Listen for Meaning

Try this exercise sometime: When you are with a friend, stare into his or her eyes for a full minute (while he/she is staring back at you). This isn’t about flirting, or hypnosis.

No, it’s just about appreciating that you are looking at something completely unique (and so is your partner).

No one else in the world has the eyes you have just been looking at; in fact, a retinal scan is a more accurate way of identifying an individual than a fingerprint – almost as accurate (and a whole lot easier) than a DNA sample.

Each of us also possesses a unique brain – a three-pound mass of cells that contains over 100 billion neurons that are linked by over 100 trillion synapses – the pathways that create our memories and serve as the filters that generate the emotional meanings accompanying each of those memories.

(See my June 30, 2014, article “There is Only One of You” for a more complete discussion about the incredible carbon-based networks and processing engines that live between our ears).

But it’s not just biology that makes you unique; it’s also your experiences, your core assumptions, and your personal collection of talents, interests, and perspectives. And if we add in age, gender, and ethnic/cultural differences, there is no question that every single one of us is unlike any other human being in all of history.

Yes, I know: as a society we also have many shared values, interests, and understandings – and that is certainly a good thing. However, at the moment I am more interested in our uniqueness as individuals than in the commonalities that bring us together into communities.

As I have suggested elsewhere, I am generally appalled at how ineffective most organizations are at leveraging (or even uncovering) the incredible diversity of ideas, insights, and talents that lie right there within their employee base.

Becoming an effective leader involves much more than listening to what your peers and staff are saying; becoming a caring and cared-about leader requires that you also hear what they are feeling, and what they are seeking. Only when you truly understand what the current experience means to someone else can you take full advantage of their unique knowledge, skills, and capabilities.

The next time you are in a conversation, listen for the meaning behind the words, and seek out what that meaning can bring to the challenges at hand. And the best way I know to sort out what any idea or comment means to someone else is to ask yourself what is their frame of reference.

I first came across a simple three-part model for understanding someone’s personal frame of reference when I was teaching at Harvard Business School over 25 years ago. Warning: it’s simple in concept, but deeply profound in application.

Simply stated, our emotions result from the intersection of our assumptions and our perceptions – the interplay between the way we believe things should be, and the way they are (actually, as we perceive them to be). The meaning of any experience, including a conversation, comes from the interaction of those three components.

As Tony Athos and Jack Gabarro, two of my colleagues at Harvard, described it in their 1978 textbook Interpersonal Behavior: Communication and Understanding in Relationships:

…assumptions include all the beliefs, values, and attitudes that a person holds about how things are and how they ought to be…. Assumptions are the …values that we incorporate into our conceptions of the world and into our conceptions of ourselves so that they become part of us.

(link above is to the book description on Amazon.com)

Perceptions are what we see or hear as actually taking place in our present world – or at least what we think we are seeing or hearing.

Athos and Gabarro then observed that most personal and interpersonal problems come about when someone’s important assumptions are being challenged or contradicted by what they are currently hearing, seeing, or experiencing. It’s the gap between “what should be” and “what is” that drives our emotions.

So the next time you see your conversation partner getting tight-lipped and red in the face, ask yourself what he or she must be assuming or wishing for that is in conflict with what is happening or what is being said at the moment. In the vernacular, pay attention to where they’re coming from, and you’ll understand a lot more about where they’re trying to go.

And never forget that each of us is on a unique, highly individual journey. We can enrich each others’ journeys, but we cannot trade places. And that is precisely what makes collaboration and conversation so special, so productive, and so satisfying.