LEND ME YOUR EAR

M any of us are poor listeners. We interrupt each other. We multitask. We’re easily distracted. “Really listening to somebody is one of the best gifts we can give them,” says Martha Greene, a member of the Rotary Club of Reno Sunrise, Nevada, USA, and a retired library administrator. Careful listening also brings benefits – sometimes unexpected ones – to the listener. Club officers, project leaders, and business managers, take note.

When Anne Glendon became president of the Rotary Club of Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1997, she wanted to hear members’ ideas before setting goals for the year. A failure to do so, she believes, would have left her without the support she needed to be a successful leader. “When people have the opportunity to make the decisions and the decisions aren’t imposed upon them, they have greater ownership and, in the end, have pride in performance.”

She followed that philosophy when she led the effort to create the club’s first strategic plan. Through interviews, surveys, focus groups, and roundtable discussions, every member had the chance to offer suggestions about the next five years.

The club, which had been minimally involved in international initiatives, began participating in ambitious projects such as building an orphanage in the Philippines. Members also met their goal of increasing the club’s endowment from about $200,000 to $1 million in five years.

“People had ideas, but they had never really been asked in a systematic way what their thoughts were,” says Glendon, whose firm, Glendon Associates, consults with major foundations.

The same strategy can get results in the workplace. Some bosses talk more than they listen, however, says Andra L. Watkins, principal of the management consulting firm Positus Consulting in Charleston, S.C. “It’s a defensive mechanism for them to keep from having to hear any criticism or deal with any issue that makes them feel uncomfortable.”

Listening carefully isn’t simply a matter being polite: A business won’t thrive if its leaders are sheltered from reality. Watkins, a member of the Rotary Club of East Cooper Breakfast (Mount Pleasant), says that by scheduling a regular time to listen to employees, managers can “create a culture of openness. People feel like they can come to you as soon as, or even before, they see a problem – or a potential opportunity.”Alyssa Janney, a member of the Rotary Club of Santa Clarita Valley, California, works at Remo Inc., a manufacturer of drumheads. The division she manages trains doctors, music therapists, human resource professionals, and others to use group drumming as a wellness tool. Not long after she came aboard in 2004, she discovered that although people would leave the training excited, only a small percentage implemented the program. “If you’re inspired and you see an application for it in your work and then you don’t use it,” Janney notes, “something’s in the way.”

So she listened – both at the training sessions and on the phone after participants got home. After she learned that many felt overwhelmed by the challenges of starting the program, Janney created a business kit to help them, among other things, explain the benefits of the program to executives.

“The message that our customers get is that we care more about their success than we do about our profit,” she says. “What we get in return are inspired and successful facilitators making a difference in the world, and loyalty for our core products.”

Differences in language and culture can present their own challenges. Bob Wiens helps clubs in Alberta and Saskatchewan, Canada, plan international projects as chair of the District 5360 World Community Service Committee. He recently led a training session sponsored by the Rotary Club of El Cerrejon, Colombia, on producing bio-sand water filters and distributing them to households. (The project was funded in part by a Rotary Foundation Matching Grant.) Wiens, a retired engineer and a member of the Rotary Club of Calgary South, Alberta, had worked on similar projects that provided batches of 12 to 24 filters to committees of community members; each committee would then decide how to distribute its filters. 

But after speaking with Colombia’s indigenous Wayúu communities, which would be receiving the filters, the Rotarians learned that the typical approach wouldn’t work this time. “They were quite adamant that you don’t bother coming to a community with a few filters, because it causes so much division and jealousy,” Wiens says. As a result, the Rotarians decided to provide their 500 filters to a smaller number of communities so that every household could have one.

Like the Rotarians on that project, Janney tries to focus on making sure that her work has genuine value. “The only way you can do that,” she notes, “is if you listen to people and find out what it is that they need.”