This episode is for you, if you’re interested in improving your listening. You’re going to learn why listening is a strategy and not skill; the only way we can tell if someone’s listening to us, which I found really fascinating; some great tips for training yourself to listen better; and also why there are four listening habits, and how you can assess which listening dominance you have, and how that can help you connect better with others.
I think there are loads of tips here for account managers who are dealing with their clients. And listening is such an important thing to do well. I hope you enjoy the chat with Dr Laura Janusik and you come away with lots of tips and ideas to improve your listening. And I hope that you’ll go ahead and take the Echo profile test that Laura mentions, to see which dominance you have and how that can help you in your communication with your clients.
Transcript:
Jenny
Okay, today I’m delighted to have Dr. Laura Janusik. She is regarded as one of the world’s top researchers and educators in the field of listening. She has a PhD in communication with a specialisation in listening and an MBA. Her company Listening to Change offers training, coaching and consultancy services for both individuals and teams and organisations to really help them transform by using listening as a strategy. So a very warm welcome Laura.
Laura
Thank you, Jenny. I’m very excited to be here.
Jenny
Not as much as I am!
Laura
I don’t know on a scale of one to 10, how excited are you?
Jenny
Before I ask you to fill in a few of the gaps, listening is the most important skill for any account manager and I’ve been wanting to get an expert in the field of listening. So I am absolutely thrilled and delighted to dive into these questions, because I know you’re going to deliver so much value. So on that note, would you mind spending a couple of minutes just filling in some of the gaps about you, your background and also why you decided to spend so long studying listening?
Laura
That’s a great question. Where I am currently right now is I’m leveraging my over 20 years in academia, to bring listening to a more general audience. Specifically, through coaching and training. The way that I got into listening was purely by accident. To be honest with you, I had a career that I call, I was a millennial before millennials were born, which is a way of saying that I’ve had a number of different careers in my past. I was in human resources for a number of years. And I did all the different areas of human resources for about 12 to 15 years. And I sold some things and just did many, many different things. But when I was in my early 30s, I decided to go to graduate school to get my master’s degree because I wasn’t feeling that I was as smart as my friends. And I wanted to feel smarter. I decided to major in communication. And what I had wanted to do at that point Jenny, was just develop interpersonal curriculum for companies. They paired me with a world leading expert in listening, Andrew Wolvin, as my advisor, and I told him within the first two to three weeks of meeting him that I was not going to become a listening person. I didn’t know what a listening person was, but it didn’t sound like something I would want to be. And he was very gracious, he said, Laurie, you can be whatever you want to be. So fast forward, I’m entering my final semester of my master’s programme. And I thought, you know what, he’s going to be writing my letters of recommendation, I should show a little bit of interest in his passion. So I signed up for his listening course. And within two weeks, it totally changed my life. I thought this is what listening is, why don’t people understand what listening is, it is so important. And there’s so much more research out there that needs to be done, that I totally changed my career trajectory and decided to stay on to get my PhD so I could really focus in listening and help build the research in that area. So I didn’t choose listening as much as the universe chose listening for me.
Jenny
Can you remember back during those two weeks? What was the crux thing that you leart that really shifted you from interpersonal curriculum to, I’m going to specialise in listening?
Laura
I do totally remember that Jenny. He had us read an article that was about listening processes, and listening models and it included, probably about eight different listening models. And I did not understand that listening was a process or listening could be modelled until I read that article. And I thought, you mean there’s more to listening than just sitting there looking like you were listening! You know, there are actually these steps that go on in our brain. And prior to that I had never really thought about listening as being a brain based activity. It was just something we did kind of like breathing. You didn’t have to understand the intricacies of it because your body just did it anyway. But in listening our body doesn’t always just do it anyway, of course. And that’s one of the things I think that we begin to stumble upon and go, wow, I’m not such a great listener after all.
Jenny
To that last point, why do you think we all think that we don’t need any listening training? Because we’re great listeners?
