Book Summary: Power Listening

1. Listening Is Worth the Effort
2. What Kind of Listener Are You?
3. Respect Your Conversation Partner
4. How to Keep Quite-Most of the Time
5. Challenge All Assumptions
6. Keeping Your Focus
7. What is the Mandate?
8. What is the Plan?
9. What is the Team?
10. How Will We Get it Done?
11. Is It getting Personal?
12. Connecting Better Listening to Better Judgment
13. Changing Your Organization through Listening
Conclusion: What to do on Monday Morning
Notes and Highlights:
Listening Actively:
Take nothing that you hear for granted, and try to sustain respect for the ideas of each of your colleagues.

Keep quiet! You have to get out of the way of the conversation in order to hear what’s important.

The Filing System:

1. Get to the mandate. Sometimes simply getting clarity on the specific dream, aspiration, or organizational mission underlying the discussion can make all the difference.

2. Understand the plan. How are we going to get from A to B? We have to understand each individual step if we want to be able to navigate toward a successful outcome.

3. Know who is on the team. Is this discussion about people and how they will work together?

4. Be aware of how well you are executing. Build your understanding around the risks and rewards, measurements, and accountability that will drive effective execution of the plan.

5. Be mindful of the personal. People are not automatons. Character and personality traits can impact what information is being offered.

Active Listening:
1. Listening is purposeful. A disciplined businessperson enters a conversation with a clear understanding of what it needs to accomplish.
2. Listening requires control. Even when you’re on the receiving end of a communication, you need to steer and filter the incoming information in order to accomplish your purpose.
3. Listening requires total focus and engagement. When you listen with intent, you must bring a heightened awareness to the conversation, so that you can formulate the right questions and generate the necessary interjections and interruptions (a subject I’ll talk about in more depth later) to advance the conversation productively.
4. Listening is the front end of decision making. It’s the surest,

What Kind Of Listener Are You?
6 Types of Bad Listeners

#1. The Opinionator
The Opinionator listens to others primarily to determine whether or not their ideas conform to what he or she already believes to be true. Opinionators may appear to be listening closely, but they aren’t listening with an open mind and instead often use their silences as opportunities to “reload.” While Opinionators may have good intentions, the effect of this listening style is to make conversation partners uncomfortable or even to intimidate them. Opinionators routinely squelch their colleagues’ ideas.

#2. The Grouch
The Grouches are poor listeners who are blocked by a feeling of certainty that your idea is wrong. One typical grouch, a top executive I worked with at an industrial company, made no secret of his contempt for other people’s ideas. He approached conversations as a necessary evil and sent the implicit message: “You’re full of it. You’re a fool. Why did you think I’d be interested in this?” Through perseverance, people could get through to him in conversations, painful though that was. However, many of his colleagues simply didn’t have the energy to break down his barriers every time they needed to express an idea to him.

#3. The Preambler
The Preambler’s windy lead-ins and questions are really stealth speeches, often intended to box conversation partners into a corner. Preamblers use questioning to steer the discussion, send warnings, or generate a desired answer. I remember a meeting with one Preambler, the chairman and CEO of a medical complex, who (by my watch) spent 15 minutes posing slanted questions
and making rhetorical assertions that all supported a recommendation he wanted to make to his board. Such behavior epitomizes one-way communication.

#4. The Perservator
Perseverators talk a lot without saying anything. If you pay close attention to one of these poor listeners, you’ll find that their comments and questions don’t advance the conversation. As often as not, Perseverators are editing on the fly and fine-tuning their thoughts through reiteration. Perseverators use the thoughts of their conversation partners to support their own prejudices, biases, or ideas. When talking to one, you may feel that the two of you are having completely different conversations.

#5. The Answer Man
Everyone wants to solve problems, but Answer Man spouts solutions before there is even a consensus about the challenge—a clear signal that input from conversation partners isn’t needed. Answer Man may appear at first to be an Opinionator. But the latter is motivated by strong feelings of being right, while the former is desperately eager to please and impress. You know you are speaking to Answer Man if your conversation partner can’t stop providing solutions and has ready answers for any flaws you point out, as well as quick rejoinders to all the points you raise.

#6. The Pretender
Pretenders feign engagement and even agreement but either aren’t interested in what you’re saying or have already made up their minds. The worst Pretender I ever met was the CEO of a health care company who had all the right moves: he seemed to hang on every word uttered, for example, and frequently won people over with a knowing, empathetic smile. That gave his conversation partners every indication that he was processing their words and agreeing with them. Yet eventually his colleagues would realize that he had not acted on anything they’d said or, worse, didn’t have access to that information when it came time to make decisions or take action.

