Chapter Overview

An initial step in planning for a meeting is selection of participants. You can identify certain participants by looking at special qualifications or expertise. Other participants may be invited because of the political sensitivity of the subject matter. Check also to see whether any unnecessary duplication in the membership could inhibit or inadvertently undermine the group's deliberations.

Next, consider the discussion issue. Is it an issue of fact, value, or policy? Issues of fact are answerable by securing needed information and, therefore, are rarely issues for decision making. Issues of value are questions about the goodness or worth of something. These call for a group to make a judgment. Issues of policy are questions that invite the group to some action. These issues provide the richest opportunity for groups to work toward some common goal. Whatever the nature of the issue, the group must focus it into manageable limits before it proceeds.

The decision about how much structure is needed in a decision-making group is a complex one. When deciding, the leader--or perhaps the group itself-must consider several questions: (1) How much order is needed to allow group members to feel comfortable? (2) How much time does the group have to carry out the task? (3) How many people will be present to give input? (4) Do the group members have strong feelings about the topic or about one another? (5) What is the nature of the task? Tasks can be classified by their difficulty, solution multiplicity, intrinsic interest to members, cooperation requirements, and population (member) interest.

A final step in preparation is securing information. First, conduct an inventory of what you know. Next, gather additional information to supplement your knowledge through interviews, surveys, library research, direct observation, and electronic search. Finally, evaluate and organize the information. Asking appropriate questions can help you in the evaluation process.

There are four components of the listening process: sensing, attending, understanding, and remembering. Each of these presents a potential area of difficulty for a listener. If your sensing mechanisms are faulty, you will not receive the message. If you are distracted and do not attend, you will not know what is said. If you do not understand, you may assume one message when the speaker means another. If you cannot remember the message that you processed, your listening effort is wasted.

Sensing problems may be related to actual defects in the mechanisms or to noise from the environment. Attending problems emerge from a greater range of difficulties. These include selective perception, poor attending habits, the listener's attitudes and needs, low-intensity messages, and messages that are too long. Difficulties related to understanding can be attributed to four sources: different fields of experience, inability to empathize, poor use of feedback, and various mental sets. Finally, as forgetting curves demonstrate, people forget much detail unless they learn to intervene in some way.

Important listening skills must be practiced if they are to be acquired. Five suggestions are

1. Work hard at listening. Avoiding distractions is hard work.

2. Paraphrase the content. Active listening will force involvement.

3. Check your inferences. Checking will allow confirmation or denial.

4. Empathize. Empathy helps you understand the speaker's view.

5. Work on remembering. Note taking, association, and review help memory.

Women and men behave differently when listening because the act of listening has different meanings for men and women. Men see listening at length as a one-down, low-status behavior. Therefore, they interrupt frequently to maintain control. Women see listening as an opportunity to connect with the other person. They see interrupting to take the floor as insensitive to the other person's feelings.