Is Anyone Listening?

“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?