Active listening

Think about the last time you heard a sales announcement in a store. After about five minutes, the words blend together. If you're listening for an hour, then it starts to sound like background noise. There's some danger that this can also happen with your project. The more messages you send, the more it starts to sound like background noise. As project managers, there's a lot of ways to deliver your message, but delivery is only half of communication. To communicate, you'll also need to actively listen. Active listening has a few components: Rinsing, remixing, and rewording. Rinsing the message means deciding which parts are relevant and which are irrelevant. It's tricky to rinse your messages of extra content. It means that you'll have to remove everything that's irrelevant. It also means removing items that are technical and can hide the real problem. This extra content might be funny or interesting, but it's usually irrelevant. The second part of the process is remixing and rewording. That's when you're synthesizing what the person said and paraphrasing back to them what you heard. I once worked on a data migration project. One of the engineers pulled me aside and said that he was the only person who knows the structure of the old database. Then he pointed out that the new engineers didn't understand the old system. Finally, he said that he couldn't help with the migration over the weekend because he was coaching his son's baseball team. As a project manager, you have to rinse away all the outside information and focus on the reason the person's talking. With the engineer, it's basically a rescheduling request. This takes a lot of discipline. People will bring up items that are annoying, like, what do you mean the engineers I hired are inexperienced? Don't get pulled into different topics when you're listening. Stay focused on the reason the other person is talking. After you rinse the information, you should remix it so it makes sense to both you and the listener. You might have noticed that the engineer didn't actually ask to reschedule the test migration, he just presented you with a problem. He said he couldn't do the test migration because he's coaching. So don't just assume he wants to wait. Figure out directly what he wants. So now you should remix what the engineer is saying so you could reply, "Are you asking me to postpone the test migration to another weekend?" Then wait for his response. The remix part of active listening is where you clear up and add information to what the other person is saying. After each remix, you're clearing up assumptions and clarifying the question. The final part of active listening is to repeat the rinsed and remixed information. So you might want to say something like, "Are you asking me to postpone the test migration to later that weekend?" If the person adds more information, then make sure you still rinse it away and remix it and repeat. With active listening, at least you'll have an accurate understanding, then you'll be in a better position to respond.