Book Review - You Are Not Listening - Kate Murphy (Part IV)
Do you chat with your colleagues? Do you care about your colleagues if they are absent? Have you ever seen workplace bullying? Here are two key questions worth reflecting on:
How often do you really listen to people?
How often are you simply waiting to interject with your own thoughts?
Improvisational listening is a proper noun and it's the art of listening and responding or reacting. What was the special alchemy of personalities, process and protocol that made people work well together? Few years ago, a task force (code-named project aristotle) comprised of statisticians, organizational psychologists, sociologists and engineers examined 180 of Google's employee teams. They scrutinized team members' personality traits, backgrounds, hobbies, and daily habits and found no predictive patterns of a group's success of failure. How teams were structured, how they measured their progress and how often they met were also all over the map.
After three years of collecting data, the researchers finally reached some conclusions about what made for cohesive and effective teams. What they found was that the most productive teams were the ones where members spoke in roughly the same proportion, known as equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking. The best teams also had higher average social sensitivity" which means they were good at intuiting one another's feelings based on things like tone of voice, facial expressions and other nonverbal cues.
A good team, will listen to each other and share news with each other. Listening is a long learning curve. People don't realize the power they have when they learn to listen. Good ears mean to have a superior ability to listen and detect what's really going on in conversations. Studies have shown that people who are well motivated tend to be more accurate in their perceptions. Honestly, we often listen to respond rather than listening to understand. Practice it. Listen to others before they finish speaking.
