If most communication these days is text-based, why is it still important to be an effective listener? Can’t we just wait till digital natives who prefer social interaction mediated through mobile devices dominate the workforce so that conversation can be done away with at last?

No! Perhaps the first rule in business is to know what your customers want (Gibson, 2022). This relates to the law of supply and demand: if you don’t know what your revenue sources want or need, you can’t successfully supply their demand, and no one’s going to buy what you have to sell. If you don’t actively listen to what customers or managers say they want in everyday interactions, or fail to figure out what they want if they don’t yet know what that is but describe to you a problem they want solved, then you may just find yourself always passed over for a job or promotion. Business “intel” (intelligence or information) gleaned from conversation—whether in person or virtual via video conference—is the lifeblood of any business, as is the daily functioning of anyone working within one.

A receiver’s responsibilities in the communication process will be to use their senses of hearing, vision, and even touch, taste, and smell to understand messages in whatever channels target those senses. In the case of routine in-person communication, active listening and reading nonverbal social cues are vitally important to understanding messages, including their subtexts—that is, significant messages that are not explicitly stated but must be inferred from context and nonverbals. In the above case of the manager saying she’s hungry, for instance, she did not say “Join me for lunch so I can base my decision about whether to promote you on your social graces, emotional intelligence, and conversational ability.” Rather, plenty of reading between the lines was required of the receiver to figure out that:

1. This is an invitation to lunch that ought to be accepted
2. Given the context, the invitation suggests that the manager is considering the receiver for the promotion (otherwise she would have asked someone else if a promotion were in the offing)
3. This opportunity should be treated like an informal job interview

With so much of the communication process’s success riding on the responsibility of the receiver to understand both explicit and implicit messages, effective, active listening skills are keys to success in any business.

• 1.5.1: The Receiver Error of Passive Listening
• 1.5.2: Be an Active Listener

1.5.1: The receiver Error of passive listening

Unfortunately, plenty can go wrong on the receiver’s end in listening effectively and correctly inferring a sender’s meaning. In §1.4.3, we looked some sources of message-obscuring noise that come from receivers themselves, such as the possibility that they may just lack knowledge about both the job (e.g., its jargon) and the broader context to understand fully the content of workplace messages and their underlying meanings. A receiver can also produce their own noise by being:

• A poor reader of nonverbal social cues due to a lack of experience in developing conversational skills
• Distracted by their mobile devices, especially non-work-related diversions (e.g., social media and gaming)
• Susceptible to too much internal “semantic noise” interference from their minds wandering off topic with distracting thoughts about non-work-related things even during work communication
• Too preoccupied rehearsing what they’re going to say on a topic because they would rather speak than listen, or they listen only to reply rather than to understand
• Trying to multitask by reading or browsing while listening, but doing neither very effectively (Sanbonmatsu et al., 2013)

Many students struggle with this, perhaps because they have never really thought of listening as being a learnable communication skill on par with writing or speaking. In all such cases, the problem is passive listening—when you receive messages as mere noises you hear and barely register their meaning because you have a preoccupying internal agenda that feels more compelling in the moment. Once again, however, communication requires that you uphold your end of the cooperative effort that is the communication process we looked at in §1.3 where the goal is to ensure that the sender’s meaning is understood.

1.5.2: Be an Active Listener

Fortunately, everyone can practice being a more effective listener by making themselves aware of their own listening habits and actively seeking to improve them. Doing so certainly takes work, especially if your listening habits have been largely passive for most of your life and your attention span is short from a steady diet of small units of media content such as memes and TikTok videos. If your problem is that your mind wanders, you must train yourself to focus on the message at hand, rather than consume other media in a failed effort to multitask or become distracted by the internal monologue that tries to whisk you away from the present. Work on just being present. Take the earbuds out and keep your phone in your pocket when someone is talking, including your college instructors. (When your instructors see you staring intently in the direction of your crotch under your desk and your hands are fiddling a little down there, they’re not oblivious—they know you’re on your phone!) Would you tolerate someone blatantly ignoring you to focus on their phone if you were speaking right in front of them? Such “phubbing” (phone-snubbing) is just plain rude, and doing this yourself could, in professional situations, make managers, coworkers, and customers resent you, resulting in missed opportunities and job insecurity.

