This post is for people who don’t mind reading a bit of jargon from the world of training and professional development. It’s all about how we define effective listening and how lawyers can develop it on the job, with some implications for legal education as well.

The term “competency” is a term of art in educational and professional parlance. I like this definition: “measurable or observable knowledge, skills, abilities, and behaviors [that are] critical to successful job performance.” 

Listening is very difficult to observe and to measure. Listening is hard even to define. Professor Neil Hamilton recognized these difficulties in his foundational law-review article on listening, Effectiveness Requires Listening: How to Assess and Improve Listening Skills:

One challenge in integrating a focus on improving listening

skills into the traditional law school curriculum, particularly the required

curriculum, is that it can be difficult to ascertain what “listening

skills” are. A failure to break down competence in a skill into component

parts can create confusion both for teachers, who need clear objectives

and assessment tools, and students, who need clear direction, thus

making it more difficult to integrate the skills into a curriculum.

Listening has received a variety of definitions from communication scholars, culminating in this from the International Listening Association: “the process of receiving, constructing meaning from and responding to spoken and/or nonverbal messages”

This definition underscores the problem with measuring listening. How do you measure whether a person is “receiving” messages, much less “constructing meaning” from them? Responding is much easier to observe and assess. (Yet another reason “active listening” gets so much love; you really can know it when you see it because by definition it involves an observable behavior.)

But just because measuring listening—all its aspects—is difficult doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile. An example worth studying comes from the Microsoft in Education program, which has undertaken the task of stating a broad range of Education Competencies for Teachers and School Leaders, including Listening Competences. (Also here are some on interpersonal skills.) The rest of this post focuses on these particular “Listening Competencies” and what lawyers might draw from some of their substance as well as the framework used to present them.

Tiers of listening from basic to expert

The Listening Competencies document begins with a rubric classifying listening skills into four tiers:

• basic
• intermediate
• advanced
• expert

An example of a basic listening skill is being attentive, and an expert listening skill is “making solid eye contact, intuitively absorbing the gist of the message.” A basic listening skill is being considerate of the opinions of others, and an expert skill is being able to accurately restate the opinions of others even when you disagree with them.

So this type of rubric is far from revolutionary but harder than it looks to develop. In the legal field, what do we consider basic and expert listening, and gradations of intermediate and advanced listening in between? The educators’ competencies do not adequately speak to the complex and contested situations lawyers find themselves dealing with; they would need to be developed and tailored significantly to describe the skills required by lawyers functioning in the real world and law students doing real-world experiential work.

There is a growing body of work in the area of articulating lawyering competencies, intensified by many factors such as the push for law schools to produce practice-ready graduates. The new book Building on Best Practices: Transforming Legal Education in a Changing World by Lisa Bliss et al. is an example of a very recent contribution. Listen Like a Lawyer will keep exploring the research, as well as talking to a variety of lawyers and law professors in order to revisit this question over the summer.

Develop-in-place assignments

In addition to the skill tiers, the Listening Competencies document also raised the idea of “part-time develop-in-place assignments.” This was not a term I had heard before, but the idea of a “develop-in-place assignment” seemed intriguing. Lawyers may prefer training opportunities that are more customized and active, with less loss of productivity than something like attending an all-day CLE.

So what does “develop-in-place” mean? From context, we know it is more than remedial training. For remedial needs, the Listening Competencies document has a separate section for “self-development remedies.” They include gems such as “keep your mouth closed” and “eliminate . . . . pencil drumming.” (There are more difficult items on the remediation list as well, such as “[l]isten to those who waste a lot of time, but try to help them.” How is that remedial?)

After the remedial section, the Listening Competencies document goes on to list ideas for “develop-in-place assignments.” The common thread is practical, hand-on training opportunities. They exist somewhere in between remedial and highly advanced. A few examples in the list include finding and learning from an expert; going to campus as a recruiter; and becoming someone’s mentor. The list also suggested making peace with an enemy or other person “you have disappointed, had trouble with, or don’t get along with.” The list also suggested going on a trip to a foreign country. (Yes, that would be a pretty awesome way to develop competencies! Sign me up for that one, please.)

The term “develop-in-place” appears not to be widely used beyond the Microsoft in Education competencies, but its basic meaning is confirmed by some excellent training materials from the Korn/Ferry training organization:

Develop-in-Place Assignments are job tasks that require application of certain competencies. Research shows that 70% of development happens on the job, and jobs differ in development power and in the competencies they address. You can’t always change jobs for development reasons alone, but there is almost always a develop-in-place assignment that you can select in your current job to address your development need.

