It's Mostly About Listening

Think for a moment. How many of the tasks that you do on your job require reading, writing, listening or speaking?

Quite a number, isn’t it? For business people like yourself, in an average forty to fifty-hour work week, most of your productive time is spent on job tasks involving these four skills. In fact, it’s hard to think of a job task that doesn’t require communication skills.

Now, visualize this. Let’s take all of these communication-based job tasks and put them together in a pie chart. Think of this as the total amount of time that you spend on reading, writing, listening and speaking on your job. Now, how much of your time is spent on each separate slice? Think for a moment. How would you divide the pie?

Be careful. Your first assumptions may not be correct. Many people overestimate speaking. Some estimate as much as 50%. This may be because we have a tendency to overestimate the importance of what we have to say. But be serious. Do you spend half of your productive time on your job talking? Probably not. Although if you do, your colleagues probably wish you’d talk less.

Many people also underestimate listening. Some estimate as low as 25%. This may be because we take listening for granted. We believe it happens naturally and it’s not something we have to work on. After all, it’s not as difficult as writing a business letter or delivering a presentation at a meeting.

The fact is, however, for your average worker during an average work week, up to 45% of the total time spent on communication-based job tasks is spent on listening. That’s right, almost half. Percentages for reading, writing and speaking will vary from person to person depending on your job, but listening is consistent for almost everyone.

Now, what does this mean? First, it means that close to half the time you spend on your job is spent listening. Meetings, telephone calls, briefings, instructions… so much of what you do on your job depends on your ability to listen effectively.

Second, it means that your company is paying you almost half of your salary to listen. Although you were hired for your technical skills, your marketing skills or your financial skills, most of the time you spend on your job exercises your listening skills.

Funny that this is true, and yet I’ve never seen a recruitment ad in the newspaper specifying, ‘the successful candidate must be a good listener’.

Listening is far more important that you imagined, and success in business is largely dependent on your ability to listen effectively.

Listen!

Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening. These are your four primary communication skills.

Two of them, writing and speaking, are your productive skills. As a sender, these are the skills you use to get your message across. These most often used for business in your e-mail, letters and reports and in your business presentations and discussions. The other two skills, reading and listening, are your receptive skills. As a receiver, you use these to comprehend the messages that you’re sent. In business, you use these skills whenever you open your e-mail, retrieve information online, or sit in the audience for someone else’s presentation.

Many self-improvement books and professional development courses are available to help us improve our business communication skills. However, have you noticed that most of what’s out there is skewed towards improving your productive skills?

For example, many of you have attended a business presentation skills course, or maybe you’re a member of Toastmasters, learning how to improve your public speaking. Others may have been through a business writing course, or maybe you’ve purchased a book of model business letters. A menu of options is available to help us improve our productive skills.

But, what about our receptive skills? When was the last time you had any formal training in reading? Probably back in secondary school. Okay, some of you may have been to a speed-reading course and others may belong to book clubs encouraging you to read more critically, but this hardly qualifies as improving reading as a business communication skill.

Listening fares even worse. How many of you remember receiving any formal training in listening at all? Do you remember anything from school? Have you ever attended a corporate training program in executive listening skills? Have you read – or have you even found – a good book on improving your listening skills?

The fact is, although listening is the communication skill we use most often on our jobs, it’s the one were least likely to receive any training in. We take it for granted that if we can hear, we can listen.

But hearing is as different from listening as eating is from digestion. What you hear must be processed, evaluated and responded to. The more thorough and critical your evaluation is, the more appropriate your response will be.

Practice this. Listen to what you are hearing. Listening is the most critical business communication skill. And like any other skill, the more you practice, the sharper you become.