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?

Seven Survival Skills

One of the most important debates of society today is over who has the primary responsibility for teaching marketable job skills: schools or employers.  This is a classic “chicken-or-the-egg” question with no definitive answer.  Employers tend to decry the lack of useful skills of their job applicants, and schools, by and large, have not fully acceded to the idea that they are responsible to teach, first and foremost, critical thinking skills.

One of the key elements of the issue (simplified here) is the argument that the schools should teach students critical thinking skills and the employer is then responsible to teach the critical job skills needed in a specific industry.  Tony Wagner has contributed to the debate with his recent work, “Seven Survival Skills.”

Wagner, who describes his “Skills” as being “defined by business leaders in their own words,” submits these skills as those business leaders should look for in their job applicants:

1.      Critical Thinking and Problem Solving

2.      Collaboration Across Networks and Leading by Influence

3.      Agility and Adaptability

4.      Initiative and Entrepreneurship

5.      Effective Oral and Written Communication

6.      Accessing and Analyzing Information

7.      Curiosity and Imagination

Wagner is the leader of “Innovative Education” in the Technology & Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard University.  Employers interested in this idea might start their online search with Wagner, and continue their education on the subject with CEC Associates’ Fall 2012 New Worker feature article, “Hiring and Maintaining Employees for the Rapidly Changing Workplace.”

From your experience, who do you think is responsible for teaching marketable job skills, such as those outlined by Wagner?  Other than schools or employers, what about a third option for the job: the future employee’s parents? 

Some Economics Are Required: The Health Care System Wasted $750 Billion in 2009

Most Americans (especially employers) know that their health care system needs critical attention going forward. And most Americans know that that is the reality regardless of who will be elected the next president.  The American health care system is:

• complex
• resistant to change, and
• extraordinarily inefficient.

The most important source of information on this issue, the report that is serving as the baseline on the current situation and from which the $750 billion shortfall figure is derived, comes from the Institute of Medicine (IOM).  The IOM report, “Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in America,” (September 6, 2012) lists three “imperatives” for change:

1. The rising complexity of modern health care,
2. Unsustainable cost increases, and
3. Outcomes below the system’s potentials.

It is important to note that the unsustainable costs are only one part of the problem as defined by the IOM.  In fact, the report indicates that the most important need is to establish a “continuous learning system” and “a culture of continuous improvement” in the health care system. The report asserts that continuous learning is needed to assure that “the lessons from research and each care experience are systematically captured, assessed, and translated into reliable care.”

While the thrust of the report is on the need for systemic improvements, it identifies the specifics of the waste for 2009:

• unnecessary services                      $210 billion
• inefficient delivery services            $130 billion
• excessive administrative costs        $190 billion
• too high prices                               $105 billion
• missed prevention opportunities      $55 billion
• fraud                                              $75 billion

Some employers belong to groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers, who have lobbyists to make their interests known to Congress. But employers without such resources also have a responsibility to make their best interests known by contacting their legislators. (You could help by bringing the IOM report to the attention of your legislator, for example). Consider and share your ideas on how and why out-of-control health care costs affect all employers, regardless of the number of employees.