Laura
I think there are a couple of reasons. Number one, because we’re born with the ability to listen. And number two, I think that, well I know that, most elementary schools and Junior High’s and High Schools do not cover listening as an area to be learned. So if we don’t have to learn about something in K through 12, we generally don’t think it’s important because if it were important enough, it would be in the curriculum somewhere. And until we start unpacking what something really is, we just don’t think that it’s important because we’re doing it already. And we’re doing it at a certain level. But we could do it so much better, if we understood it.
Jenny
How can you tell if someone’s listening to you or not?
Laura
Well, the crux is you can’t really. You can’t tell by looking at them. This is always the piece of information that really blows people’s minds. There is absolutely no non verbal that we associate with listening, like eye contact, head nodding, body leaning. None of those things correlate in any way, shape, or form with what’s going on in our brain. Listening is really about understanding or making meaning. That’s the goal, or crux of listening. And that all takes place in our brain. And even though I can look in your eyes, I can’t see past them to your brain, to really see the words that are going on in there to know if you’re listening to me or not. So what we often do in communication is we perceive listening behaviorally. So we do look for the eye contact, we do look for the head nods. And when we get those symbols from people, those nonverbal behaviours, then we make the assumption that they were listening to us. However, it’s a very dangerous assumption, because as you well know, we’ve all learned how to ‘fake listen’.
We learned that in school too, on our own. We wanted to look really interested and we looked like we were taking notes, but we were actually writing a letter to a friend. Or we established eye contact, because we knew that the teacher or professor would expect that, but we were actually thinking about the party that we would be attending on Saturday. And to complicate this even more Jenny, is cultures have different acceptable listening behaviours. So every listening behaviour that we can think of is actually a cultural norm. And those norms vary from culture to culture. So to give you an example, there are two cultures where when you nod your head up and down, that actually means No. And when you shake it side to side, that means Yes. Can you imagine going to that culture, because I’m in the opposite culture, that the head nod is Yes and the shake is No. So I would go to that culture and I would be reading those nonverbals absolutely, incorrectly. And I would be thinking, when they were shaking their head, oh they don’t like this at all, but maybe they were trying to show me that they liked it. So we have to be so careful with those things.
Jenny
That is so fascinating. Can I ask you, because in my past, in my youth, I spent years working in Greece, and I don’t know if that’s actually one of the countries but actually, when they say no, they kind of lean their head back, you know.
Laura
So you totally get this right. You it’s because you’ve actually seen it. And what was your perception of that when you were there?
Jenny
I thought he was quite rude because they tut at the same time. This is not everybody, but there is this, you know, like that. It means no. So cultural differences, isn’t it? It’s just getting used to it.
Laura
It is and we oftentimes think that people who do things different than us, in those nonverbal ways, are rude and they’re not being rude. They’re being very appropriate to their culture, and we’re the ones being rude because we didn’t learn their culture well enough to communicate with people appropriately within it.
Jenny
I’m just thinking of my audience now, account managers, you know, maybe many of them are working on global accounts, and therefore are dealing with different cultures. So this is a good topic to kind of understand. But thinking more about,
so you can’t tell if someone’s really listening?
Laura
You can’t tell through the nonverbals. You have to listen to how they’re responding. Are they responding on topic to you? Are they asking you questions on topic? Are they doing those strategies like confirming, to show that they actually understand or not? So that’s the only way you can really tell if somebody has listened to you. And if you’ve created shared meaning with them.
Jenny
So that’s really important for account managers to realise isn’t it, that
if I want my clients to know that I’m actually listening, then repeat back what they’ve just said or clarify or ask continuous questions on the topic?
Laura
Yes, exactly. And account managers particularly need to do a lot more listening than they do speaking. So being able to bite their tongue and allow the client to talk, and then doing those things like confirming, which is paraphrasing, and then somehow asking if you’re right. So Jenny, if I heard you correctly, you said this, this, this and that, did I get that right? Because then it gives the client the opportunity to go, ‘Oh, well, you almost have it right but I forgot to say this’. And oftentimes that happens. Or, ‘Yes, you have it, right’. Which is always the ideal or, ‘No, no, that’s not what I meant when I said that, this is what I actually meant’. And all of those are equally valuable.
Jenny
Very valuable. You just mentioned biting your tongue. I remember you mentioned that to me when we were planning this podcast. Tell me a bit about that because I think that’s a fantastic tip.