This definition should appeal to lawyers in that it’s about doing an actual job task that also happens to develop skills or competencies—in other words, learning by doing. The idea that “there is almost always a develop-in-place assignment . . . in your current job” may ring true for many practicing lawyers. For example, new lawyers doing a lot of writing and research may seek out pro bono opportunities to work with clients more personally. (This isn’t a simple matter, and pro-bono work should be more than an opportunistic skill grab. But done correctly, it is a way to serve clients and the public and apply lawyering competencies.) Similarly, lawyers who work on a lot of individual, fact-intensive matters may seek time to write an article taking a broader perspective.

Expert lawyering requires so many different competencies, with listening being just one aspect of a broad picture combining intellectual, interpersonal, more broadly social, and practical skill sets. Marjorie Shultz and Sheldon Zedeck may have the definitive set in their list of 26 lawyering effectiveness factors. Given this eclectic mix and the value of learning by doing, this concept of “develop-in-place assignments” seems like a pretty good idea for professional development.

Please share your thoughts on listening competencies for lawyers, and ways that lawyers could use “develop-in-place” assignments to practice and improve their listening skills.

How is listening taught in law school—if it is taught at all? Some wonderful work is being done, especially in the clinics. But even the strongest and most effective approach to listening typically found in legal education today seems to be based in individual courses. It seems possible that a given law student could graduate from a typical U.S. law school without working on listening skills at all.

That’s not the case in an innovative program at the University of New Hampshire School of Law that re-envisions the 2L and 3L years. A new report by Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers, an initiative of the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System, describes the Daniel Webster Scholar Honors Program. Twenty-four students are selected at the end of their first year of law school to participate over the next two years. These students attend a careful sequence of subject-matter and skills classes. They receive frequent feedback (formative assessment) and must assess their own progress through a variety of reflection assignments. Upon successful completion of the program, students are admitted to the New Hampshire Bar without taking the regular bar exam, a fact touted in the New York Times’ recent article on bar-exam critics.

Listening plays an explicit role at the beginning, middle, and end of the Webster program.

The beginning: Getting admitted to the program

First, students are actually selected for the Webster program in part based on their communication skills. The report notes that during the program’s first year in 2005, student selection was based in large part on prior academic achievement. Now, selection is based on personal interviews with the selection committee and the committee’s assessment of a broader set of criteria. The criteria are grouped into four main categories: professional relationships, professional development, personal responsibility, and academic competence. A number of criteria in the professional relationships category relate to listening:

• Have integrity and engage in honest discourse
• Treat themselves and others with respect
• Work well with others, acknowledging their own and others’ strengths and weaknesses
• Show empathy and kindness to others
• Listen attentively—know when to listen and when to contribute
• Have humility—admit to mistakes and make apologies

And several criteria related to professional responsibility relate to listening as well:

• Seek—and learn from—feedback
• Are open to new ideas, seeing things from others’ perspectives, and sharing their views

The middle: Sequence of classes

Students in the Webster program proceed through a preset sequence of classes. Working with simulated clients appears to be required every semester. For example the first semester of the 2L year requires pretrial advocacy. The report provides benchmarks for that course. Some benchmarks address listening in the classroom: whether the student “actively and respectfully listens to peers and professor” and makes relevant comments that reflect, inter alia, insight about other students’ previous comments. Other benchmarks address performance on the skills such as taking a deposition (whether the student asks clear questions and uses effective body language and eye contact) and giving an oral argument (whether the student gives responsive answers to the judge’s questions and again uses effective body language and eye contact).

The end: Capstone class and standardized client interview

The Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers Report is so enthusiastic about this program because graduating students in the program outperform new lawyers at least as measured on their client interviewing skills. The capstone class involves a “standardized client interview” in which students are assessed by the trained actor who plays the client. The assessment has two parts: (1) interpersonal and professional interaction such as whether the student listened to the client; and (2) skill at asking questions to glean specific facts necessary for the client representation. Appendix B to the Report contains the assessment form filled out by the trained actors/standardized client. It contains a number of questions regarding the lawyer’s demeanor and ability to gain trust and glean the correct information.

Question 2 on that assessment hits listening about as hard as you can hit it, with 1 representing “strongly disagree” and 5 representing “strongly agree”:

I felt the lawyer listened to me.

1            2           3           4           5

The students who completed this program, regardless of their LSAT scores and other entering credentials, outperformed lawyers with 1-2 years of experience who also completed a standardized client interview. They received higher scores (statistically significantly higher) on the criteria of their professional communication skills such as listening and building trust. They received significantly higher scores on their ability to glean the relevant information from the client.

The Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers Report proclaims that these students are more ready to “hit the ground running” as a result of the program. The Report does, however, acknowledge obstacles to implementing such a program on a broader scale outside the context of the close-knit New Hampshire legal community. The Report suggests that the Webster program’s innovations could be unbundled and implemented in a more modular fashion, on a smaller scale. The key elements to preserve would be “the combination of formative and reflective assessment in a practice-based context and a focus on collaboration between the academy and the profession.”

