Engineers Should be Skilled Listeners

From the Financial Times today by Simon Kuper in his Opening Shot column - Lessons In Listening:

"Good listeners ask questions, but not too many.  Journalists know the best moment in the interview often comes when you put away your pen and say, "Thank you so much for your time."  Then the interviewee - freed from your barrage of questions - tells you the thing she had been wanting to say.

Listening to anyone halfway interesting is a stimulus to think of something new.  The German writer Heinrich von Kleist called this "the gradual completion of thoughts while speaking".  In business, skilled listeners will use the other person's words to make a sale.  A consultant  that I know says that instead of telling clients what he has to offer, he usually asks them, "What's top of mind?"  If the client replies, "We're just working out how to replace all our workers with robots." he can then say. "It so happens we're got just the product for that."  Every common knows that what you really sell people are their own fantasies."