How to approach Listening Test Part Three • In this part of the Listening Test you listen to a long conversation or interview an

F George, you said you’d be interested in talking about communication sometime.
M Yeah, just chatting, you know.
F Well, I’m not too busy just now.
M Oh, good. The thing is, Karen, I’ve been feeling rather frustrated lately. I mean, I get these managers who are apparently only too willing to show up for these workshops I run ... and I have them draw up lists of obstacles they face at work and communication is always there. But it seems just to be paying lip service, rather than probing the underlying factors. And I have observed that in many companies there is still an air of deference towards managers and people find it hard to be honest because managers keep employees’ real issues at arm’s length.
F Oh, it can be terrible, can’t it? I remember one time, when I’d been made the test manager at an IT company, and a member of my team, this guy Dave, came and complained that a colleague wasn’t pulling her weight on a project she was on. When I investigated, I understood that Dave had probably really been expressing his dissatisfaction that he hadn’t been included in the project himself.
M Very tricky,, that kind of thing. And there’s no obvious solution.
F Well, I guess there are always ways to try and prevent problems building up in the first place. You need to create a space for people to talk really talk ’And to do that you have to cultivate a relationship where people feel they can be honest. You have to make some time as appropriate, according to need, to have, say, lunch or coffee with each of your people in the canteen or rest area. If you’re impatient or don’t take time to listen, invariably you won’t get an accurate impression of any given situation - and in the end you’ll suffer for it.
M Yes, that’s something not everyone fully appreciates. Especially when people are needing to collaborate across different departments, which seems to be increasingly common. If you rind yourself working jointly on a project with another department, you can often get mix-ups about completion dates, about who has what area of responsibility It can get very irritating. You should try to be dear as you go along the way about what role each department is taking, what it is you’re contributing, and what you expect from the other department - but the message doesn’t always get through.
F Oh, certainly - giving out messages is the easy part The question is whether your message got through. And it’s your responsibility to make sure it does! After all, meetings and conversations can often go on for ages, and correspondingly so can any notes you or others make to capture the points. In fact, the end result can change the nature of discussions along the way, so you’re better off having your opposite party repeat back to you what they think you’ve achieved overall. If you say it yourself, you may simply be reinforcing the impression they had as opposed to your own.
M Right. It all comes down to the processes that the company uses to run itself internally, as a bureaucracy Until recently, communication in companies was seen as the exclusive territory of the PR and marketing departments. But that’s come to an end, hasn’t it with new forms of communication - so you’ve got something like investor relations being termed ’financial management’- though what that means in practice is hard to say. I’m not sure who’s controlling what anymore, and I think this can mean you get fragmented or contradictory manifestations of. the company being sent to the outside world. But I wouldn’t like to be asked to propose a solution!
F No! Well, actually, it’s all in the system you set up, isn’t it2 Everyone’s plunging into team after team, weaving functions together, regardless of whether it can all be knitted in like that, But you’re actually only in one department, and you can only do what you’ve been equipped to do, and we can’t all be experts in the field of communications, but we can all get better than we are, which is where some effective skills input and support to empower people can really make a difference.
M Yeah, but decisions to that effect have to be made and delivered by someone. So you have the reality of an organisation on the one hand, and its figurehead chief executive on the other
   The leader can take something forward on Paper, according to where he or she’d like to see everything going, but can’t control how that’s expressed down the line. So effectively it’s the middle sections of the hierarchy that calls the shots, however illogical that seems.
F I think you’re right. And then I suppose we should ...