You'll go deaf (and broke) if you keep doing that!

Jianying Lu makes a good point in The Listening Style Inventory (LSI) as an Instrument for Improving Listening Skills when he explains that "Listening consumes more of and individuals time than writing, reading or speaking" (2005, p 45). Lu champions the importance of listening as a process as well as a behavior. Lu explains that listening the most important element of communication. The Listening Style Inventory (LSI) is a validated self assessment tool meant to improve your own behaviors and, man can I use it!

If I don't listen, I go broke. Sales is not about "showing up and throwing up" or "feature dumping". The most successful sales reps and consultants do as little talking as possible, at least early in the sales process, and listen as much as possible. And listen closely. If you interrupt, or are passive and detached from the conversation, you will have absolutely nothing to go on to move business forward or. Assuming you know their problem without listening to what they tell you; Planning your next leading question while they're answering the one you already asked; Being distracted by the BIGGER sale that just came in on your Blackberry; These are all poor listening behaviors evaluated on the LSI and will cause you to miss the REAL problem you can solve for them or the buying signal they just gave you.

Listening skills are getting worse and we only have ourselves to blame. If you don't use a tool, it gets rusty, and the 21st century professional needs a giant can of CLR for their eardrums! In a 2003 poll, "...seven in ten firms acknowledged that e-mail is critical to business," (Kubicek, 2003 p18). Kubicek goes on to explain that it is fundamentally important for organizations to conduct e-mail training to ensure it does not become the soul means of communication. It must be managed and used as one aspect of communication lest other skills go by the wayside. I think we can all agree that if that same poll were to be conducted today (just six years later) 10 in 10 firms would acknowledge that e-mail were essential, not critical, to business. Were will we be in six more years? We are rapidly turning ourselves into poor listeners. Most of our communication is done via e-mail and as a result we lose the paralinguistic and non-verbal aspect of communication. As a result, we are less capable of picking up on them when we do speak directly to a co-worker. E-mail is deafening us at a measurable rate, to the point that where we interrupt co-workes and ask them to, "Just put in an e-mail and send it to me." Not only are we creating an environment where good listening behaviors are needed, they're not wanted!

So the take away from all of this is I must make a concerted effort to maintain my listening skills in an environment that is quickly devaluing them. Or I'll become deaf to my clients and broke soon thereafter.

Kubicek, M. (2003, October). Breaking the e-chain. Training Magazine. p 18.

Lu, J. (2005, May). The listening style inventory (LSI) as an instrument for improving listening skills. Sino-US English Teaching, 2 (5), 45-50.