by Kate Murphy
For Naomi, the hardest thing about listening is resisting the urge to insert her point of view instead of just taking in what people have to say. That’s an advantage of purely quantitative approaches—when you know nothing but the numbers, your ego and beliefs are less likely to influence the results. But when you’re face-to-face with someone, this can happen directly by straight-up voicing your opinion, or indirectly by asking questions in a leading way. Or you can telegraph your bias nonverbally with an encouraging nod or disapproving sigh. “It’s hard to hold it inside,” said Naomi. “But when you get good at it, you can pull back the curtain to people’s lives and see what’s in there; and my goodness, I’ve learned things about our world that I would never have learned in another job.”
Naomi has what I have come to recognize as the listener’s demeanor. By that, I mean she’s exceptionally calm and has an expression that transmits interest and acceptance. Her eyes don’t dart, her fingers don’t fidget, and her body seems always relaxed and open. I spent several hours interviewing her and observing her interactions with others, and not once did I see her cross her legs or arms. When she was with someone, she never gave the slightest indication she was on a schedule or there was somewhere else she’d rather be. My most vivid image of Naomi is her sitting with her elbows bent in front of her on the table, cheeks resting in her hands, eyes wide, listening like a rapt teenager. “The real secret to listening I’ve learned is that it’s not about me,” Naomi said at one point. “I’m holding my cup out in front of me. I want them to fill my cup and not pour anything in their cup.”
In a position now to pick and choose, Naomi has given up political work to focus exclusively on clients who sell consumer products. “The political arena even for market research can get a little smarmy,” she said. “They are listening for something, not to people.” She also travels widely to train employees at Fortune 500 companies how to moderate their own focus groups. Holding focus groups in-house rather than hiring qualitative research consultants is becoming more common and not something Naomi necessarily endorses because it creates all kinds of biases. “You tend to not listen very well when it’s your boss’s idea you’re asking people about,” she said. “You ask questions in a way, and hear answers in a way, and write your reports in a way that will make your boss happy.”
Information is only as useful as how it’s collected and interpreted. Algorithms are only as good as the scope and reliability of the data sets to which they are applied. So, too, the findings of a qualitative researcher are only as good as that individual’s neutrality, perceptiveness, and skill at eliciting anecdote and emotion—in other words, how well the qualitative researcher listens. At best, a quant can give you broad brushstrokes while a good qual can provide finer detail. Both approaches are valid and when used in concert can be extremely revealing. But when it comes to human interactions and divining individuals’ unique motivations, proclivities, and potentials, listening is, so far, the best and most accurate tool.
9
Improvisational Listening
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Work
Back in 2012, Google commissioned a study to find out what made a great team. Most of Google’s projects are carried out by teams, and the company wanted to understand why some groups got along and got things done while others developed animosities and petty resentments that led to infighting, backbiting, and passive-aggressive dysfunction. What was the special alchemy of personalities, process, and protocol that made people work well together?
A task force (code-named Project Aristotle) comprised of statisticians, organizational psychologists, sociologists, and engineers examined 180 of Google’s employee teams. They scrutinized team members’ personality traits, backgrounds, hobbies, and daily habits and found no predictive patterns of a group’s success or failure. How teams were structured, how they measured their progress, and how often they met were also all over the map.
After three years of collecting data, the researchers finally reached some conclusions about what made for cohesive and effective teams. What they found was that the most productive teams were the ones where members spoke in roughly the same proportion, known as “equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.” The best teams also had higher “average social sensitivity,” which means they were good at intuiting one another’s feelings based on things like tone of voice, facial expressions, and other nonverbal cues.
In other words, Google found out that successful teams listened to one another. Members took turns, heard one another out, and paid attention to nonverbal cues to pick up on unspoken thoughts and feelings. This led to responses that were more considerate and on point. It also created an atmosphere of so-called psychological safety, where people were more likely to share information and ideas without fear of being talked over or dismissed.
While this was a revelation at Google, our friend Ralph Nichols, the father of listening research, said the very same thing in the 1950s. The only difference is that back then, Nichols said listening would make you better at your job. In today’s economy, listening likely is your job. Nearly all job growth since 1980 has been in occupations with higher levels of social interaction, whereas positions that require predominantly analytical and mathematical reasoning—that can be turned into an algorithm—have been disappearing.
Few products or services today are made or carried out end-to-end by one person. Google is not an exception. Most businesses rely on teams of employees to get things done. A study published in Harvard Business Review found that during the last two decades, “the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50 percent or more.” At many companies, employees can spend as much as 80 percent of their day communicating with others.
