You're not listening! If you've managed to avoid hearing or saying that phrase, then you are a rare human being indeed. Conversations and other forms of auditory stimuli surround us. Sometimes there's so much noise that true communication disappears in the chaos.

My favorite example of this phenomenon took place in a firehouse, where we had an individual who liked to do woodworking when he was on duty. The chief hated him doing it. The woodworker hated the couch that the department had in the station's living room. These two were at each other's throat almost constantly over these issues. The chief wanted the woodworking out of the firehouse, and the firefighter wanted the couch out of the living room.

One day it was raining the proverbial cats and dogs. When the chief came through the door, he saw that there was a great deal of wooden material stacked neatly on the couch. Growing redder in the face as he pointed toward the couch, he began to spit and sputter at the woodworking firefighter, “Get rid of it and get rid of it now!” As the chief left the room, he tossed off a final comment, “This is the last time we are ever going to talk about this — get rid of it right now!”

Imagine the chief's chagrin when he returned a few hours later to find all of the woodwork neatly piled on the chairs in the room. The couch had disappeared. Bolting to the back door and looking behind the fire station, he was outraged to see the couch had become a sodden mess sitting in the parking lot.

Now this particular event had some humorous aspects of it, but the consequences of not listening aren't always funny. As a matter of fact, a lack of active listening skills has cost people their careers, opportunities and even marriages.

Have you ever had a problem with your listening skills while dealing with a spouse or a child? What many of you might not realize is that if the same inactive listening skills are exercised in the fire station, there can be a wide variety of negative results. If you learn what an active listener does and see it as a skill and ability, you can become better at it and improve your interactions with others.

Let's talk first about the whole concept of being a listener versus a talker. The first ground rule is that if you're talking, you aren't listening. The second ground rule is that if you're just listening without talking, then you aren't communicating.

Active listening means focusing on what the other person really has to say. However, in the event that you're absorbing signals from another person without giving feedback on what those signals mean to you, there's a strong possibility that the versions may not be the same when it's all over with.

While the tale of the wet couch shows communication problems in the fire station, active listening also can be applied to the overall fire organization. Developing active listening skills is a very important part in determining the potential success of interaction among small groups in an organizational setting. In large groups it also plays a role, but to a different degree. Large groups often have more misunderstandings as the various sides give out without getting through to the others. In short, being an active listener is very important for a fire captain supervising a small group of people, but it's often more important to a chief officer supervising an entire shift or a fire chief running an entire fire department.

Active listening skills are vital only in certain environments. We all know there's a lot of rhetoric in our organizations, but you also might compare much of the communication that goes on in the firehouse to radio static. Active listening isn't something you can do 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, but it is something you must be prepared to do when consequences could result from not doing it.

For example, the use of active listening skills allows a much more effective application of information when you're trying to resolve a conflict. When a person is coping with conflict, listening is very important. It could be conflict above you; it could be conflict below you; it could be conflict between individuals. In conflict resolution, both sides have to hear and feel the true signals of the other side to reach a level of trust. That comes from active listening.

While conflict resolution may seem to require only problem-solving, it also touches on crisis management. There's an emotional aspect to it that's one notch up from having to solve a problem. Active listening is a technique to get beyond the tears and fears to probe for specifics rather than generalities.

So how do you do this wonderful thing? It might be helpful if we use an acronym here to remind you of these techniques. The acronym is FAIR, which stands for focus, accountability, involvement and repetition.

Focus means exactly that. When you're involved in an exchange of information, you can't be multi-tasking. It's important to position yourself in a way that maintains eye contact while allowing you to watch for body language and other non-verbal forms of communications.

The only way that you can be an active listener is to block out all of the other signals that are coming into your consciousness. You need to pay attention to what other people are saying. Nuances such as the choice of words and the manner in which people express themselves often are based on whether they think you are paying attention or tuning them out. You also don't want to provide your own distractions. For example, it's better not to be too direct when you're trying to get another person to tell the truth.

Accountability speaks to the issue of taking responsibility for what you say and holding other people responsible for what they say. In active listening there are no throw-away lines. When you're engaged with another person in an active-listening environment, everything that's said must mean something. You have to take personal accountability as you formulate every thought based on what you're hearing.

Involvement literally means that anytime a person is doing all of the talking and none of the listening, there isn't a lot of communication going on — it's a monologue. Involvement means that there needs to be a continuous assessment in the discussion of how the other person's perspective is being brought out. Instead of making judgments during active listening, good communicators tend to ask a lot of questions in case the other person has yet to form all of their conclusions. It you can get someone to answer questions before he or she forms a final opinion, you may uncover information that will help you with the understanding of that person's true intent.

Repetition is an important component of active listening, requiring you to tell the other person what you think has been said. This type of dialogue often starts off with, “What I think you said to me was ….” If you go back to the previous test of involvement, repetition means constantly using new information to update what you actually know about what is being discussed.

Active listeners often give the impression of empathy without being overwhelmed by what they are receiving. They tend to be people who can convert what's being said into what is really being meant. The concept of active listening also includes the idea that judgment is always pending instead of being rendered in the middle of a conversation. The use of any language that gives the person the indication that the jury has already delivered its verdict almost automatically eliminates the opportunity for active communications.

Unfortunately, active listening is not a common practice during many situations in our field. If the comic-strip character Dilbert had been a captain in a firehouse, he probably would have drawn some of the same conclusions about the breakdown in communications that occur in almost every business around the country.

As a person who is leading or supervising others, we often can expand our influence over their roles and relationships in achieving the goals of our organization by being a better listener. When individuals seek to understand, they must have both patience and curiosity.

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A 40-year veteran of the fire service, Ronny J. Coleman has served as fire chief in Fullerton and San Clemente, Calif., and was the fire marshal of the State of California from 1992 to 1999. He is a certified fire chief and a master instructor in the California Fire Service Training and Education System. A Fellow of the Institution of Fire Engineers, he has an associate's degree in fire science, a bachelor's degree in political science and a master's degree in vocational education.