Listening and its enemies | Avi Kluger | TEDxLaçador

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences.

Avi shows the importance of listening and its benefits in every areas, and he shows its enemies. He finishes talking about his dream that every child has listening classes at school.

Avi is the first born of parents who both survived Holocaust. Today he is an Organizational Behavior professor at School of Business Administration at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel. In his research, Prof. Kluger demonstrated that feedback, even positive feedback, can be detrimental to performance. This research (with Angelo DeNisi) was recognized in 1996 as the Outstanding Paper in Organizational Behavior by the Academy of Management, and received the first William A. Owens Scholarly Achievement Award for the best publication (1996) by the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. Further, this research (with Dina Van-Dijk) received the 2009 Award for Best Competitive Paper by the Organizational Behavior Division of the Academy of Management. He has developed several listening tools including "Feedforward" (with Dina Nir), and now pursues questions about effective listening both academically and as a trainer, teaching people from diverse cultures to listen to one another.

(Portuguese) I want to tell you

why I'm interested in listening.

When I was 17 years old,

I started to suffer
from a pain in my throat.

Psychiatrists called it globus hystericus,

completely psychosomatic.

Eventually I developed depressions,

and even considered suicide,
and I could not relax.

At the age of 25 when I tried yoga,

I felt as if somebody was putting
a nail into my throat here

and it was coming out
from the other side.

So I learned to cope with the pain

by working many hours
and ignoring what was going on inside,

so I couldn't feel anything
from here down.

And in this way,
I was able to raise a family,

succeed in my career,

and things were as if they were OK,

until by the age of 46.

I was hit by a crisis

that was sparked by a consultant

using questions
from an appreciative inquiry.

She asked:

"When were the relationships
between men and women ideal?

And could you please tell us a story

about a moment at work
in which you felt full of life?"

I was stunned.

First, I realized how much
little joy I had in my life,

and second, I realized that answering
this question is changing me,

thanks to somebody listening to me.

Then I allowed myself
to try a variety of things

such as: massage therapy, psychodrama,

storytelling classes, voice classes,

Zen Buddhism workshops,

and more recently
dialectical behavior therapy

and things started to change for me.

First I could feel the pain again
but I didn't run away from it.

Eventually I even started to feel anxiety,

which I didn't know
what it was until that age.

But later on, I won some moments
of tranquility, quietness,

and moments of joy.

And I started to ask myself,
"What made it possible?"

And my answer was that I was so lucky

as to raise myself a village of people
who would listen to me.

So, then I decided to research listening.

And today I would like to share
with you the results of this research.

So, I first looked
in the professional literature

in my field of management
and organizational behavior,

and in one top journal,
out of 3,000 papers,

I found zero discussing listening.

In other top journal,

out of 4,000 papers,
two discussed listening.

And while it reflects something

about the disinterest
of researchers in listening,

I think it reflects the disinterest
of humans in listening.

Watch with me this graph.

This shows what people
are searching in Google

from 2004 until 2015.

The red is the amount
of searches for the word "talking",

and the blue is for "listening".

This is what people are interested in.

And you speaking Portuguese
do not have to worry about

(Português) "talking" in red
versus (Português) "listening" in blue.

So I started to look at what theories
exist out there about listening

and I'll show you three,

starting with the idea

that, actually, the listener dictates
the speaker's speech quality.

If he's going to listen to you,
naturally you'll talk more,

but you'll talk more coherently
and you'll tell more interesting stories.

And if this is not enough,

if you tell more and more
interesting stories

you commit whatever
you have said to your memory,

so you know more about yourself,

such that if a child comes home
and tells the parents,

"Oh! We did this and that in school,"

and the parents say, "Not now.
Have a shower and we'll have dinner,"

the child will remember

that whatever he or she did in school
was not that interesting.

That will be commited to memories.

Thus, the collection of our listeners
slowly, imperceptibly,

changes our self-knowledge.

If this is not enough,

listening in a special way
could even change personality,

a listening that is
nonjudgmental and emphatic.

Let me explain to you how could it be
that listening would change personality.

For that, I have to paraphrase
Pirandello from his book:

"Uno, nessuno e centomila" or
"One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand".

From now I'm going to act,
so don't get scared.

I see that you're laughing at me.

That is fine, continue to laugh at me,

but do me a favor.

Do you remember the case that you had

that in your home there was
a good friend sitting with you

and, suddenly, a new friend
was knocking on the door,

and you, what did you do?

With an ugly excuse,

you asked the old friend to go home,

because you were afraid

that the old and the new friend
will not get along.

I see that you remember this case,
so do me one more little favor.

What do you think would have happened
if, instead of throwing out from your home

the good old friend, and let me add,
the stand good old friend,

you had left home for half an hour

and, within this half an hour,
asked them to sit in your living room?

Tell me what do you think
would have happened

when you came back home?

Don't you think it's possible

that one of them would say,
"Wow, what an interesting person!",

and the other one, "You don't believe it!
Thank you for this introduction!"

So, you see, that is exactly
what would have happened.

So, now, let me ask you one more question.

Who the hell do you think
you kicked out from your home?

It is not the good old friend
because he or she

"will not get along with the new one."

We've just established
they'd have gotten along just fine.

Let me tell you.

You kicked out from home the character
that you present to the old friend

because this one has absolutely
nothing to do with the character

that you want now to present
to your new friend.

And now that we discovered
that you have two creatures in your mind,

who knows what is the truth?

How many creatures do you have inside?

Is it scores, hundreds or,
perhaps more accurately, thousands?

So, I thank to Pirandello two things.

First: (French) Congratulations!

Seventy years before the psychologists,

you described the self as a multitude
and not as a unity.

We say "my self-esteem",
as if there is one self there.