But recognizing the importance of listening and getting employees to actually do it are two very different things. Some employers have added sections on “active listening” to their employee handbooks, but, as mentioned earlier, the concept tends to be vaguely or inaccurately defined. Employers also sometimes bring in career coaches and business psychologists to help employees listen better. But employees tend to resist and resent any suggestion that they might have “issues.” Which brings us to one of the more interesting and effective methods for improving employees’ listening skills: improvisational comedy. Many large companies, including Google, Cisco, American Express, Ford, Procter & Gamble, Deloitte, and DuPont, have given it a try.
To find out more, I went to Second City, the improvisational comedy mecca in Chicago where Tina Fey, Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, Amy Poehler, and so many other famous comedians and comedy writers got their starts. There, I met artistic director Matt Hovde, who, in addition to directing comedy shows at Second City, also oversees the improv training program. He was gripping a coffee and looking a bit weary, having spent the previous week auditioning 350 people for just six cast openings. He pinched the bridge of his nose when he told me a lot of would-be comedians aren’t as funny as they think they are.
But Hovde rallied when we started talking about listening. It’s a skill he considers essential to his art. “Improv actors don’t know what’s going to happen next in a scene,” he said. “We train ourselves to be very sensitive to what’s happening onstage; to listen to what our scene partners are saying and what they mean, because if we miss those details, scenes will make less sense and will seem less magical or funny to an audience.”
In a typical beginner improv class, Hovde told me people miss their scene partners’ cues again and again because they formed incorrect assumptions about where the scene was going, talked over their partners, rushed their partners, or were intent on getting in the last word. “In many art forms, there is the perception that the artist must be selfish or self-centered, but in improvisation, it works the opposite way,” Hovde said. “We focus a lot in improv on taking care of and making our scene partners look good, and listening is a fundamental skill in being able to do that.”
When t
eaching a class, Hovde holds out his arm and asks students, “If a story someone is telling you starts at the shoulder and ends at the fingertips, where do we stop listening?” They generally agree that they stop listening at the elbow and start thinking of what they want to say. To stop them from doing that, Hovde has them play a game of group storytelling. He gives them a title, and when he points at someone, it is that person’s turn to be the narrator of the story, making it up as they go along. Hovde can switch narrators at any time, even when someone is mid-sentence. The following person has to have been listening carefully to pick up the thread. Not surprisingly, there are a lot of deer-in-the-headlights looks when people get tapped.
“It’s really hard for people to do it successfully because they want to control where the story is going and they are already filling in the blanks about what the story should be about,” Hovde told me. “At first, people tend to freeze up a little bit because they have to rewind their brain and surrender what they wanted to happen and submit to where the last person left off. They have to give over control and really be in the moment.”
To understand what he was talking about, he recommended I take, and not just observe, a class. And so I did, along with a dozen others, many of whom said they were there for “professional development”—that is, their employer had told them they needed to work on being a team player. Our instructor was Stephanie Anderson, a veteran improv performer who managed to be quick-witted without being cutting or unkind, putting the class at ease even as she asked us to do things outside our comfort zones.
Like Hovde, Anderson had us do the group storytelling exercise. But in our class, the problem was more often people grabbing for attention than losing the thread of the narrative. Some of my classmates said things that were so silly, absurd, or out of nowhere that the next person had a really hard time coming up with something logical to follow. They went for a cheap, quick laugh at the expense of a bigger, funnier payoff later, built on each person’s contribution. It was like that train-wreck moment during a work meeting or dinner party when someone says something so weirdly out of context or inept that it makes everyone else laugh uncomfortably and shift in their seats.
Two other listening-intensive exercises Anderson had us do were speaking with one voice and mirroring. In the former, you pair up with another person and try to talk as if you are one being. Seated in chairs facing each other, one person starts speaking, and you try to say everything your partner says as simultaneously as possible. And then you switch. Mirroring is similar, only you must match each other’s facial expressions and body movements. Maintaining eye contact during these exercises is crucial because only by using your eyes can you signal that you’re handing off the leader role. The intent, of course, is to get people to focus on each other; to listen so carefully that they sync up mentally and physically. Maintaining focus is as important for the leader as the follower because the leader has to be sensitive to avoid doing or saying something that makes the other person uncomfortable.
But again, our class had its attention grabbers. During the mirroring exercise, for example, I watched as one woman—let’s call her Ms. Yoga Pose—took her foot in the palm of her hand and slowly raised it over her head. Her less flexible partner grimaced and struggled as he tried to match her movements. All the while, Ms. Yoga Pose smiled brightly and insistently motioned with her head for him to continue to lift his foot despite his clear agony.
