time to time.

There are five basic skills to assertive listening.

1. Suspend Judgement - When the sender of the message has finished his point it should not be obvious whether you agree or disagree with his opinion. Let the other person "have his or her say." This is extremely difficult to do when an issue is highly emotional or when you know you are right.

2. Paraphrase - This is when the listener repeats what he has heard in his own words. There are two reasons why paraphrasing is important. First, it enables you to know if you understood the message. If your paraphrase is incorrect, the sender will simply correct you. Second, and most critical, you have proven to the other person that you are listening. Have you ever been told "you are not listening to me"?

   If so, you have failed to prove to the other person that you heard what they have said. Next time try paraphrasing and see the difference.

3. Clarification - You should clarify a statement by asking questions to get a clearer understanding of what the other person has said. The key is to define anything you find ambiguous. You want to get specifics. I'm not suggesting a Clintonesque debate over the word "is" but words such as "team player", "frequently", and "improvement" all mean something slightly different from person to person.

4. Summarize - This is when the listener restates the main points of a discussion or meeting, similar to paraphrasing. The main difference is that paraphrasing is used throughout the conversation, whereas summarizing is performed at the end. It is an effective way to make sure you have listened and have understood the particulars of the conversation.

5. Attending Cues - These are all of the signs you give to demonstrate you are listening and include eye contact, hand gestures, head nods, and verbal following such as "right, uh huh, really, and OK." Attending skills used alone will come across as fake listening. They are best used in conjunction with the other four skills described above.

   Whether you are discussing business outcomes with your manager or are a participant in a team meeting, listening can make a difference. It can be the difference in not making that million-dollar mistake in handling a customer complaint and in not having an employee quit for no apparent reason. As one woman told me, after completing a workshop assignment on listening, "I learned more about my teenage daughter last night after assertively listening to her for an hour and a half than I had for the last 3 years." What a difference assertive listening can make.