“Listening is a skill that we are in danger of losing in a world of digital distraction and information overload.” This pronouncement is from Seth Horowitz, an auditory neuroscientist at Brown University.
CEC Associates, Inc., has been offering single-issue
courses, including communications skills, from our start as a
company. High on the list of our
individual communication skills has been listening. We have found that listening is a critical requirement in working
with employees.
Still, these basic skills have been denigrated as being
unessential by many quarters. In fact,
employers have become less and less interested in wanting to sponsor training
in them.
So we view Horowitz’s recent book, The Universal
Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind, as being something of an
affirmation. Horowitz writes:
Hearing is a vastly underrated
sense. We tend to think of the world as
a place that we see, interacting with things and people based on how they
look. Studies have shown that conscious
thought takes place at about the same rate as visual recognition, requiring a
significant fraction of a second per event.
But hearing is a quantitatively faster sense. While it might take you a
full second to notice something out of the corner of your eye, turn your head
toward it, recognize it and respond to it, the same to a new or sudden sound
happens at least 10 times as fast.
The significance of listening, in both our personal and
work relationships, is effectively described by Kansas City Chiefs quarterback,
Brady Quinn as he discusses his late teammate, Jovan Belcher, during a December
2, 2012, press conference.
Now, as “digital distraction and information overload” are prevalent, do you think employers should sponsor training in communications
skills? Is listening a skill that needs
more emphasis in college classrooms and workplaces?