Laura
Yeah.
In the UK, and in the United States, it seems like the average time between speakers is about a half a seconds, so point five seconds. What I recommend that we do as listeners is after the other person finishes speaking, so the client finishes speaking, I recommend that an account manager bite their tongue for a minimum of three seconds. When you bite your tongue, there’s that physical sensation so you know you can’t speak. It’s a little bit awkward in the beginning, but it does keep you from speaking. And what I know about both of those cultures is people become a little bit more uncomfortable with silence. And so they like to fill the silence. And that is a strategy then to get the client to speak more. Because as an account manager, I know what I know. But I don’t know if what my company can provide is really exactly what this client needs or wants. And I need to get as much information from that client as I can to make sure that we are match. So the more information I can get through them talking, the better off we’re both going to be.
Jenny
A slight side note, but to that point, is there some kind of science behind how someone feels when they are speaking?
Laura
Ask that in a different way so I understand that better.
Jenny
Okay. So the rule of thumb, and I agree that we want to get the client speaking 70% of the time because they have the insight really, it’s our job to uncover it. And so listening and asking really great questions. And I think in general, people like to talk about themselves, don’t they? They enjoy sharing, many, or would you disagree with that?
Laura
I agree with your qualifier, many people enjoy talking about themselves. There are different types of people in terms of how much they feel sharing, in terms of personal lives, or particularly when they’re in a sales type information they don’t want to give too much, it’s almost like going to a fortune teller. You don’t want to give too much because you don’t trust that this person is really a fortune teller. And so you don’t want to give the account manager too much information because then they will just tell you what you want to hear. So I think that we do sometimes have people like that. But the brain research in terms of the neuroscience does talk about our brain synchronising together And when we can speak and listen in a way that, so it’s called dialogic listening, so you speak in a way that the other can listen to you and you listen in a way so the other can speak to you. Then our brains synchronise more so and when we have more synchrony, there’s more understanding, and there’s more likeability. And the really interesting thing to me is, there’s also an element of agreement. So, we can listen to people that we disagree with, but still synchronise with them. So what I often say is, it’s our job to listen to understand, not to respond. And understanding doesn’t mean agreement. I can understand somebody who’s at the opposite political end of the spectrum than I’m at. I can understand and not agree with them, but I can understand them.
Jenny
Fascinating. What else did you learn through your research that really stood out for you? What other surprises did you find?
Laura
I think one of the big ones,
I was one of those women who went into it thinking that women were much better listeners than men were. And you’re shaking your head thinking? Well, there’s a caveat here. So, from a brain perspective, the comprehension, the amount of understanding, there is no significant difference between men and women. However, there is a significant difference in those nonverbal behaviours that we like to attribute to listening, like the head nodding and the body orientation. So women significantly show more of those behaviours than men do, which is why women get the perception of being better listeners.
Jenny
Fascinating. That is fascinating, that’s another one that I’m going to be re-quoting. Now something that you said, that has really stuck with me, is that you call listening a strategy, not a skill. I think that’s a genius thing to say. What made you say that? Why is that true?
Laura
The more I got into the listening research, the more I understood that we had different goals and could have different goals with how we listened. And many of us understand this implicitly, because we have learned to shift the way we listen in different contexts. So for example, how I listen at work might be very different than how I listen at home or how I listen with my friends. And so I’m listening for different things, and to different things, depending upon the context. I’m sorry, I started talking there, and I forgot the question!
Jenny
No, it’s fine. The strategy, the fact that…
Laura
The strategy. So it goes back to what do I want to get out of this interaction, because if I can identify what I’m listening to and for, then there’s a goal involved, and I have a much better chance of meeting that goal, if I’ve identified that goal. But if I haven’t identified that goal, then I listen habitually for what I always listen for. And I might not get what I needed out of that conversation. Or I might think that it was a useless conversation, when in actuality it was because I was not listening appropriately.