But the second thing, Mr. Pirandello,

what wrong did the people
attending TEDx do to you?

And now we'll go home and think,

"I have this character
and this character, and I'll get crazy,

like your book's hero."

And here comes listening.

My understanding
is that when you really listen,

a person will start to hear
hidden characters inside him or her.

But not only recognize
different parts of the self,

but it allows to build
bridges between them.

So the elements of the self
could live together.

So let's see what is the evidence.

Now to collect the evidence, you know,
some people collect stamps.

I collect scientific papers on listening.

And every paper that has numerical data,

I take it and put it on a pile to see
the overall picture of what we know.

And this process is called meta-analysis.

I've done many of those on many topics,

and let me first summarize
to you the results.

This is the result.

One person listening creates
two people with benefits:

the listener and the speaker.

Let's go into details.

For example,

experiments show that a poor listener
indeed creates poor speakers.

My own team shows that a good listener

indeed makes speakers who have
more complex attitudes and less extreme.

And finally, research on training
suggests that listening could be taught.

Let's see more data.

There is also evidence

that good listeners are also
good performers, for example:

physicians who listen well
tend to have less malpractice losses;

detectives who listen well tend
to listen to new information

unknown to the police, from the suspect;

salespeople who listen well sell more;

principals who listen to their teachers,

their students have
better grades in school;

and finally, supervisors who listen,
their employees have less accidents.

Let me show you even more.

Let me explain
this graph of meta-analysis.

On the first line you see that I found
in this collection 13 studies

that are accumulating information
of almost 8,000 people

and it suggests that if you
listen to other people,

especially if you are the boss,
they'll think you are a leader of people,

that you know how to lead
the people aspects in leadership.

You will feel more psychological safety,

you'll say what is in your mind,

you will trust the listener.

If it's your boss,
you have higher job satisfaction;

if you're a physician,
your patient will be more satisfied;

if you're a boss, your workers
will have more commitment;

if you work in a hospital
and listen to your patient,

there will be less violence
against the staff;

if your manager listens to you,
you'll have less burn out,

your performance is higher and
maybe a little bit even less depression.

And let me tell you

that everything
to the right of the line here

is considered a strong
association in my field.

Let me explain what I mean
by strong association.

Let's take the case
of job satisfaction as an example.

If I want to predict, to focus
on your job satisfaction

and I know how much you're
being paid relative to other people,

I can slightly predict
your job satisfaction.

But if I know whether
your boss listens to you or not,

I have a predictor that's 13.5 [times]
stronger and more accurate than your pay.

Next, in my research, in past years,

I was studying the destructive
effect of feedback on performance.

I found out that, out of 607 experiments,
in close to 40% of them,

after feedback, whether positive
or negative, performance goes down.

In 38% in listening, in contrast,

I didn't find any evidence
that listening can cause damage,

perhaps 5% of them showed
it doesn't produce anything effective.

My most conservative estimate

is that giving feedback is 7.5 times
more dangerous than just listening.

Talking could cause you trouble.

So, if listening is so useful,

why is it that most of us
have difficulty in listening

most of the time?

I want to introduce to you
the enemies of listening.

These are boredom, dominance,
fear of intimacy, trauma and cost.

Let's talk about each of them, alone.

My approach is: let's collaborate
with the enemies of listening

rather than fight them.

The first enemy is boredom.

Some people may talk your ear off,

and you say, "I can't listen
to this anymore."

You want to leave the room
or want them to leave.

What can you do?

You can ask them to tell stories.

Instead of asking, "What's your name?",

"Could you tell me something
interesting about your name?"

You can ask these people, and in general,

after they say whatever they say,

"and what else", and wait.

Sometimes the boring person
will start to tell you the truth

or what's really important.

And it's not going to be boring anymore.

Next, all of us
want to gain social status.

It's perhaps an evolutionary
force that we cannot fight.

But we can do it in two different ways:

we can dominate other people

by intimidating them
and instilling fear in them

or we can have some skill that people
want to imitate to get from us

and we build prestige.

And we found that if you listen,

you’re going to lose
social status based on dominance,

but you will gain social status
based on prestige.

So it's up to you to choose
how do you want to build your status.

And then some people,
when you try to listen to them,

they get nervous.

You ask them questions
that are not comfortable.

For those people, try to talk to them
at first only about technical things.

And then, when you listen to people,
you may start to hear horrible stories,

about the Holocaust, about rape,

about cancer, death, premature death.

You may feel burdened that now you need
to help the person who shared the story,

but you should know that often

what the other person wants
is nothing but your listening.

If you listen and believe it is helpful,
you will not have such burden.

And last, listening is a cost,
it's an effort.

So that's what I suggest to you:

spread your eggs, don't start
right now to listen to everyone,

it's impossible.

Every day choose one, two people
to listen to just a little bit more.

Then, you should respect your limitation
of how much you really can listen to.

And to build your energy to do that,

you will need somebody
to listen to you as well.

Actually, everything that
I have said is not that new.

Let me show you what is written
in the Book of Proverbs in the Bible:

"Counsel in the heart
of man is like deep water,

but a man of understanding
will draw it out."

That is, each of us
have an advice, a counsel,

to our own problems and challenges

and the value of this advice

is like water which is a source of life.

That is, the advice that we have
for ourselves is a source of life.

But a man or a prisioner
of understanding will throw it out.

This is the other that will bring
our own wisdom outside.

So, I'd like to conclude
with two dreams that I have.

One, I wish that in 20
or 30 years from now

every child in every school
will learn reading, writing,

and listening.

And my other small wish

is that, during the break,
the breaks here today and tomorrow,

you will go and ask somebody around you,

"Could you tell me
a story about good listening?"

Enjoy it.

(Applause)