One thing which fascinated me always is – “ why don’t we listen actively to our stakeholders ?”. Be it your customer, supplier or employee – it does not matter. I have seen multiple instances where instead of listening to them, we assume what they have in mind and make our own judgements.

This attitude leads to misunderstanding stakeholder issues and thereby leads to wrong diagnosis of the problem and hence inappropriate counter measures at our end. Let me illustrate this point with three real life instances, which I have witnessed myself and understood how deaf we are to our stakeholders.

In the first instance I was working in an automobile company. We were travelling in a bus for an offsite with the sales and marketing team. I noticed that the bus was not our brand and was wondering why customers don’t prefer our brand in that region of our country.

When enquired, our sales guys promptly told me that “Price” was the issue. On the other hand, when I asked the same question to the driver of the bus who was also was its owner, he said that “price”was not an issue but the issue was “non-availability of timely service and spares” and they could not afford their bus to be off-road for long as it could impact their business income.

The second instance is that of a patient and a doctor. The patient had mistakenly taken a tablet with its aluminium foil without realising it. When she complained to the doctors that her tablet had got stuck in her throat, they did not listen to her actively and investigate appropriately.

On the other hand, they examined her throat and told her everything was fine. Even in the end when they did an endoscopy the doctors said it was possibly a denture and not a tablet. Ultimately, a tablet with its aluminium foil was removed from her upper oesophagus. If the doctors had actively listened to the patient, the agony of the patient could have been reduced from one month to a few days.

The third incident is that of an employee. We were in process of selling a business to a buyer. We had a fantastic track record of employee well being and never had a strike in our history in that business. However, on the day when we were to hand over the business to the buyer, the employees went on strike.

I was incharge of that business and never realised that I did not listen to our employees. I had fought hard with the buyer to take over all the employees as part of the sale. The buyer had reluctantly agreed. On the other hand, while our employees were very happy with us, they were are not keen to join the new employer. They wanted to make their own decision to join or not. A clear situation where we did not listen to our employees.

In the all the three cases, if we had listened to our key stakeholder, we may have been better placed and the decisions we may have taken could have been a win win in each situation.

Organisations need to train their employees to listen to all their key stakeholders and not put words in their mouth or assume what they have in mind. If we listen attentively and act objectively, all our decisions will be the best we could make in any situation.

Let us learn to listen to all our stakeholders.

S Ramesh Shankar

15th April 2022