Open Topic: Other Communication Issues
Active listening is an important form of communication which I feel is necessary and may affect us in our everyday life. Many a time, people tend to misinterpret or misunderstand some things due to the lack of listening attentively.
Here is one scenario that I would like to share with all of you.
It was a meet-up with my project group mates to discuss about the details of how we were going to present our ideas to the audience through a presentation. As usual, ideas were brought up and different opinions were discussed before reaching to a final decision. After which, we split the workload and everyone was allocated with different parts of the presentation slides. I was nominated to compile all the presentation slides on top of my workload.
As this was a big group that consisted of eight people, not all of us were present during the discussion. We then got Ben, a good friend of Jason to inform him of his allocated slides, the next meeting time and venue. The next meeting was to edit all of our slides before the actual presentation.
However, problems arose when it was the due date for all the slides to be sent to me for the final compilation and I failed to receive Jason's part. Feeling frustrated, I called Jason to find out what was wrong and was shocked to hear that he did not get to know of any updates from the meeting much so his part of work. I then told him the necessary information he need to know before calling Ben to confirm his side of story.I was quite pissed with his response when he merely said,”Sorry, I didn’t catch that part of information”. It then dwelled on me that Ben had not done his part of informing Jason, resulting in me having to take a longer than expected time to compile all the slides and Jason having to rush out the slides.
This scenario that I have mentioned is a problem of inactive listening that every one of us will face in one way or another. It is very common for us to missed out important parts of the information if active listening was not practised which may result in problems and inconvenience for the rest of the group.
In my opinion, this is the most common scenario of lack of active listening and I believe every one of us here will have experience it. Do you agree with me?
posted by Zoelyn Teo @ 7:23 AM
6 Comments
6 Comments:
Hey Zoelyn!
You know I used to think that selective hearing is a tactic guys use when they do not want to hear their wives or girlfriends "mother" them. After a while, I realized that it's common! almost everyone I know have listened to someone speak and still not register any information. In fact, I have this friend in church who repeatedly ask "what did that person say?" right after the person said it. It's really a common scenario.
It makes me wonder whether active listening is actually a rarity even among friends. People seem to have accustomed to solving communication issues after it happens rather than before. Communication problems actually seem to become acceptable. It causes so many unnecessary conflicts to arise.
Hi Z,
inactive listening is really a common problem and the cause for many conflicts. This is a post that I MUST COMMENT!
Sometimes I wonder if it is the fault of the listener or the speaker. Well, for instance, if the speaker is speaking in a mono-tone way, then it is really hard for people to stay focus.
However, in most cases, like what your post is about, it is the fault of the listener for not paying attention. What can we do to educate this man for committing such a mistake? I suggest getting a cane and hit it at the table occasionally to get people's attention. It always work!^_^
Thank you, Zoelyn, for this post focusing on the very important issue of miscommunication/ ineffective listening. The scenario you describe illustrates just how important effective communication is for smooth group work. I wonder if it was only a case of bad listening though. Could Ben have just forgotten to inform Jason and then blamed his error on not "catching" that?
To: Brad
Ben sounded shocked when I ask him if he had informed Jason. Therefore I feel that he never catch the statement as throughout our discussion he was quite restless throughout the discussion and did not contribute much to the ideas as well.
Fortunately, after this incident, we will always appoint two people to inform the one that didn’t come for discussions so as to minimise the chance that the “responsible” party forgets again.
To Gillian:
I totally agree with you that most of the time the fault lies in the listener! However, I feel that effective communication is a two way process. Both the listener and the speaker have a part to play.
Perhaps using methods like getting a cane and hit the table (as you suggested) could helped minimise the probability of ineffective listening, even though it is sounds a little extreme. In my opinion, I think there can be milder methods used to achieve the same result. Milder methods such as constant reminding or repeating might also help to minimise ineffective listening. What do you think?
To: Kenneth
I agree with you that communication problems seem to become more and more acceptable. Misunderstandings arise when people do not communicate properly.
In fact, I too feel that it is common! I have a friend like yours too. She is in my volunteer group and whenever instructions are given out clearly, she will still ask me again and again. Frankly, it makes you feel quite irritated at times and you will really wonder are they just doing a confirmation or they are just not listening!
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