Worth a Listen, Look or Read #14 — W.A.I.T. – Why Am I Talking?
Jeff Ikler here for Kirsten Richert with our weekly “Getting Unstuck” mini feature: Here in about five minutes, we extend the idea of this week’s podcast with some related content that we feel is definitely “Worth a Listen, Look or Read.”
The idea we’re exploring in this show is the acronym: WAIT, Why Am I Talking?
This week we talked with Michelle Pinchot, principal of the preK-6 Heritage Computer Science Academy in the Garden Grove school district, Garden Grove, CA. https://bit.ly/3sGfT1v Michelle also serves as an administrative coach to other principals in the district, and she teaches in San Diego State University’s leadership program. You might say that developing leaders at any level is her superpower.
When Michelle inherited her current school, just about any data point you’d examine reflected some deep problems. Some leaders with good intentions might have jumped in right away in an attempt to fix this and that. Any action was good action, right? Michelle and her assistant principal took a different approach.
They asked a lot of questions. And listened.
“We knew that we had an incredible group of teachers. And we needed to find out what their gifts were, I believe that each individual has a gift — something to bring to the team. It's our job to figure out what it is that each person brings.”
Listening, really listening – to understand not just to respond – is an act of emotional intelligence. Basically the act of listening to someone else is like saying “In this moment, you are way more important than I am.” We listen to others to know and understand them and maybe in the process learn something about ourselves.
Taking the idea deeper
Let’s dig into this idea of listening a bit deeper.
Listening as a leadership skill is typically hard because it runs counter to what we instinctive believe leadership is: answering questions, solving problems, providing direction, and making decisions. Our inner critic conditions us to avoid looking uncertain and unknowing in front of others. We instinctively don’t want to openly admit, “Gee, I dunno.”
And this misunderstanding of leadership’s function often creates a co-dependent relationship. The employee wants the leader to resolve a matter quickly so that they can continue their work. The leader wants to resolve the matter on the table to feel worthy of their position. That process maybe OK for moving the work along in the short term, but it’s a disaster for developing the next generation of leaders.
Dialoguing to find an acceptable answer to a problem counteracts that one-way street. It requires the leader to ask open-ended questions and then listen to the response. We can explore the art of listening in two ways: first, verbal listening and then, nonverbal listening.
Verbal listening. Julian Treasure is a sound and communication expert, and in a much-watched TED Talk, he details various reasons why we’ve gradually lost our ability and willingness to listen. And thankfully, he offers five exercises to help us improve our listening.
Number 5 is “R.A.S.A.,” an acronym, and it’s my favorite. RASA stands for:
Receive - pay attention to the person
Appreciate - Make little noises like "hmm" "OK"
Summarize - Use the phrase "So what I’m hearing is…”
Ask - Ask questions afterwards
This strategy is interesting to me because it requires the listener to be an active participant in a conversation by summarizing what the other person is saying and then by asking them follow-up questions. It literally begs the listener to be curious, a behavior that has definitely lost steam in our social media world of scrolling.
Nonverbal “listening.” Nonverbal listening may at first seem like a contradiction in terms, but it speaks to our ability to receive information from the speaker not through what we hear, but through what we see. Yes, we’re talking broadly about body language.
UCLA behavioral psychologist Dr. Albert Mehrabian’s research on the topic of body language resulted in the 7-38-55 rule. The 7-38-55 rule indicates that
7% of a speaker’s communication of their feelings and attitudes comes via the words they speak
38% of a speaker’s communication of their feelings and attitudes comes via their tone of voice.
55% of a speaker’s communication of their feelings and attitudes comes via the facial expression and body display.
I emphasize “feelings” and “attitudes” because Mehrabian’s findings are often incorrectly generalized to all aspects of communication and meaning. He only intended the rule to focus on what the speaker was likely feeling along with their attitude on the topic under discussion.
But even with that limitation, Mehrabian’s findings are hugely important. We can be looking right at a speaker, but if we’re not listening for tone of voice and watching their mannerisms, we’re likely missing some important information. As this recent Forbes article notes, we need to be picking up all the cues we can in this age of masks and ZOOM if we truly want to understand someone. Finally, as Henry David Thoreau once said “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”
Putting the idea to work
> Put yourself in situations where you can practice R.A.S.A. What’s it like to simply sit and listen? To open up your curiosity and respond with a question?