“Listening is a long learning curve,” Anderson told me after class. She said it’s one of the toughest parts of teaching improv and a frequent topic of discussion in staff meetings as she and other instructors brainstorm ways to make people more attentive and aware of their impact on others. “I like to think of improv as medicine,” Anderson said. “Instead of thinking, ‘This person is a jerk and out for themselves,’ I think, ‘Oh, man, this person is really struggling to be seen.’” In her experience, it all boils down to insecurity. “Their concern is they are not enough,” she said. “So they will use whatever tactics they think will work for them.” The most common tactics are showing off, withdrawing into a corner, or sometimes even getting hostile when others don’t think they are funny—“What’s wrong with you? Don’t you get it?”
Anderson has particular insight because she used to work as a nurse’s aide on a teen psychiatric unit. She first took improv classes as a de-stressor but soon realized that part of what was making her job stressful was she was more reactive than active in her listening. “At work, it was like I was this boulder on some shore and stormy water was crashing down on me,” she said. “I didn’t see trouble before it started because I wasn’t present. I was always thinking about the next thing.”
With improv training, she said, she became more aware of and sensitive to signs of an impending outburst or aggression so she could intervene before a patient acted out or before a fellow staff member got too overwhelmed. “It’s an amazing thing to realize that you get to set the tone within your space,” Anderson said. “People don’t realize the power they have when they learn to listen.”
She was promoted to be the ward’s education coordinator and began teaching improv to combined classes of patients and staff members, which transformed the climate on the unit. “It humanized an authoritative nurse who was mostly known for yelling at everybody because the kids would see that he was also afraid to be in the moment and think on his feet,” Anderson said. “I think it helped patients talk about their feelings in group therapy because everyone had already taken a low-level risk of listening and responding to each other during the improv exercises.” Interestingly, another mental health worker, the famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung, early in his career, did a kind of therapeutic improv with patients who wouldn’t speak. He mirrored their gestures and movements until they felt “heard” by him and started to talk.
Now at Second City, Anderson teaches classes to professionals hoping to improve their performance at work as well as classes for those with social anxiety or Asperger’s syndrome. She has also been recruited to teach improv to students at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Business, and at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
No matter who is in the class (including a journalist doing research for a book), her approach is fundamentally the same: getting people to listen to one another and have meaningful exchanges. Anderson is not far off when she describes improv as medicinal or therapeutic. Week by week, in doing the exercises, people start to realize the behaviors that keep them from connecting with people. Remember Ms. Yoga Pose? At the conclusion of the class, during which she tried to turn her partner into a human pretzel, she said, “I’m beginning to think my need to show what I can do is keeping me from finding out what other people can do and what we can do together.”
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To be successful at improvisational comedy and also the improvisation that is your real life, listening is critical. Controlling the narrative and grabbing for attention make for one-sided conversations and kill collaboration. Rather than advancing your agenda, it really just holds you back. The joy and benefit of human interactions come from a reciprocal focusing on one another’s words and actions, and being ready and willing to respond and expand on every contribution. The result is mutual understanding and even appreciation. As fun as it is to watch talented improv performers effortlessly riff off each other, it’s even more satisfying to be in a good conversation where you are both listening and helping to develop each other’s thoughts.
Moreover, listening is essential to being funny. A vast body of evidence indicates humor is an asset in forming and maintaining relationships both professionally and personally. In work environments, successful attempts at humor lead to perceptions of competence and confidence. In romantic relationships, successful humor is a gauge of intimacy and security. But the operative word here is successful. Unsuccessful humor has the opposite effect. Taking an improv class taught me that people don’t so muc
h have a fixed sense of humor as a variable ability to sense humor, depending on how well they listen. Whether telling jokes in front of a crowd at a comedy club or just trying to inject a little levity into a normal conversation, you won’t be funny unless you accurately read your audience.
The cartoon and humor editor for Esquire and former New Yorker cartoon editor, Bob Mankoff, told me, “Dating is a ritual of getting to know another person well enough to laugh.” To have an inside joke, to be able to make someone smile even when that person is mad at you, to have license to let down your guard and be silly, requires the investment of listening. “You have to listen to them long enough to be able to repeat back something they said and put a funny twist on it and also to know what the lines are that you’d better not cross,” said Mankoff, who has a background in experimental psychology and has taught humor theory at Fordham University and Swarthmore College.
Making a joke also involves being vulnerable. You’re putting yourself out there, hoping your humor will be appreciated. You are more likely to take that risk if the other person has proven an attentive and responsive listener and vice versa. Indeed, shared humor is a primary indicator of feelings of connectedness. People who fear intimacy tend to use divisive, put-down, or mean humor, which discourages listening by making people defensive.