Poor communication in the workplace has the potential to create conflict, negatively impact the morale of your team, and eventually translate in poor performance and loss of productivity. More often than not, work mistakes and failures are caused by miscommunication. Failing to communicate efficiently with your employees can have lots of negative consequences for both your company and your employees.
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.
By this time in your personal and career development, you likely learned quite a bit. A lot of it is undoubtedly about communication techniques. Without communication, you cannot have teamwork. Or leadership. Or any sort of cooperation, to be precise.
Improving communication is at the core of organizational development. Anything you can do to improve communication will benefit your organization in all sorts of ways. Hence, it makes perfect sense to train teams into using effective communication techniques. Yet oftentimes, a few very effective ones go overlooked.
Although we spend approximately 60% of our communication time listening, we only retain 35% of what we hear. Actually, two months after a conversation, we only remember around 25% of what was said. That’s no surprise considering our average eight-second attention span, which makes listening concentration so hard to achieve.
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