Workplace Issues #6: Ineffective Listening

Posted on May 7, 2006
Filed Under Workplace Issues | Leave a Comment

It is often said that the single most important attribute of a manager is his ability to listen. One could equally apply the same inference for all other workers. Ineffective listening is often the cause for most misunderstandings, mistakes, productivity loss and eventually lost sale/customers. If your manager fails to listen to what you are saying, then that could lead to poor employee morale, loss of productivity and increased turnover ratios. Likewise, if you don’t listen to your manager (or peers) then you have be doing the wrong stuff, or doing it the wrong way or at the wrong time. In either case, the results are catastrophic. I do not recall whose session I attended, at GE, but I remember writing down some bullet points. 5 basic reasons we don’t listen effectively:

1. It is Hard work: Listening is about concentrating on the other person, more than yourself. There are some biological implications - high blood pressure, increased pulse rate etc.
2. Too many message sources: I believe the speaker was talking of the various number of information source we have today - radios, tv, newspaper, ads, internet, blogs etc. So the body learns to screen out most stuff - some important ones too.
3. Mental Rush: This is so true that I actually think it is a very natural tendency. The ability to guess what a person is going to say, and react to it. We almost, often, never listen to the message in its entirety.
4. Listening Gap: This is the difference between the speech speed and the thought speed. An average person speaks around 135 words a minute, while the mind actually processes around 400. In other words, the mind is already jumping to various conclusions or scripting a reply or daydreaming.
5. Lack of training: As we all know we all receive training on so many subject areas, including speaking. But I have not heard or attended any training session on listening. I guess that explain why most of us are so ineffective when it comes to listening.

So how we listen better? According to this speaker (apologies, I just remember his name), one should cultivate six different skills which he called the CARESS model.

• C - Concentrate: Focusing the attention on the speaker will help eliminate the environmental noise, and help receive messages clearly.
• A - Acknowledge: Acknowledge to the speaker what you just heard
• R- Research: Understand the context of the talk or message before hand. Prepare any questions you may have.
• E - Emotional Control: Most often, messages are emotionally charged and are reacted upon before the delivery is complete. Exercise some caution to fully hear and understand the message, and then react (if need be).
• S - Sense the nonverbal message: Understand the vocal (tone) and visual (body language) messages as well as the words (verbal) being spoken.
• S - Structure: After you have fully heard the message and understood, organize the same and reconstruct the message. Reiterate the reconstructed message, and validate it.

It is hard to imagine that listening can have such an impact. But it does, just look around your home. Several times we miss the messages, both the content and intent, because of the above reasons. And these, naturally, will become a part of your lifestyle. Active listening helps us improve relationships, reduce the misunderstanding and prepare ourselves to react better.

Technorati Tags: Active Listening, Workplace Issues, Communication, Listening Gap

80/20 Fallacy of Proprietary Systems

Posted on May 3, 2006
Filed Under Open Source | Leave a Comment

When Vilfredo Pareto coined his, now, famous PARETO principle he was describing the unequal distribution of wealth in his country. Over the years, the PARETO principle has been applied to every walk of life. Marketing departments have applied this principle and concluded that 80% of their revenues actually come from 20% of their customer base. According to a survey conducted by Enterprise Management Associates, a majority of companies using proprietary tools take advantage of less than half the features in the box. Businesses that buy products like Documentum, Vignette, Unicenter are paying for features that they will never use. In essence, 80% of the departmental needs can actually be fulfilled by 20% of the feature set. This 80/20 fallacy of proprietary systems is explained below, along with suggested alternatives.

• Lack of viable competition has driven proprietary vendors to design their systems as a ‘one size fits all’ model. It simply costs them more to have multiple stacks to fulfill the varied category of users. Instead they continue to glue code on top of their monolithic system, and then charge their customers extra.
• Proprietary vendors argue that their systems are built for the future and that the additional feature set can come in handy at a later point of time. The reality is that organizations using these proprietary tools are actually paying for 80% features, that will never be used. Since they have already paid for the tool the ROI realization is, at best, delayed or non-existent.
• Open Source software allow organizations to manage things in a more natural way. Organizations can choose an open source tool that provides 80% of what proprietary alternatives offer and that is easy to set up, configure and maintain. All of that at Zero license fees.
• Open source also give organizations more flexibility to deploy “just enough” to manage their infrastructure and function as well as any proprietary vendors’ solutions without the higher cost of incremental features.
• Open source has created a new business model for service organizations, like Cignex, to package certified open source stacks and create a comprehensive solution that meet the demands of most businesses.

The bottom line is if organizations continue to pay for the fat packages, that proprietary systems are, the cost savings from other departments are negated by the cost explosion on IT infrastructure. Up until 3 years ago, proprietary vendors ruled their customers demanding ransoms for integration and support. With the advancement of open source technologies, organizations have been provided with a cost opportunity that is both compelling and factual. How often can you say that about proprietary systems?

Technorati Tags: open source, proprietary tools, pareto principle