Can you hear me now?! Can you?!

Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force.  The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward.  When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.  ~Karl A. Menninger

This is certainly not my first time to focus on the topic of listening.  This past week brought an opportunity for me to be reminded once again just how difficult, and important, it is to listen, really listen.

I was facilitating a leadership development class and the topic was the leadership behavior of active listening.  These participants had just spent the past four weeks developing their listening skills.  Part of the assignment was to keep a listening log so they could track their improvement.  For many, keeping a log allowed them to realize how poorly they were listening and how difficult it was to truly listen.

One of the comments these students of leadership repeated was how they felt like listening took a lot of time.  While feeling pressed with all of their own responsibilities and deadlines, they found it difficult to have the patience to just listen.

It feels like we have become a culture that doesn't really value listening.  Stephen Levine said, "The saddest part about being human is not paying attention.  Presence is the gift of life."  Wow, the gift of life, yet we don't seem to have time to squeeze it into our task-filled days.  Expressing a very similar view, Bryant H. McGill said, "One of the most sincere forms of respect is actually listening to what another has to say."  

This all seems very paradoxical to me.  We want workplaces where people feel valued, respected, have the opportunity to develop and grow, yet, we're very bad at listening.  We don't take the time to listen so we don't develop the skill. 

The late Scott Peck, psychiatrist and best-selling author said, "We cannot let another person into our hearts or minds unless we empty ourselves.  We can truly listen to him or truly hear her only out of emptiness." We are so filled with our own "stuff" that it's hard for us to listen.  We fill our minds with our deadlines, our responsibilities, our to-do lists, our next task.  We find it hard to unearth within us the patience and, I dare say, compassion to listen to someone else.  Are we willing to empty ourselves to allow someone else to be heard? 

The final sentence of this week's quote, "when we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand" describes a wonderfully vivid image of the outcome of listening.  In nearly every organization I work with, employee development is a priority.  But rarely do I see listening skills being emphasized.  Listening is a low-cost, high-return form of professional development ("it creates us, makes us unfold and expand"), yet we say we just don't have the time to do it.  Do we really not have the time or do we not have the will to empty ourselves so we can really listen.

Woodrow Wilson once said, "The ear of the leader must ring with the voices of the people."  Are our ears ringing with the voices of the people?