Rather, maintain strong eye contact with the speaker to show active interest. Resist the social anxiety-driven urge to avert your eyes as soon as pupil-to-pupil contact lasting more than a second or two makes the human connection too real for comfort. Challenge that. Eye contact builds trust, so avoid signalling to the speaker that you have something to hide (such as a lack of confidence in yourself) by darting your eyes away. Don’t fake attention either by maintaining eye contact while your mind is a million miles away; good communicators can tell from your nonverbals (such as a “glazed” look in your eyes or nodding in agreement at the wrong things) that you’re privately distracted by your wandering thoughts.

Perhaps the best strategy for active listening is to devote your brain’s full processing power to the message at hand. One way you can do this is to paraphrase the message if it’s a short one or summarize a long one (i.e., re-state it in your own words; see §3.4.2 and §3.4.3 for more on these skills) either to yourself or, better yet, to the speaker; then you can ask the speaker if you understood it correctly. Translating the message into words that resonate more with you than those the speaker used helps you remember it because you’ve personally invested yourself in it. In fact, you’ve literally re-wired your brain around it by establishing a neural pathway that you can then continue building up by returning to it if it’s important. You thus make the idea your own even if you don’t necessarily agree with it (but that helps, too). By doing this, you signal to the speaker that you’ve completed the whole goal of communication—which is what? If you created a neural pathway for the answer after reading §1.3 and built upon it by returning to that answer in section §1.4 and §1.5.1 above, you know well that it’s to understand the sender’s meaning as they intended it.

Another processing strategy is to think of questions you can ask for clarification. No matter how thoroughly a speaker covers a topic, you can probably find gaps to ask about for clarification. You could say, for instance, “I understand that you’re saying A, B, and C, but what happens in situations X, Y, and Z?” and fill in those placeholder letters with whatever content is under discussion. Identifying gaps requires keen interest and strong processing power from your brain. It’s the kind of proof of thinking that sends the bonus message that you are interested in what the speaker says, which may lead to a deeper conversation and connection, which is the ultimate goal of networking. Try to put this strategy into practice by watching and actively listening to speaker Amy Gallo in the following Harvard Business Review Guide video, even though this isn’t a conversation where she can respond to you.

(Harvard Business Review, 2022)

Figuring out when to talk and when to listen also requires basic social skills. If you like to grandstand and get impatient when someone else is talking, you must practice exercising some impulse control. Take turns! A conversation should be like a game of catch where each speaker tosses the ball and catches it in turns; the game stops if you just hang on to the ball at the point when you should be tossing it back. By hearing out your conversational partner and reserving judgment, you can really learn something.

You must also know how to deal with people who are still learning how to share. If you’re dealing with someone who doesn’t know when to pass the ball—i.e., someone who tends to monologue rather than dialogue—you must be a good reader of nonverbal cues to capitalize on the right moment to jump in with the right thing to say. On the other end of the spectrum, it takes skill to know how to draw people who communicate mostly in silence out of their shell if it means that you will mutually benefit from it on a business or personal level.

If you spent too much of your youth lost in screen time rather than interacting in person with friends, there’s no time like the present—and the rest of your life—to begin favouring direct human contact over technology. Of course, technology can always be close at hand to help, and you can be great at using it when the situation calls for it. However, your professional and personal well-being depends on knowing how and when to do without it and to get back to what really matters: being human and speaking effectively face to face as millions of years of evolution prepared you for. From there, professional success follows from keeping the communication channels open to solve problems collaboratively, one conversation at a time.