On paper, at least, I am one of the world’s great communicators. I was CEO of one of the world’s largest public relations firms. Before that I was co-founder of one of the fastest growing high-tech marketing communications firms in Silicon Valley. And before that I was a successful journalist. I haven’t counseled kings, but I have whispered in the ears of some of the world’s most important business executives. When I lost most of my hearing, being the world’s greatest communicator got a lot more complicated. What I’ve discovered, though, is that communication involves a lot more than using your ears, and that you can still be one of the world’s greatest listeners even when you can’t hear.
I learned early on that the key to being a successful consultant is to shut up and listen. People are so accustomed to not being listened to, that if you simply let them talk, and if you take an honest and careful interest in everything they say, they will reveal things about themselves they’ve never exposed before. And they won’t even realize it. Once you get them talking, you can learn a person’s life story and nearly everything you need to know about what makes them tick. But the strangest thing is they often fail to listen even to themselves, so that after they’re done they have no recollection of what they’ve just told you.
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve simply played back to new clients what I’ve just finished hearing them say about their most personal fears, hopes and dreams for themselves, their families, their new products or their companies, and been told I’m an absolute genius, a mind reader who seems to know more about them than they do about themselves. They tell me I must already be an expert in their field because I know so much about where they are going and what they are doing without even having been briefed about their strategy and plans — only minutes after they’ve shared all those plans with me, down to the smallest detail. There is truly amazing power in good listening skills.
Unfortunately, severe hearing loss takes away that advantage. It’s impossible to sit back and listen intently, vacuuming up every seemingly insignificant little detail and putting it to very good use later. With speech reading you can get a very good approximation of the key points of a conversation, but you have to come back later to fill in the details of what you missed: the subsidiary clauses, casual asides, jokes, analogies or contextual references that are critical for complete understanding but hard to get the first time through without hearing the exact the words. Getting through an initial business conversation is like trying to read War & Peace at a single sitting. I’m sure with enough Evelyn Wood speed-reading training you can get the gist of Tolstoy’s great novel, and if you skim enough of the high points you can hold up well in a dinner-party conversation, but you will by necessity have to skip 80 percent of the actual words in the book. Sometimes speech reading is even like skipping to the last chapter of a mystery to see who done it in advance — by the end of the conversation you finally figure out what was going on, but you have no clear idea of how the participants got there.
So my little trick of playing the genius on a first business meeting doesn’t work any more. But I can be quite effective anyway by getting the same information in different ways. First, I do ten times more preparation than ever before. I do voluminous research on the client’s busines problem, industry and market. And I make it my business to know that person’s life story before I go in, so when I’m hearing it in the initial conversation I have the context and basic high points of the client’s personal story. (Look at my recent posting, A Night at the Theater, on going to a play having read the script beforehand — speech reading is a lot easier if you know the plot and what’s coming in the next scene). Thank you, Google.
Second, I take in the visual details in a way I never did before. How the person is dressed, what chatchkes he or she has strewn about the office, whether the desk is neat (a buttoned up client who will be easy to work with, or an anal control freak?), or sloppy (a casual client who will be easy to work with, or a disorganized nightmare?), framed awards or diplomas on the wall, and personal pictures all tell a tremendous amount about the person and the business situation. They also provide useful clues that can provide hooks back into the conversation when you lose the thread.
Looking at the client’s bookshelf also tells you “volumes” about that person’s interests and experience. Especially if there are books you’ve read in common, which gives you a chance to steer the conversation to an area where you know the context and are more likely to understand his or her perspective on it. Informal get-to-know-you conversations are extremely revealing but are among the most difficult social transactions for someone with a severe hearing impairment, because all too often the repetitions required just to get going kill the spontenaeity of the moment and end the discussion before it gets started. But when you start a “spontaneous” conversation about a topic you both are familiar with, where you already have a context and know the points of similarity in your experiences, you have a much better chance of successfully negotiating this opening social ritual.
Having several people in the room is also very useful, because body language comes into play much more prominently. I’ve sat in group meetings around a conference table with people who initially were complete strangers to me, but who at the end of two hours I know quite well, even without having understood much of what people at the far end of the table said. I know who’s mad at whom, which side of the issue different players are on, who is the funny one who provides social lubricant, who is the organized one who moves the meeting along, who is skeptical of the idea of hiring a consultant in the first place (take a note to set up a one-on-one later), and who through vigorous head-nodding is ready to sign a contract today. Sometimes this information is more important than the details of the problem at hand, which can often be established quickly through advance research. Having a grip on these dynamics can mean the difference between being effective or ineffective as a consultant and ultimately between success or failure. But none these things are obtained verbally.
So while I still find it very difficult to hear, I still manage to be one of the world’s greatest communicators. Just ask me. Then, listen up!