How To Improve Your Listening Skills
1. Show Respect-respect your conversation partner no matter what
2. Keep Quiet-use 80/20 rule.  80% listening, 20% talking
3. Challenge Assumptions-seek to understand and challenge what they say-the assumptions

5 Questions To Ask Before Interrupting
1. Do I need any clarification?
2. Do I want to hear more about this issue, or one that has come before?
3. Do I need to parse an issue to focus on a certain aspect?
4. Do I want to head down a different line of discussion?
5. Is there a counterargument or new perspective

6. Do I need to end the conversation?

Keep Focus:
1. Compartmentalizing-Managing external stimuli
2. Decoupling-process of separating your emotions from the substance of the conversation
2. Get to the POINT and don’t repeat

Sorting the Chaos
1. Identify what a conversation is all about
2. Capture the information that matters from any conversation or meeting
3. Steer a conversation in order to ensure that you gather all that information
4. Know how to sort and process the information received
5. File away the information so you can remember, recall, and use it when necessary

File Drawers
1. Mandate
2. Plan
3. Team
4. Execution
5. Personal

A. What is the Mandate?
1. Why are we here?

2. Are there any misalignments?
3. Can we work with this mandate?

4. Does the mandate capture the imagination and energy of the leadership team?
5. Can the mandate be communicated more broadly to all the stakeholders?
6. Can the mandate be translated into a plan?

B. What is the Plan?
1. What are you going to do now?
2. What are the specific objectives that begin to move a company toward its mandate?
3. What are the specific initiatives that will help achieve the objectives?
4. What is the timeline?
5. What assets are required, and are they available?
6. What are the risks we will be facing?

C. What is the Team?
1. What capabilities do we need?
2. What are the mind-sets of the team members?
3. What are roles of the team members?
4. Will this assignment be goo for the individual on the team
5. What are the inescapable realities?
6. How is the chemistry?
7. What are the consequences of the performance?

D. How will we get it done?
1. How are we making decision?
2. Are we getting the right information at the right time?
3. How do we manage complexity?
4. Do we have a rhythm?

E. Is it getting personal?
1. What does this person value?
2. What are the individual’s aspirations?
3. How does this person interact with colleagues and others?
4. What is the person’s level of self-awareness?
Change your organization through Listening
1. Foster a more disciplined and productive organization.
2. Ensure the free and open flow of information and ideas.
3. Establish a reverence for fact-based discussions.
4. Generate new insights and more creative solutions.
5. Build an organization that excites and energizes its people.

What to do on Monday Morning?
1. Keep quiet.
2. Challenge assumptions.
3. Focus on what you need to know.
4. Increase your tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty.
5. Sort incoming information into the appropriate file drawers and folders.
6. Work your memory to gain insights.
7. Know when to pull the trigger.
8. Demonstrate the best listening practices to lift everyone’s game.

The idea of Power Listening mentioned in this book is focused on people. But as I was reading the book and now I’m writing a summary, it occurred to me that the application of Power Listening is not just limited to the realm of being in a conversation with someone or being in a group of people in a meeting or an interaction between a leader and a subordinate or a relationship between a husband and wife or the leadership between a parent and child. I saw more.

Think of a problem at work or home, if you apply the concepts of Power Listening and avoid the 6 archetypes of a bad listener, you can make way of a better judgment on what to do next. Don’t jump to conclusion when you see a slight victory, let the situation mellow down by listening to the data and outcome. Listen to the data available before taking any action to any situation.

Recommendations:
1. Read this book.
2. Use the Kindle version if you have a tablet. I’ve read this book mostly before going to sleep and waking up.
3. Read one chapter at a time and then apply at work, co-worker or at home. I used my wife and son as the guinea pig. One time, my wife confided me about a bad situation at her workplace. She was feeling bad about the situation and here she is telling me everything and I had no idea where the subject was going. Instead of cutting her off and telling her that I’m not interested about her workplace negative reports, I told her to go on and I listened well. In the end, I noticed that all she wanted was to release the tension inside her head. For me, I learned that sometimes a person just needs somebody to listen – you don’t really have to do anything else.

4. Be Quite.  Give it a try! You’ll be amazed how much you hear around you. [not just inner voices of people, but data, insights and wisdom]