“A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while, he gets to know something.”
I paused to try to remember the source of this excellent quote (Wilson Mizner)… and a group member spoke up.
“As a management team we’ve done lots of talking to each other. Now our facilitators are suggesting we do more listening. Let’s try it!”
It had taken more than an ancient quote to get them to that point, of course!
They’d just experienced a fabulously simple and effective activity. It’s one that you can easily do with your teams – and one that this particular management team now plans to use at the start of their regular meetings.
Here’s how it goes.
- The group pair up and take it in turns to take two roles, the talker and the listener.
- The listener’s job is to listen well for two minutes, encouraging the talker to keep talking without using words. Nods, smiles, umm-humms etc are all fine.
- The talker’s job is to talk about something important to them for two minutes.
- At the end of two minutes, swap roles.
- At the end of this second round, either stop the activity or repeat it with a new partner. With a big group, I like to run the activity three times.
- At the end, everyone takes a minute to reflect on the activity and perhaps to make a note of something they’ve learned
I’ve been running this activity with groups for almost two decades (many thanks to Wendy Sullivan for teaching it to me) and it never fails to make an impact.
People love being listened to. It makes them feel good.
Listeners learn stuff they didn’t previously know. That’s often very useful.
And there’s a big realisation in the activity for some people: that they rarely listen fully, because they tend to be gearing themselves up to respond to what’s being said. For some, that will be uncomfortable – but well worth knowing!
What happens when you run this activity with your team? I’d love to hear!