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A previous post about another initiative of Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers can be found here.

Listening theories. Listening techniques. Body language. Distraction. Music. Hearing impairment. Client development. Client service. Law-firm management. Collaboration. Cognitive styles. Creativity.

Asking questions. Mindfulness. Job satisfaction. Emotional intelligence. Psychology. Learning theories and myths. 

Listen Like a Lawyer has a pretty awesome Twitter feed collecting fantastic links on these listening-related topics and more. As an end-of-year review, this post collects one notable link from each month, and some honorable mentions at the end. If you want to share your favorite link about listening, please post in the comments.

January

Merrilyn Astin Tarlton, The Multitasking Mess, Attorney at Work: http://www.attorneyatwork.com/the-multitasking-mess/

February

Gerry Riskin, Seven Keys to Retaining Your Clients, Amazing Firms; Amazing Practices http://www.gerryriskin.com/seven-keys-to-retaining-your-clients/

March

Adam Pasick, The Complete Guide to Listening to Music at Work, Quartz http://qz.com/185337/the-complete-guide-to-listening-to-music-at-work/

April

Art Markman, How to Figure Out What You’re Not Being Told, Fast Company http://www.fastcompany.com/3027793/work-smart/how-to-figure-out-what-youre-not-being-told

May

Wells H. Anderson & Seth G. Rowland, How to Choose the Right Tools for Any Client Communications, ABA GP Solo: Law Practice 2020 http://www.americanbar.org/publications/gp_solo/2014/may_june/how_choose_right_tools_any_client_communication.html

June

Judith E. Glaser & Richard D. Glaser, The Neurochemistry of Positive Conversations, Harvard Business Review Blog https://hbr.org/2014/06/the-neurochemistry-of-positive-conversations/

July

Josh Beser, 5 Ways to Follow Up Effectively (With Real-World Examples), JD Supra Business Advisor http://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/5-ways-to-follow-up-effectively-with-re-98088/

August

Anne Collier, Style Matters: How Cognitive Diversity Affects Your Work, ABA Law Practice Today http://www.lawpracticetoday.org/article/style-matters-cognitive-diversity-affects-work/

September

Gregory Ciotti, Critique v. Criticize: The Lost Art of Candor in the Workplace, The Next Web http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2014/09/08/critique-vs-criticize-lost-art-candor-workplace/

October

Jeanne R. Lee, Making It Rain–Practical Tips from Those Who Do: Annita Menogan, ABA Women Rainmakers http://www.lawpracticetoday.org/article/rainmaking-practical-tips/

November

Scott Eblin, How to Pull Yourself Back from the Brink of Your Caffeine-Driven, Smartphone-Addicted Life, Leading Blog: A Leadership Blog http://www.leadershipnow.com/leadingblog/2014/11/how_to_pull_yourself_back_from.html

December

Allison C. Shields, Use the Spirit of the Holiday Season to Improve Your Networking, Slaw: Canada’s Online Legal Magazine http://www.slaw.ca/2014/12/01/use-the-spirit-of-the-holiday-season-to-improve-your-networking/

Honorable Mentions:

• Tuning In: How to Listen Better http://www.wsj.com/articles/tuning-in-how-to-listen-better-1406070727

• “I Created a Different Relationship to the Voice in My Head” http://www.gretchenrubin.com/happiness_project/2014/02/i-created-a-different-relationship-to-the-voice-in-my-head/

• What is a Photocopier? http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/04/28/opinion/verbatim-what-is-a-photocopier.html

• What Gets in the Way of Listening https://hbr.org/2014/04/what-gets-in-the-way-of-listening/

• What Makes Lawyers Happy? Transcending the Anecdotes with Data from 6200 Lawyers http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2398989

• To Remember a Lecture Better, Take Notes by Hand http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/to-remember-a-lecture-better-take-notes-by-hand/361478/

• Getting Along at Work: A Primer on Personal Intelligence http://fortune.com/2014/04/14/getting-along-at-work-a-primer-on-personal-intelligence/

• Tales of the Undead . . . Learning Theories: The Learning Pyramid http://acrlog.org/2014/01/13/tales-of-the-undead-learning-theories-the-learning-pyramid/comment-page-1/

Doug Stone and Sheila Heen co-wrote what is now a business classic, Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most (2010). Their new book explores the challenges of one of the most difficult kinds of conversation — feedback. The title and subtitle of Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well (2014) signal their thesis: in these conversations, “the key player is not the giver, but the receiver.” 