Jenny
Now, this also speaks to helping account managers go into client interactions. Because what happens in our world Laura, sometimes it’s quite difficult to get airtime with the client, because they’re busy doing a million other things. And actually, the one thing that we’re working on for them is a small part of their day. So we want to make sure that small part of their day actually, is significant. So it’s kind of a little bit of a performance. So when we turn up, it’s good practice to, prepare, have a pre-meeting plan. And actually, what you’ve just suggested is a good strategy for account managing in general, to kind of pre think about what are the questions that I want to ask? Or what are the answers that I need to gather from this client interaction that are going to be most helpful? And does that form part of your training as well?
Laura
Yes, it does. And Jenny, what you’re also speaking to, well, two things actually. Number one, an account manager is actually, I guess I would view an account manager more as a liaison. So this is the person who is the point central between the client and between the creatives. And it’s quite likely that the way that both of those groups of people process information in their brains is very different. Creatives process information, and habitually are thinking creatively…?
Jenny
Creatively.
Laura
That’s the word, I could not find that one, yes creatively! Where as, as you said, with a potential client, their meeting with the account manager is a very small part of their day, and they’re doing all of these other things as well. So they’re not necessarily in the habit of meeting with account managers on a routine basis. And so being this liaison between the two, and understanding that they may be approaching you with a way of listening that works more effectively for them within their organisation, but doesn’t necessarily work for this conversation. Because it gets into the four listening habits, which have been identified in the research that was published early last year, in March of last year actually, that identified not only listening as a habit, and that is really important, because a habit is something we do routinely, but we can change. And how can we change it? They have found that
there are four different, I like to use the analogy of a strainer, ways that we strain information or filter information. And how we filter information really talks about what we’re listening to and what we’re listening for. So we can listen connectively for people, and how information is going to affect people. We can listen and strain through reflective, which is our past experience, asking questions like, ‘Have I ever been in a situation like this before? Have I ever seen an ad like this before? How did it turn out? You know, what didn’t work about that?’ We can listen analytically and analytically is all about the details of today. So I’m going to be thinking and asking questions like, ‘Well, my deadline is this, can you meet this deadline? And here’s my budget, are you going to stay within my budget?’ So those types of questions. Or we can think and filter through conceptual, which is the possibilities of tomorrow and beyond? So the what ifs, so I just have the big idea or the big picture. And I don’t really want to nail it down now because I want to explore all of the other possibilities before I nail anything down.
Jenny
So these are the four listening habits?
Laura
Correct.
Jenny
And do we all fall into one of these default habits that we do mostly?
Laura
Yes. And I say that with a little bit of hesitance because people can have more than one dominant habit. And since listening is a habit, we can choose different habits in different context. And that’s where I think the whole listening is a strategy and not a skill. Understanding how to adjust what we’re listening to and what we’re listening for, based on the context, is really important because then it increases the chance of us getting what we need or want. And identifying how the client is listening. There’s evidence that how we think, how we listen and how we speak are all connected. I can’t see your brain so I can’t see how you think, I can’t see how you’re listening. But I can listen to how you speak. And if I can really understand how you’re speaking, then I can understand how you’re thinking and listening, which means as an account manager, I can better align my communication to yours to give you what you want and need more quickly. So we can then cover other things as well.
Jenny
Wow. So is the ideal scenario to go into a client interaction as an account manager, identify the client’s listening habits and adjust our approach accordingly? Or is it to anticipate what this interaction requires from us and go in with our listening habit that’s most conducive to the context? I don’t know if I’ve overcomplicated it!
Laura
Yeah, no, no, you’ve asked a great question. The more we get educated in this, the more I would say we could do both. So for example, if I am going in, because I know that I’m going to be presenting a proposal, and I’m going to ideally get a signature on the bottom line there, then I know what my goal is. And I know that that goal is going to require some analytical thinking and listening and speaking, because we’ve got bottom line numbers here. However, there are some listeners who might be listening conceptually, who don’t focus as much on the bottom line. But the possibilities, what’s this going to make me look like in the future? Is this going to be a slam dunk for me? Is this going to help me climb the corporate ladder if I can land this account? So those are the conceptual what ifs of the future. And so both and there is, I need to go in and get this signed, because it’s potentially a big contract for me. However, I need to be able to assess what the client needs to hear as well before the client will sign because I need to speak into what the client needs to hear before the client will sign.
