Listening: The missing essential in public relations

Amid the UK's recent political turmoil, it has been instructive to hear some of the language used around the debate, with the leadership of the Conservative Party and the party itself described as ‘tin-eared' and self-obsessed.  These criticisms haven't just come from the media, but from members of the party itself.   

As the Conservative Party geared up again to select a new leader, former Cabinet Office minister Sir David Lidington wrote in The Guardian, "In the past few weeks, we have appeared incompetent, tin-eared and obsessed with our party's prospects at the very time millions of households are worried sick about how to meet their bills for food, fuel and housing."

An expression such as tin-eared is immediately understandable, suggesting an inability to listen. But there's more to it than that.  The expression developed in relation to the appreciation of music, but it has also come to mean an inability to understand people's feelings.

For a politician, it means being out of touch with their electorate, unable to relate to their concerns. And this problem of listening in political and public communication has been thoroughly investigated over recent years by Professor Jim Macnamara at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia. 

His book, Organizational Listening:  The Missing Essential in Public Communication involved extensive work with organisations in three countries, 36 detailed case studies of organisations, in-depth interviews, and a review of hundreds of documents, such as communication plans.

He concluded that the organisations that provide a ‘core infrastructure of industrial and post-industrial democratic societies' are not listening effectively to their stakeholders and publics.

And there are serious consequences to not listening, including death, injury, breakdown in social cohesion and loss of trust.  One example cited in the book relates that failures within the National Health Service to listen to concerns about health care provision have resulted in unnecessary deaths. Longer-term effects include negative impacts on social cohesion and loss of trust.

BIG IMPACT

On the basis of these studies, the implications for public relations are significant. The claim, in practice, is that it's based on two-way communication, but the evidence in the book raises the question: is it?  Over the years, public relations has been described as the management of communication between an organisation and its public, or the management of reputation; a practice aimed at establishing relationships that are beneficial for all parties.

One view of public relations is that it is, axiomatically, a part of the overall management task, concerned with influencing relationships between organisations (both clients and individuals) and important groups. Now, it's recognised that practice is aimed at behavioural change. Communication is a means to influence, and the practice is anticipatory, looking to the future, and based on two-way communication.

The studies in Organizational Listening call a number of these features of the practice into question - and, further, suggest that public relations is a constituent part of corporate communication.

One principal finding is that organisations do not spend a great deal of time, or invest much effort, in listening.  The calculation from the studies carried out is that organisations spend, on average, 80 per cent of their time speaking, and 20 per cent of their time listening. (At the extreme end, the figures are 95 per cent speaking, 5 per cent listening.) And even when listening takes place, it often serves to refine outward communication, to make it more persuasive.

STARTING OVER

Listening takes work. And, to be effective, it should take place through what is described as the ‘architecture of listening.'  Listening is that "active direction of the sense of hearing to discern meaning from sound."  While doing this is clear in face-to-face communication, organisations need to make arrangements to ‘direct' attention and hearing - and these arrangements require resources such as personnel and time.

There's also a need to recognise what Macnamara describes as the seven canons or rules of listening.  Listening requires:

1. Recognition of others with legitimate rights to speak and to be treated with respect
2. Acknowledgement as a signal to those who speak that they have been heard and will receive attention
3. Giving attention to others - time consuming and requiring empathy
4. Interpreting what others say, as fairly and receptively as possible
5. Trying as far as possible to achieve understanding of others' views, perspectives or feelings
6. Giving consideration to what others say
7. Responding in an appropriate way.

To listen in this way and to set up architecture for listening, organisations need to have in place a culture for listening and policies relating to listening.  They have also to accept the political considerations relating to listening:  what is heard in the course of listening may call into question organisation plans, actions, ways of working, and these questions may be uncomfortable to those leading and giving direction to organisations.

Structures and processes will need to be established to listen and follow through on what is heard. Technology enables listening, which also requires the allocation of resources.  Finally, there is a need for listening skills on the part of those working in this area of communication for the organisations.

Can the costs and investments of time and skill in listening be justified?  The answer is quite definitely yes.  Benefits are felt in better decision-making, as the results of listening closely to important groups are fed back into senior levels of management.

Listening also leads on to improved working within the organisation, the building of trust between organisations and the groups important to them, and the reinvigoration of democracy and democratic government.

The value of new attention to listening is clear from the interest that has been expressed in the work that went into Organizational Listening, the book. 

For public relations, the questions raised by concern for improving listening can also lead on to answers that can lead on to improvements to practice. 

First, attention to listening challenges one of the dominating models of the communication process drawn on in practice. This is the so-called ‘transmission model' that sees communication initiated by a sender, transmitted through channels and directed towards receivers, or target audiences. Although the model allows for feedback, the emphasis is on transmission - messages to receivers - and feedback is used to test whether or not messages have been received.

Evaluation schemes are constructed using this model and are limited accordingly: they make insufficient allowance for the reaction of receivers, who are assumed to be passively waiting to receive, rather than active and selective in their attention. Listening allows for the collection of much more information about them, and for a more developed response to what they have to say.

Thinking more deeply about listening also allows for better techniques of listening; and for many years has been employed in public relations practice, such as survey research, in-depth interviews, and focus groups.  Where the results of these techniques are not available in practice, methods have to be found to use them as far as resources will allow - and this reinforces the point that listening is a matter of investment to improve practice.

Communication is central to public relations practice; not, as the late Harold Burson once said, the totality of the practice.  Its importance to practice means that improvement in communication skills is a constant requirement, certainly as technology opens more and more possibilities for communication. Practice is enhanced as skills develop, and the skills of listening are undeveloped in a practice which can over-emphasize the importance of speaking, telling, informing, broadcasting, content and message delivery.

In the UK, one of the emphases in government communication practice is on audience analysis, knowing the groups with which the government intends to communicate as thoroughly as possible. And this is a key part of government campaign planning. It is hard to see how this understanding of important groups is to be achieved without close attention to listening, in the fully developed way Macnamara describes. 

Drawing on the insights he provides, public relations can return to its commitment to dialogue, to look at ways of improving the practice's capacity to listen, reaping the many rewards that can follow more effective listening,  and ensuring that the organizations and clients advised are less likely to be accused of being ‘tin-eared.'