What half-listening costs you

The next chapter is about what your drafting costs other people. This one is about what it costs you. It's the less obvious bill, and most of this chapter is my own reckoning.

Information. You miss things. You don't miss the gist, but you miss what came after it. There's the date they mentioned at the end, and the condition attached to the yes. There's the name of the person you were supposed to ring. At work this shows up as small errors and repeated questions. At home it shows up as "I told you that on Tuesday." Some people with this habit have come to think that their memory is going. Often nothing is wrong with their memory. The information was never taken in, because they were composing a reply at the moment it was offered.

Standing at work. Avraham Kluger and colleagues pooled the research on listening in workplaces, several hundred results in all. How well people felt listened to was strongly associated with good outcomes, with an average correlation of about .39. The link was stronger for the quality of working relationships, at about .51, than for performance itself. I should flag a weakness that the authors flag themselves. Three quarters of the studies relied on people's own reports, and a person who likes their manager will rate the manager's listening highly. When those studies were removed, the link with job performance fell to about .21, which is modest but still there. The fair reading is that people work better with, and for, those they feel listen to them.

Trouble at home. "You never listen" is one of the commonest complaints between partners, and it's usually met with a hurt denial, because the accused partner was there, was facing the right way and can repeat the gist. Both are telling the truth. One heard the gist and replied to it, and the other didn't feel heard. If you've been told this more than once, by more than one person, you should take it as information about how you listen. It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with your character.

Being wrong. Drafting commits you early. You've decided what the situation is by the third sentence, and everything after that gets fitted to the decision or ignored. So you're more often mistaken about what people think, what they want and what's going on with them. You're also more often surprised, and more often left saying, "But I had no idea."

Learning. A reply composed from what's already in your head can only contain what you already knew. If every conversation is a chance to deliver something you've got ready, you come away from each one knowing what you knew when you went in. People who listen to the end hear things they couldn't have predicted, and that's one of the few ways anyone learns anything new about other people.

The work of it. Drafting is effortful. You have to hold the reply, rehearse the first line, watch for the gap and keep up the nods. That's a fair amount to be doing at once, and a day of it is tiring. Many people find listening to the end easier once they've got over the strangeness of it. There's only the one thing to do.

The company you get. This is the subtlest item. People show more of themselves to those who listen. If you half-listen, the people in your life become a little flatter and a little more predictable, because they give you the safe surface and take the rest elsewhere. You may have concluded that your colleagues are dull or that your teenager has nothing to say. It's worth considering that they have plenty to say and have stopped saying it to you.

The relationships themselves. Chapter 1 showed where this ends. The calls get shorter, and the big news reaches you second-hand. You find you know less about your children's or your friends' lives than other people do. Nothing dramatic happens to mark it. People simply stop telling you much.

Against this, what does drafting buy? It buys a reply delivered a second or two sooner. It buys protection from a silence that wasn't going to hurt anyone, and a better chance of getting your story or your point in. You'd be able to tell most of those stories and make most of those points anyway, a little later and to a more receptive listener.