Chapter 13: How to Be a Better Listener So That People Will Want to Help You

Reality Check

A colleague of ours, Jan, was sitting in the cafeteria one day when her boss’s boss’s boss, Marie, sat down across from her, offered her half a muffin, and said, “I’m so glad to see you. Tell me how your Six Sigma project is going.” Jan’s first impulse was to whip out the data pack the team had just finished and launch into the fascinating details of their chi-square analysis. Jan loves the challenge of turning raw data into useful information, and she easily could have expounded on the team’s analysis for hours.

Fortunately, Jan recalled the Checklist: Matching Your Communication to the Person Whose Help You Need, and recognized that going into details of the team’s data analysis might not be the best approach with Marie. Although they didn’t know each other well, Marie was smiling and making full eye contact. Jan quickly reviewed the times she’d seen Marie in action, and recalled that Marie was a great storyteller and really seemed to care about people. So Jan started by relating a funny story about missing the first team meeting because there was a pickle spill on the freeway. She then mentioned how excited the team was about the breakthrough they made in the last meeting, and what a developmental experience the project has been for all members. They ended up talking about the project for nearly an hour, and Marie agreed to help Jan get some much-needed data from her boss’s boss.