Hearing vs. Handling

Jakob runs engineering at a company that builds industrial sensors. He is the person you want when something fails at 2:00 AM. Describe a problem to him and he’ll begin solving it before you finish the sentence.

That gift has a shadow side.

At dinner one night, his husband, Phillip, described a colleague who was making his work harder than it needed to be. Jakob listened the way he listens to a failing system: isolating variables, mapping causes. By breakfast, he had three options for Phillip on a single sheet of paper, ranked, with the tradeoffs of each.

Phillip read it standing at the counter. Then he set it down.

"I didn't want you to fix it," he said. "I just wanted you to listen."

Jakob started to answer and stopped. Phillip wasn’t angry. He sounded like someone who had said this before, in other words, on other nights, and finally the message landed.

What Jakob found underneath, he found on his own, on his drive to work that morning. Solving is how Jakob ends uncertainty. An open problem buzzes in his mind like a fault alarm, and handling it silences the alarm. The sheet of options was never for Phillip. It was for him.

Jakob recounted this when we spoke next, and I offered him a framework of “hear, help, or handle.” The practice is simple. Before you respond to anyone who brings you something unfinished, ask one question, of yourself first, and then out loud: Do you want me to hear this, help you think it through, or handle it?

He tried this new framework two days later. His most senior engineer came in with a customer situation tangled enough that the old Jakob would have taken it from her. Instead, he asked the question. She looked surprised, then relieved. She just needed him to know about it, she said. She could handle it.

The whole conversation took less than ten minutes. She left, and Jakob had nothing to write down.

Weeks after the dinner, Phillip came home with another story about work. Jakob felt the old pull to start solving. Instead, he asked, "Do you want me to hear this, help you think it through, or handle it?"

Phillip laughed. "Once an engineer, always an engineer."

Then he answered the question, and they talked for a long time.

Handling has its place. Some problems are yours to own, and you must own them well. But the people who bring you problems aren't always bringing you work. Sometimes they are extending you trust, and all it requires is hearing what they have to say. Don’t let your own discomfort choose the response.

Handling answers your need. Hearing asks about theirs.

THE QUESTION

The next time someone brings you a problem, will you ask what they need before you decide?

"Listening, of this very special kind, is one of the most potent forces for change that I know." — Carl Rogers

I first learned of hear, help, or handle from Sandy Sullivan and Allie Wik at Alchemy Group.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dominick Bizzarro has spent three decades as an executive and coach. He helps humanistic leaders see possibilities in people and business.

Contact: dominick@innovatorswithin.com​

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