Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Sims Wyeth for Inc. magazine. To read the complete article and check out others, please click here.

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Knowing when not to speak is one of the most valuable speaking skills you can learn. Here’s why.

Companies are finding that people in call centers are not well equipped to work in save centers.

What’s the difference, you ask? Save centers help retain customers who are ticked off and want to cancel their contracts and get their money back. To staff up these save centers, companies tend to look for high-performing agents from traditional call centers.

Surprisingly, however, these employees tend to underperform in their new role, mainly because of poor listening skills.

Companies think the problem could be that these agents from regular call centers rely on written scripts. That is, like newscasters, they are accustomed to broadcasting information and not accustomed to listening.

In a study done by McKinsey, one telecom save desk hired candidates with superior listening skills. It found that within three months, these agents had save rates two to three times higher than those of more experienced people from the regular call centers.

The same is true at suicide hotlines. People who run suicide hotlines report that there are two kinds of volunteers who want to help:

1. Those who have been touched by suicide
2. Successful people who want to give back

The latter type are a disaster, because they can’t help jumping in and trying to make the distraught person feel better by sprinkling sunshine and unicorns on him or her. The instinct to problem solve can be devastatingly wrong.

The average suicide call lasts 20 minutes, but only if you listen the first 10, which is an excruciating amount of time.

The Persuasive Power of Listening

It is tempting to consider the possibilities of extending this lesson to a broader range of communication activities, including sales, coaching, consulting skills, managing difficult conversations, and leadership training, too.

Listening is persuasive, because it:

o Makes the other person feel respected and understood
o Helps the listener understand the feelings and perceptions of the other party
o Enables the listener to ask better questions
o Makes the person being listened to want to reciprocate and listen back

What’s really going on is what Robert Cialdini calls the Principle of Reciprocity, which says that human beings are hard-wired to give back to those who have given to them. And perhaps the greatest gift people can give one another is the gift of attention, a gift you give primarily by listening.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Sims Wyeth is the president of Sims Wyeth & Co., an executive development firm devoted to the art and science of speaking persuasively. He is also the author of The Essentials of Persuasive Public Speaking, published by W. W. Norton (2014).
@simswyeth