(FORTUNE Magazine) – A certain sadness attends the folks who have worked diligently over the years to teach managers to listen. Says a consultant typical of the breed, wearily: ''We keep trying to tell them, but they just don't seem to get the message.'' Not that the skills involved are hard to learn; they aren't. What's hard, apparently, is developing the right attitude. Executives remain addicted to the thrill of hearing themselves talk. Hold your tongues, execs: At hand may be the managerial equivalent of what fundamentalists call the Rapture, the final ingathering to glory of those who have got their minds right. The old order -- the brass decides, tells the troops, they hop to -- passeth. More participatory management, heralded for 20 years but little acted upon, finally arriveth, ushered in by new competitive pressures and the demands of baby-boomers. In the new order, where the troops have a few ideas of their own, listening is ''the fundamental skill'' required of managers, at least in the view of experts such as John Kello, a Davidson College psychology professor who conducts workshops in communications for the likes of IBM and Chrysler. From that ability, Kello says, all the rest derives: the ability to establish good relationships with employees, to set goals with them, to give them effective performance appraisals. Still can't muster the right attitude? Besides missing out on promotions and power in the new milieu, you run these risks: -- You are liable to prove a poor negotiator. No win-win for you, baby, if you can't tune in to what the other fellow truly wants, or might settle for. -- You leave yourself open to unpleasant, career-derailing surprises. Michigan * State professor Eugene Jennings, a consultant often brought in when the CEO is in trouble, argues that authority is inimical to information: The higher you go, the more you wrap yourself in the mantle, the less likely your subordinates are to tell you bad news. To get the truth, you have to show them that you hear, and indeed welcome, the occasional discouraging word. -- You will flunk crisis management. The experts say that under high stress, when you most need information, even a good listener's system will shut out incoming signals. -- You probably aren't going to do as well with your significant others -- spouse, children -- as you, or they, might wish. ''Kenneth, I'm leaving you for someone else.'' ''Uh . . . fine, hon, I'll just order a pizza.'' To listen seriously: Begin by setting the stage as much as you can. For important conversations, go somewhere free of ringing telephones, background noises, or desktops full of distractingly undone work. Pick a place where the speaker can relax, in the case of a subordinate possibly somewhere other than your power office, with its desk on a dais and the sawed-off visitors' chairs. More important, try to clear your mind. Put aside whatever else concerns you, consciously slow down, and think for a moment about why you are having this conversation and what you hope to get out of it. You walk a fine line here. On the one hand, the experts are virtually unanimous that you should have an agenda -- some idea of what you are listening for. Just the facts, ma'am, or perhaps the underlying reasons for the speaker's position. On the other hand, said experts also counsel that when he actually gets talking, you must try not to anticipate what he will say next; guessing ahead will distract you and you're likely to shape what you do hear to fit your preconceptions. Enlightened you will, of course, already have attempted to rid your mind of any preconceptions based on the speaker's sex, race, accent, or rank. He or she begins. More fine lines: Look at the speaker, but don't stare unremittingly. Try to pick up on his facial expression and body language, but avoid being transfixed by manic gesturing. Don't interrupt, but do interject a nod, smile, or an ''um-hmm'' frequently enough to show him you are paying attention. And be careful in your choice of interjections. Kevin J. Murphy, author of a new book entitled Effective Listening, points out that the phrases ''That's interesting'' and ''Is that right?'' almost always indicate that $ you are only pretending to listen. WHILE you should not expect the speaker to be organized in what he says, you should listen for patterns -- key words frequently repeated, an underlying structure. Gerald Phillips, a professor of speech communication at Pennsylvania State University, observes that possible structures range from the chronology to the use of analogies to the flat-out argument -- ''I think we ought to do this for several reasons.'' Be alert, too, to the possibility that the speaker will simply throw rationality to the winds and attempt to grab your emotions. Professor Nancy Wyatt, also at Penn State, and co-author of the soon-to-be-published textbook Successful Listening, particularly warns against those two beguiling fallacies, the bandwagon pitch (''Everybody's doing it'') and the old ad hominem one-two (''That comes from Shirley, and Shirley is a you-know-what''). What you're trying to do is create what the experts call an internal paraphrase of what the speaker says. Think of it as a running mental outline, which you recap to yourself periodically throughout the conversation. You may even want to jot down the principal points. Having such a paraphrase will help immeasurably both when you go to sum up the conversation and when you try to remember it later. To fill in gaps in your outline, ask questions -- carefully timed, neutral in tone, unloaded, the more open-ended the better. You can also use questions to draw out the speaker's feelings (''You're pretty upset about this, aren't you?''), though an observation (''I noticed that you're livid with rage'') or a reference to your own experience (''Something like that happened to me once; I was homicidal'') will serve as well. A bonus tip from Professor Wyatt: In your questioning, probe the areas you should be hearing about but are not. Is your subordinate perhaps tiptoeing around an incipient problem? Was that just possibly inventory blocking your way into the parking lot this morning? Why did the assistant controller leave suddenly for an unscheduled vacation in Brazil? The bad listener assumes that if it isn't mentioned, it must be okay. The good listener, sadder but wiser, knows better. IF YOU have not been doing it along the way, then certainly toward the end of the conversation rehearse for the speaker what you understand him to have been saying: ''All right, what I hear from you is that . . .'' Not just the words, mind you, but the emotions behind them as well. This will provide a check on your internal paraphrase, and a final assurance to him that you really were paying attention. Be open to corrections. Then, once the two of you have got the gist straight, give him your considered response. In the to- and-fro that follows, if anything, listen harder. Now more than ever, avoid being distracted by fretting about what eloquence you will utter next. Your final responsibility as a tuned-in manager is to act on what you have heard. Do something, even if it isn't exactly what your partner in conversation had in mind. Otherwise he's likely to feel that the whole exchange was a futile, manipulative exercise. The true test of a good managerial listener comes in those situations euphemistically termed confrontative: You have to deliver a bad performance review, or discipline someone; the boss, or a subordinate, comes stomping into your office blisteringly mad. One thing to remember from the outset: If you get mad in response, you lose. Rationality flies out the window, feelings get hurt, and the chance for substantive two-way communication disappears. Alan Brown, a professor at Southern Methodist University, notes that your memory of key facts or arguments may well be impaired by the first rush of hot blood. If you need any further inducement to keep cool, consider the possibility raised by Max Bazerman, a professor at Northwestern's business school and an expert on negotiation: The other guy could merely be using anger as a ploy to throw you off. The secret of negotiating these little spates of unpleasantness, as Kello of Davidson points out, is to stick to your agenda, even if it's only an agenda seized upon in the first nanoseconds after the wild bull arrived at your door. Like a good torero, give the het-up creature plenty of opportunities to express, and exhaust, his angry feelings: ''I can see that you're really mad. Tell me what happened.'' Yammer, yammer, yammer. ''So you feel that we went back on our deal with you?'' Yammer, yammer, yammer some more. Your aim in all this is to ''talk him down,'' in Kello's phrase, back to himself and to a level where some exchange can take place. You will know you are beginning to succeed when he starts saying things like, ''Look, I don't mean to lay all this on you.'' Proceed to conduct the civilized conversation that the two of you are now capable of. If he can't be talked down, your best bet may be to break off the hostilities, appointing another time when you can resume with greater calm: ''Look, you're mad, I'm becoming mad, and together we're getting nowhere. Why don't we both sleep on it, and talk in the morning?'' Then, at the end of the day, hie yourself to a loved one or friend, have a libation or two, and get a few things off your chest. Let it bring home to you, once again, the value of a sympathetic ear.