Did You Hear What I Said? How to Listen Better

It’s a common experience in the workplace: You leave a meeting feeling good about the discussion and believe everyone is on the same page.

“Then you meet with someone two days later, and you realize they’re not on the same page at all,” says Hanne Collins, a doctoral candidate at Harvard Business School. “You feel like maybe they weren’t totally listening.”

The team found:

• Nearly a quarter of the time (24 percent), the listener wasn’t paying attention to their partner.
• Even more significantly, 31 percent of the time, the listener’s and speaker’s perceptions of attention didn’t match up.
• About 19 percent of the time, the speaker thought the other person was listening when they weren’t.
• And 12 percent of the time, the speaker didn’t think the other person was listening when they were.