Are you listening ???

All of us who are blessed, can hear. It is something involuntary. We wake up to birds chirping or to the persistent alarm and end the day with either ilayaraja melodies or the breaking news.

But do we listen. As a leader, it took me sometime to go through this journey of listening. The reason I call it a journey is because, it took me through several stages. At each stage, I learnt something new, and the need to leave behind a few other things.

The first stage is obviously hearing and not much to write about it.

The second stage is selective listening. During the initial stage, as I had said earlier, it was a learning process for me to lead a team. So I kept my ears open, and listened to everyone and everything said. But unfortunately, it was in the interest to learn things. So, what I listened and processed was the information that I needed in my journey as a lead. I was very particular in listening to feedback about me from everyone. While this helped in the long run, it did not help me at that moment. I missed a few cues from people, probably someone trying to tell me a problem, wanting some help.

The third stage is passive listening. I realised within a few months, that I was making a mistake. I slowly transitioned into passive listening. Now, I was able to listen to people fully, without getting into the mode of processing selective information. I was keeping my ears and mind open to what people said. I waited for people to complete what they said, before I started to speak. I did not rush to form my response mid-way when someone was talking. This was a period of time, when people started to approach me to talk to me - sometimes about work, sometimes about personal stuff.

The fourth stage is active listening. This hit me like a truckload of bricks during one of the client visits. During the visit, while I was prepared with the updates, what hit me was the sheer speed and the surprise elements thrown at me during the discussion. It was like playing the famed Windies pace attack on a bouncy and seamy pitch. I could not even sight the ball, leave alone defend and score runs.

While passive listening worked with the team, it did not help me with my peer group / my leadership team or with my clients. I had to actively engage them in a duel. A war of words, thoughts and ideas. I had to be prepared for the follow up questions, for the next round of bullets. The next step was to listen to the speaker, understand what he / she was trying to convey, rather than spoke. In one of the leadership meetings, someone said, don't answer the question, but try to find the question behind the question or the reason for the question and answer it. This was clearly a lesson for me at that time. For this, I had to continuously process information, on what was said rather than worry about the response that I had to make. Once I had all the information, the response became easy.

And the last stage is listening to the unspoken words. This I realized is what makes someone a good leader. People always don't convey what they want in the form of words, but sometimes in what is left unsaid. I learnt that true listening is not just listening with ears and mind but also with the heart. A lot of times in my conversation with people, there were few things unsaid. I started to listen to this and tried my best to understand. I knew that I was partially successful in this, when my teams started opening to me more than previously. A lot of things were said, which previously would not have been. But more importantly, I knew I was in the right track, when people from other teams, wanted to talk to me, wanted to tell me something, to share their professional success & failures, to share their personal problems. 

ps: During that time, people would stop me for a 5 minutes chat, at 10 pm when I was leaving after a long day and by the time the 5 minutes got over it would be like 11.30 pm. This started happening regularly. At a point, I started running away when i heard the sentence, "raghu oru 5 minutes freeya " uttered by anyone when I was leaving office. :-). I think it was a revenge for 'coffee with raghu'.