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Feature

Dr. Myles Martel
President
Martel & Associates

Quality Listening in the Boardroom

A board member’s listening style communicates his or her leadership qualities. Are you guilty of tuning out or turning off someone who is speaking to you?

By Myles Martel

Based on a recent survey conducted by our firm, 80 percent of a board member’s meeting time is spent listening. Yet our research also reveals that poor listening is the most serious and common issue leaders face as communicators.

Quality listening can pay numerous dividends. At a minimum, it can facilitate comprehension and create a stronger platform for board members to ask incisive questions conducive to enlightened decision making. As John Whitehead, former chairman of Goldman Sachs, has wisely counseled: “The best leaders do a lot of listening … you can’t learn anything when you’re talking.”

A board member’s listening style also communicates. By listening well, the board member can not only convey interest in the issue, the person communicating, or both, but also help project such traits as self-assurance, composure, intelligence, and authority.

Therefore, the adage “a leader cannot not communicate” has special pertinence in the board setting, where keen sensitivity to verbal and nonverbal cues can help board members and managers interpret reactions to those present, and, as a result, better gauge whether, when, and how to respond.

Moreover, since quality listening has been increasingly valued in the corporate world, it can enhance the board member’s credibility — especially perceptions of competence and goodwill.

Perfect listening is impossible. It’s not a realistic goal for anyone, including board members. The standard to aspire to is highest-quality listening.

The Key Undermining Behaviors
In any analysis of the factors that tend to undermine quality listening, four are especially pertinent to board meetings:

1. Lack of Understanding. The board member tunes out because he cannot understand the presentation or exchange. Often, this pattern is attributable not only to presentation weaknesses but, as well, to the board member either not having done his homework or not being properly briefed by the chair or some other party.

2. Lack of Respect for the Board Member. This phenomenon can be communicated by the chair’s or any board member’s apparent reluctance to invite the member’s input; the tendency to not reinforce it (while demonstrating an obvious pattern of reinforcing others), reject it undiplomatically, cut it short prematurely, or refute it too aggressively.

3. Lack of Emotional Control. A major impediment to quality listening, this factor has many root causes and manifestations. Among the more common is a pattern of anxiety reflected in impatience, inability to concentrate, and a tendency to interrupt, including a propensity to complete the sentence or thought of the person speaking. This pattern can also be rooted in a fear of forgetting. Still another deterrent to quality listening is the tendency to over-personalize. This pattern is often conveyed by reflecting disagreement too readily through facial and other nonverbal cues, as well as through unduly aggressive argument.

4. Displeasure with the Manner in which the Message Is Being Communicated. Board presentations are often unfocused, complex, wordy, detailed, and too long. While the presenter may carry at least some responsibility for these issues, including the listening challenges they spawn, the question each chair and board should ask is: To what extent can we exercise the type of influence that results in presentations which suit our needs and, in effect, support quality listening?

Other Compromising Behaviors
Other verbal and nonverbal behaviors common to meetings of all types that can both compromise listening quality and signal poor quality listening include:

• Speaking to another person instead of listening.

• Transmitting cues to the person to hurry up and finish — for example, head nodding, looking at watch.

• Playing anxiously with a pen, paper clip, or other object.

• Passing notes.

• Frequently checking one’s Blackberry.

• Failing to ask questions — or to ask quality questions — when questioning is expected.

• Questioning that signals that the board member was not listening, had not done his homework, or both.

Board Chair Behavior
The board chair can enhance quality listening and credibility by demonstrating five major behaviors:

1) interrupting judiciously;

2) drawing other members’ points of view without unduly imposing his own;

3) avoiding comments or nonverbal cues that inhibit the open discussion necessary to capture maximum value from each board member;

4) making sure that the attention paid (including listening time) to any given issue is in proportion to its importance;

5) being neither too verbose nor too active — behaviors that invariably invite the perception that the chair is more interested in his views than in listening to others.

Climate Control
I encourage boards to make quality listening an explicit standard and discuss openly with members how well they feel the board climate supports quality listening. Such an exercise might require a fair measure of courage, self-analysis, self-awareness, and candor, but the dividends could be well worth the investment — especially since listening is and will likely remain a board’s major mode of communication.

Dr. Myles Martel is president of Martel & Associates, a firm specializing in leadership development and personal image enhancement through high-impact communications (http://www.martelandassociates.com). He can be contacted at mmartel@aol.com.