Jenny
You gave me an assessment to do before we spoke. Is that assessment assessing what habit you kind of tend to have when it comes to listening?
Laura
The Echo Profile which you took, asked you to think of a particular context. And so within that context, that’s primarily how you think then.
Jenny
Okay. Because I’m thinking for account managers now, how valuable it would be if we were to give that test to our clients and take the test ourselves!
Laura
Yeah. You may or may not get your client to be able to take it. But if you take it yourself, and you get just a little bit of training and listening, then you’re better able to identify what the client’s thinking and listening style might be, based on listening to how they speak.
Jenny
Amazing. Go on Laura.
Laura
I was going to say, so your results, Jenny….
Jenny
I don’t know whether I want to listen!
Laura
Go ahead. Do you have your results handy?
Jenny
No, I didn’t find the results.
Laura
Oh, you don’t have them? Oh, I apologise to you. Actually, do you want to take a break for a second? Because I can go grab them?
Jenny
Okay, so I’ve taken your your test Laura, and you’re sharing with me the results. And I see that you have Connective, Reflective, Analytical, and Conceptual. And you’ve gone straight to this slide to show the dominance. So can you talk us through what you can see. Just generally when you approach this.
Laura
Yes, and you are a fascinating profile. There are 41 different profiles that exist. You are an Experimenter, it’s called, which means that you have a triple dominance Jenny! You are triple dominant in Connective, which is the people and how things affect people. Analytical – the details, and Conceptual the big picture and possibilities of the future. Where you were relatively low would be Reflective. So that’s learning from your past experience or bringing your past experience into things. So what this suggests is when you listen as a triple dominant, you actually do a really nice job. The only thing that you might want to do to improve if you want all of these four cylinders firing at the same time so to speak, is take a little note card in with you that says, ‘What about my past experiences’. So just bringing in your past experiences to something. But as a triple dominant, that is minimal work compared to somebody who might be single dominant. So for example, I’ve seen people who are single dominant in Analytical, and they didn’t understand, they hated to go in and small talk, because they just did not understand the value of small talk with a client. But if you’re speaking with a potential client who is highly Connective, they are totally into that small talk. So small talking is an avenue of respect that you have to approach further. If the client is highly connected, and you’re highly analytical, if you go in there and give deadlines and budgets and details like that, that’s not what they’re interested in at all. They’re interested in how this solution is going to feel to the people who are using it. How are they going to like it? How is it making their lives better? So they’re looking for those types of things. How does it solve the problems that they’re currently having, as opposed to how much it cost or when it could be built by. So you’re not aligning your communication well, but once you get a little bit of education in these four different habits, then you can assess by listening to the client or the potential client, you can assess what their style might be, and then begin speaking into that style. So for example, I was saying that I did coach an individual who is just highly Analytical. And what I had to help this client do, was really learn how to small talk, first of all, potentially, when he was with Connective possibilities, but also how to assess what the other person is. And then I have a little cheat sheet of different questions and statements that align with each of these four, and really worked with this client to be able to remember to ask questions like this, as opposed to the questions that he just felt most comfortable with being Analytical.
Jenny
This is so fundamental, because the the account managers job really, is to build that rapport. And what you’re talking about here is adapting your communication style to be more conducive to the client style, so that you build that rapport. Because ultimately, people like to do business with people like themselves. And and you’re absolutely right, if you have someone with Analytical dominance and that the client wants to small talk, then that’s going to be a struggle. And even more so, if they’re lacking awareness, I mean, at least the individual that you were coaching, has gone through this test to understand that.
Laura
Yes, and did some some private coaching with me, and just felt so different afterwards. He understood his wife much better because his wife’s dominance was not Analytical! So yeah, there are just so many transformations that occur with just a couple hours of education in this.
Jenny
I mean, it’s a natural question about, this is an Echo Listening test, is this something that you have developed? Or you’re an ambassador for this programme? How? And also, how can people do it? Because I’m sure a lot of account managers are kind of leaning in right now thinking, wow, I want to know what I have here.
