Once again, I am teaching Employment Dispute Mediation online to students in various professions, including Human Resources, union representatives, teachers, law enforcement, paralegals, etc. As in past classes, Active Listening is an important topic that most of them need to work on.

I raise this issue as the Harvard Program On Negotiation blog recounts an interesting story about someone who learned how to actively listen and, thus, how valuable it is. (“How Conflict Examples Can Teach Us to Listen” by Katie Shonk, February 4, 2025) It changes our preconceived notions and helps to bring parties together. Suddenly, one understands the other party’s perspective and concludes it is not as preposterous as initially presumed. There is more in common than first thought, and the parties can agree! (Id.)

The story is as follows:

In the 1980s, Jessie Daniels entered the sociology PhD program at the University of Texas with a lot of assumptions about the world, as she writes in a new anthology of personal essays by sociologists, Between Us: Healing Ourselves and Changing the World Through Sociology. Some of those assumptions were profoundly shaken when she secured a research position with Dr. Joe Feagin.

Feagin assigned Daniels the task of transcribing interviews with middle-class Black Americans about their experience with racism. At the time, Daniels, who is white, naively assumed that because the Civil Rights Act had made racial discrimination illegal in the United States, the interviewees might be “overly sensitive, looking for discrimination where there was none,” she recalls.

In fact, she soon found, the interviewees were slow to complain. When they did share stories of possible discrimination, they agonized over how to interpret them. One woman, for instance, described being seated at the back of a restaurant, near the kitchen. “Oh, come on,” Daniels thought. “That could happen to anyone.” But as Daniels noted, the woman on the tape “couldn’t hear me, and I couldn’t actually interrupt her, so I just kept typing.”

In her interview, the woman expressed how confusing the incident was: “It could be discrimination, or it could not be, but now I’ve got to spend my energy to try and figure this out, because you know, I don’t want to be one of those complaining types.” She concluded, “It’s an exhausting way to go through life.” From nearly every interviewee, Daniels heard similar stories of “internal calculation in response to discrimination.”

By listening closely to the interviewees—with no opportunity to question or rebut them—Daniels gained a deeper understanding of systemic racism and the pain and confusion it causes. “By the end of transcribing those interviews, something fundamental in me had shifted,” she writes. “Instead of arguing or disagreeing with the Black people I’d spent time listening to, I was in solidarity with them.”(Id.)

Sarah Federman, a professor at the University of Baltimore, suggests that one way to improve your active listening skills is “to ask five information-seeking questions with no agenda” to someone in your life.” This means you can only ask questions to understand the person’s world better, not to lead the person toward or away from a particular solution.” (Id.)

Professor Federman notes that by asking questions without an agenda and listening carefully, one gains a better understanding of the other person and can reduce, if not prevent, conflicts. (Id.)

I am inclined to try that five-question exercise with my class and see what happens!

… Just something to think about.

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