Business Communication Today: An Analysis (part 3)

Understanding the Listening Process

by

Charles Lamson

No matter which mode of listening you use in a given conversation, it is important to recognize that listening is a far more complex process than most people think. As a consequence, most of us are not very good at it. Given such complexity, it is no wonder most of us listen at or below a 25 percent efficiency rate, remember only about half of what is said during a 10 minute conversation, and forget half of that within 48 hours. Furthermore, when questioned about material we have just heard we are likely to get the facts mixed up (Business Communication Today 8th ed by Courtland L. Bovee and John V. Thill; pg. 50).

Why is such a seemingly simple activity so difficult? The answer lies in the complexity of the process. To listen effectively, you need to successfully complete 5 separate steps.

• Receiving: You start by physically hearing the message and acknowledging it. Physical reception can be blocked by noise, impaired hearing or inattention. Some experts also include nonverbal messages as part of this stage, since these factors influence the listening process as well.
• Interpreting: Your next step is to assign meaning to sounds which you do according to your own values beliefs, ideas, expectations, roles, needs and personal history.
• Remembering: Before you can use the information, you need to store it for future processing. First, you need to need to capture it in short-term memory, which is your brain's temporary notepad. Information disappears from short-term memory quickly though, so you need to transfer it to long-term memory for safekeeping.
• Evaluating: With the speaker's message captured, your next step is to evaluate it by applying critical thinking skills. Separate fact from opinion and evaluate the quality of the evidence.
• Responding: After you have evaluated the speaker's message, you now react. If you are communicating one-on-one or in a small  group the initial response generally takes the form of verbal feedback. If you are one of many in an audience, your initial response may take the form of applause, laughter or silence. Later on, you may act on what you have heard (Bovee, Thill; pg. 50).

If any one of these steps breaks down, the listening process becomes less effective or even fails entirely. For example, if you work in a noisy environment, you may never hear a message intended for you. If you do receive the message, a lack of shared meaning or shared language between you and the speaker might lead to a different interpretation than the speaker intended. Or you might have looked away when the person was speaking and thereby missed an important nonverbal clue that would have helped you decipher the intended meaning. And even if you did interpret the meaning as the speaker hoped, you might forget it before you get around to acting on the information (Bovee, Thill; pg. 50).

As both a sender and receiver you can reduce the failure rate by recognizing and overcoming a variety of physical and mental barriers to effective listening

End