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.