Selective Hearing Syndrome

Many Lean afflictions reduce the effectiveness of your continuous improvement efforts. One such affliction is Selective Hearing Syndrome.

In this disease, people filter out information that doesn’t support their views or that involves things they don’t want to do.

They also interpret the meaning of this information exclusively based on the pieces that make it through their filter.

Sometimes Selective Hearing Syndrome is an intentional tuning out of the person, but more commonly it is just that the person has something called confirmation bias going on. They weigh the things that they support or believe more heavily than other ideas.

As an example, when discussing the change an employee might see in a Lean environment, a leader might talk about how they will work to smooth out the workload to remove spikes where people are frantic, and provide a steadier level of work throughout the whole shift. If the person has a negative view of Lean, he might selectively hear that the lulls during the day are going away.

In an office, the manager might tell team members that they will each be getting a printer at their desk, so they don’t have to waste time going to and from a central printer unless it is a large print job. The person might hear that they are going to be stuck at their desk all day long.

There is obviously a communication issue here. If people don’t hear what you intended, you won’t get good results.

But the bigger cost of selective hearing is that it fouls relationships. When you give instructions and people don’t do what you asked, it can erode trust and make you more likely to micromanage, furthering the damage.

For team members it is worse. They likely won’t tell you that they filtered out important parts of a conversation and have a very negative view of something you said. That damage is a challenge because it is hidden, and slowly deteriorates relationships.

I recommend making amply use of briefbacks to be sure that what you meant is what the team member received. If they can repeat what you said, it reinforces the entire message, limiting the impact of the Selective Hearing Syndrome.