Laura
This is magic. It really is magic. And I align this with listening intelligence, because the more we recognise about listening, the better off we can be with it, and use it. I did not have a hand in developing the Echo Listening profile, though some of my research does support it. So research builds upon research. So some of my research is reflected in the development of it, of which I’m very proud. But one needs to be a certified listening ambassador guide to the Echo, and I am a certified practitioner in this. So any of your individuals, if they’re interested could reach out to me through my website Listening to Change, and I could order them a profile and then do a reading with them. Another thing that I have coming out that might be of interest to account managers, particularly at an entry level point, is I’m doing an online course for the 10 listening tips for leaders. And that will include this Echo Listening profile as well. And that will be a link from my website within the next month.
Jenny
Amazing. That sounds fantastic. We’ll include the links in the notes Laura for sure. Cheeky question? Can you share one tip or any more tips that you think account managers could benefit from?
Laura
Sure, sure, actually, I will give you three of my favourite. So two of them, I think I’ve already given you. The first one is biting your tongue for at least three seconds. And then to add on to that after that three seconds, if the client has not broken the silence, then you want to ask a question such as, ‘What else?’ or, ‘Can you tell me more about that?’ So a question that would continue the client speaking and continue you gaining that helpful information? The second skill is that skill of confirming, (and confirming again, is paraphrasing plus somehow asking if you’re right), if I understood you correctly, you said this, this this and that. Did I get that right? And the third potential skill. I think actually the third potential skill that would be most powerful, most useful for account managers, because they’re the liaisons between people is really learning these four listening dominances, learning how to speak into each of the dominances and learning how to assess others dominances by how they speak.
Jenny
I think this will be hugely powerful. And given that it’s always quoted as the most important skill for an account manager, I think it’s worth the time investing in understanding because, speak to me about some of the results that you’ve had Laura, from working with organisations, individuals, like, it’s certainly going to transform, but could you maybe give a couple of examples of how you’ve seen the impact of doing this training?
Laura
Yes, absolutely. One of my favourite ideal clients is actually working with small companies. And I just had the pleasure of working with a small company in Kansas of the United States that had 24 employees. And they’re a relatively new company and they’re very proud of their company culture. And it sounds like I’m going away but I’m really going to bring this all back. When you think about culture Jenny, culture occurs because of repeated patterns of something. That’s how we create culture. So whether we talk about culture from a larger, ‘We’re going to celebrate this holiday. And this is what we do with these holidays’, to family cultures, to company cultures. And they wanted to become a culture that was known for listening. And so I took them through approximately 10 hours of training together. And not only did we get into a lot of what I call listening solutions, the verbal listening skills that you can do, but we actually identified different places within their company, where they could implement these solutions on a routine basis. So that any new employee entering the culture, entered recognising that they’re supposed to do these skills, because everybody around them were doing these skills. So it was a way to enculturate the new people into the skills. So in terms of transforming a company, they’re in the process of very much transforming because they’re implementing listening in so many of the different routine areas of their company. So I have a very specific example on this. At the end of every meeting, when they’re making decisions, they go through that cheat sheet that I had mentioned before that asks the 12 different questions, three in each of these areas, to make sure that they haven’t left out any of these areas, because there’s no guarantee that the people in that meeting are going to represent all four areas. So it’s really important to continually ask yourself if you’re representing all of those areas. I also worked with a female who was, she was promoted to be a communication manager at a company. And she was now at the leadership level and definitely not quite as confident as the other leaders who were there, she was the only female leader. And so not only did we work on some of the gender differences, but we worked on the listening differences, and were able to identify the different dominances of the other leaders in the company, and develop the different types of questions and statements she could use with them individually and in group. And the perception of her then, in the other’s eyes, just grew exponentially, which of course, gave her much more confidence in what she was doing as well.
Jenny
Wow. Sorry, go on.