Lawyers may benefit particularly from this book’s wisdom, given situations in law practice involving the lack of feedback, poorly delivered feedback, and the dire consequences of certain feedback. One difficulty was summed up by Dennis Kennedy’s advice for new lawyers in the ABA’s Law Practice Today:

Many attorneys will say nothing about your work and continue to give you more and more work. To you, this can be frustrating. In their minds, they have given you the highest form of feedback. “If I didn’t like the work, I wouldn’t give them more.” They don’t realize that most of us need to hear the words.

And likewise, Kennedy points out, some generic feedback may hide quite negative thoughts:

A hearty “great job” and no specific comments may disguise the fact someone can’t believe what a poor job you did and just wants to get you moved on to someone else.

So, for the feedback receiver, the first key to getting more out of feedback is recognizing it is everywhere; Stone and Heen define it to include “any information you get about yourself.” And since feedback is everywhere, we can guarantee that not every source of feedback will be skilled or thoughtful. People who want to be more effective can do so by focusing on the part of the feedback transaction they can control: how they receive it and what they do with it. I love this point for lawyers.

Several frameworks can help feedback receivers to do more with what they are receiving. The first is to understand the types of feedback:

• appreciation: knowing that others are noticing what you’re doing, and grateful for it
• coaching: understanding direction to grow and change in an area of skill or in a relationship
• evaluation: being rated or ranked, perhaps comparatively, and learning about future decisions based on rank

Some of the problems with feedback arise when the receiver just wants appreciation but receives detailed coaching, or wants a clear evaluation but receives vague appreciation (and so on). That’s what Dennis Kennedy was talking about with the “hearty great job” that disguises real dissatisfaction. I have also seen a confusion with coaching and evaluation, when an attorney receives a draft motion and marks it up extensively. For some attorneys, they aren’t criticizing the drafter but just using the first draft as a tool to recognize what they really want to do. This is coaching. But for other attorneys, having to mark up anything carries with an implicit judgment/evaluation of the drafter’s skills. Understanding the differences in types of feedback and clarifying expectations in a feedback situation can make conversations more productive.

The second important framework Stone and Heen outline is three categories of “triggers” — as in emotional triggers — that block feedback:

• Truth triggers arise when the feedback receiver thinks “that’s wrong”; “that’s not helpful”; or “that’s not me.”
• Relationship triggers arise when the feedback receiver feels unappreciated, does not respect the feedback giver, or blames the giver.
• Identity triggers arise when the feedback receiver takes the feedback personally, feels helpless, and starts to question everything.

And with these frameworks in mind, Stone and Heen then suggest various process-based approaches for effectively receiving feedback. There is really too much good material to describe here even at a very high level.

One point important point is the “mindset” work led by Carol Dweck at Stanford. If you believe people’s skills are fundamentally fixed and feedback merely reveals what their skills are, then you have a fixed mindset. If you believe people can develop their skills over time and feedback can help with that, you have a growth mindset. This is an incredibly important distinction for professional growth, such that the ABA’s Commission on Women in the Profession has an entire “GRIT Project” devoted to this concept. Professor William Henderson also wrote a great article about whether great lawyers are born or made. (For in-depth articles focusing on legal education, see articles by Sarah Adams-Schoen and Carrie Sperling. These are just two examples of a lot of great work in this area.)

At times Stone and Heen’s book focuses on listening specifically:

Advice about listening is white noise. It’s so common and so boring that we no longer even hearing. But if you’re drifting off, this would be a good time to wake up. Listening may be the most challenging skill involved in receiving feedback, but it also has the biggest payoff.

Part of the challenge with listening is the competing “inner voice” that drowns out external information. Stone and Heen advise listening for specific information and cultivating a sense of curiosity that can help to tamp down some of the inner voice’s resistance.

Another challenge with listening is the difficulty of doing it really well. Stone and Heen point out that great listeners are able to recognize not just what is being said substantively but also what is happening with the process of the conversation. Here’s one of their examples of managing process within a team:

Okay, we’re deadlocked. We both need to agree on this, and we don’t. Your solution is that I should give in. As a process, that doesn’t feel fair to me. On the other hand, I don’t know how to break this deadlock, so we’ve got to figure it out. What’s a fair and efficient way to decide when we don’t agree?

There is a whole lot more really valuable information in Thanks for the Feedback. Much of it is general information useful for any professional or personal setting. But among their many gigs, Stone and Heen teach negotiations at Harvard Law School; thus, they include several good law-related examples in the book. For anyone who gives or gets feedback, I really recommend this book.

Who can resist a good Hercule Poirot line, especially when it comes to listening?

Here’s another good one in the spirit of brutal honesty: “Mr. Ratchett, I have made enough money to satisfy both my needs and my caprices. I take only such cases now as interest me, and to be frank, my interest in your case is, uh… dwindling.”