The ability to listen is one of the most important skills you can leverage as a leader and manager. Not only does this ensure that your employees are heard, but it broadens your perspective too. There are four types of listening that you should master.
We’ve explored the importance of listening in this series, and now it’s time to talk about some simple and practical strategies for honing your listening skills. It’s especially important for leaders, who have employees to manage and guide. Because simply standing in the room while someone talks is not enough.
Listening is critical to your workday and poor listening skills can ruin it. Top executives for a Chicago manufacturing plant were asked to survey the role of listening in their plant. After hearing a seminar on listening, Ralph G. Nichols and Leonard A. Stevens explain in their Harvard Business Review article, that one of the most common responses was:
“Frankly, I had never thought of listening as an important subject by itself. But now that I am aware of it, I think that perhaps 80 percent of my work depends on my listening to someone, or on someone else listening to me.”
This is true for nearly anyone who works with other people. Having good listening skills is critical to avoiding miscommunication and staying connected with other team members and managers.
Effective listening is a critical part of communicating—you can’t have one without the other. No matter where your position lies in the chain of command. Both managers and entry level employees alike need to hear feedback, take direction and understand the needs of the people around them.
Everyone knows how to have a conversation, we all do it every single day, with several people, in different contexts. However, conversations can go terribly wrong in a day and age when everyone argues on every media channel, and society is more divided than it has ever been. To navigate conversations like a pro, you should apply some of the strategies that we are going to discuss in this article, inspired by Celeste Headlee’s TED Talk
As a team leader, you are the one who needs to set an example for other team members. People look up to you, and expect you to come up with solutions, and do things the right way. This requires a high amount of creativity. Building credibility as a leader can be quite challenging, so this article aims to give you some useful advice that should point you in the right direction.
At first glance, listening seems like a non-issue – it is something we do most of the day, every day. But things aren’t always that simple. Listening is not the same with hearing, as hearing someone does not suffice to actually understand them. Listening requires focus and will. First of all you have to want to listen, and then you need the ability to actually do it.
At the same time, listening plays a major role in communication. In the world of business, effective communication is absolutely crucial. So one of the skills that any entrepreneur, leader, and professional should possess is knowing how to make people to listen to them. This is the theme of today’s article, so I invite you to read forward and learn how to get people to listen to you.
Motivate teams and get every obstacle cleared. Motivate teams and reach set goals. In fact, motivate teams and everything about teamwork streamlines to optimal results.
But in order to motivate teams, you need to be versatile. You need a full range of methods. Moreover, you need to possess special abilities, from public speaking to one-on-one mentoring and listening. Seems improbable? It’s actually achievable.
Meetings are a buzz killer. Most complaints about office work are about meetings. In fact, meetings seem to be the most dreaded office activity. Potentially, even more disliked than peer reviews and evaluations. Yet, meetings continue to be an apt and necessary way to do work. Otherwise, everyone wouldn’t be so keen on organizing them. Hence, we can only derive that there must be something about meetings that is truly valuable. It’s something that, until now at least, only meetings can provide.
Meetings have been studied, and there are countless publications discussing the matter. What’s so special about meetings? It may have to do with the information exchange. Or it may well be due to the nature of the event. The physical proximity, the sheer presence of teams in the same room. It likely has to do with an interplay of the two.