Laura
And then there are other times there are just, there are the ‘Ah ha’s’ that individuals have, when they find that they have been the square peg in the round hole, so to speak. So I love working with groups. And when I do a group profile, we can see what everybody’s dominance is. And sometimes you see there’s only one Analytical person and the rest are Connective conceptual, which could happen a lot, particularly in the very creative fields like marketing and sales, particularly marketing there. And so that person who is Analytical who has always felt like the odd person, and everybody else has treated that person as the odd person, because said person is the one always saying, ‘But what’s the budget? We’re not going to get this done in that deadline’. And everybody else is just, you know, having fun brainstorming, they recognise the value that this analytical person is really bringing to them, because he or she is bringing information that they hadn’t considered. And that analytical person can then value more the Connective conceptual. And it also gives them a way to talk about what’s happening in the room, and what should be happening in the room. So let’s all put our conceptual hats on right now, we’re not going to worry about anything analytical, no details here. But let’s brainstorm for the next five minutes, you know, or now we need to get really analytical because we have to talk about whether we have the funds to be able to build this better mousetrap. And we have to talk about whether we’re going to be able to get it done by the clients deadline here. So it gives us a different way to talk about what we’re doing. And that talking about it then changes the way that we do it in our brains. And it takes us back to that synchrony, which is part of collective intelligence for the group.
Jenny
Absolutely fascinating. For so many different benefits, you know, because up until this point we’ve been discussing how it affected the client and the account manager and the confidence levels and the rapport building. But actually, there’s a huge piece here about internal efficiencies, culture, people working and gelling together, understanding one another, feeling part of it, being perceived as more effective or feeling more, you know, efficient and effective. So, there’s just no end to the benefits really, is there? I just think this is so, it’s should be part of everybody’s training actually.
Laura
I definitely would agree with you. I would love to take this back to primary education, really start listening there. But since we haven’t, yes, this is a way for people to have a superpower.
Jenny
And you’re absolutely right, that it isn’t taught in schools. And perhaps that’s the mission, isn’t it? That’s where we should be starting all of this and this awareness. Wow. This has been absolutely fascinating. Laura. There was one other thing that you shared with me that I would love to just mention before we finish, which is the different cultures again. You mentioned in the States, there’s a general kind of half a second pause between conversations, but you also gave examples of other areas of the world where it was up to six or seven.
Laura
Yeah.
Jenny
Can you talk to us about that?
Laura
Sure. So the three examples that I like to use, The States – which is approximately a half a second between speakers, and then we’ve got some of the Asian cultures where there’s up to seven to eight seconds between speakers. And then we have the Italian culture and the New York Jewish culture, where there is no time between speakers because the speakers are actually overlapping each other, interrupting each other. And the interesting element to all of this, is the reason that all of the cultures do it differently, is that’s how they show respect in their culture. So in the Asian culture, I am going to pause for seven to eight seconds to show you that i’m really considering and honouring the information that you’ve shared with me and think about it before I respond to it but in the Italian culture where they’re actually interrupting each other, which you know would be extremely rude to other cultures, the reason that it’s respectful there is because it shows that you want to co-create the conversation with them. You want to create the story together. So with account managers who are working with clients from around the world, definitely understanding how respect is shown in the culture through simple things like pauses or non pauses is really important.
Jenny
I wish I’d taken your training before I went to live in Spain for three years because I used to have to excuse myself from dinner parties and go and sit in the other room because my head was exploding! And you know in hindsight, it was the difference in how they communicate, everyone talks at once and you know! So this is absolutely fascinating. Laura thank you so much for coming on. I think this has opened up so much possibility for account managers. I think it’s lovely to know that there is a tool that they can capitalise on to help them get better at listening. So can you just tell us the best way of reaching you and ideally, who would you like to be contacted by?
Laura
The best way to reach me is either through my website Listening to Change, and there’s a place where you can actually then link to me on there and send me a question. So you can do it that way, or you can link with me on LinkedIn, so it’s laurajanusik. And then my ideal client? Individuals who are interested in improving their individual listening. Teams – so whether it’s the team leader or somebody on the team. I love to help teams better align their communication and understand this, not only to work more productively internally but work more efficiently with external stakeholders as well. And then I love working with small companies to help build their culture to be a listening culture.
Jenny
Amazing. Okay, fantastic. We’ll include all of those links Laura and once again I really appreciate you coming on. Thank you so much for your time.
Laura
Thanks Jenny, it was my pleasure, very much.
