TOI, Patna
EFFECTIVE LISTENING SKILLS
MOST CEOS COMPLAIN that people in the workplace just don’t listen’. Most of us hear but don’t listen and instead we spend time thinking about what we are going to say next. Poor listening skills can create misunderstandings, make us miss deadlines and focus our attention on the wrong issues in the workplace.
Simple steps to improving your listening skills :
Awareness : Recognising it as an area of improvement sets you on the path to becoming a better listener.
Conveyed Interest : Set aside whatever you’re doing and give the speaker your 100% attention. This offers encouragement to the speaker and he/she doesn’t feel compelled to speak faster or abbreviate their message. Convey interest non-verbally by nodding, maintaining direct eye contact and leaning forward.
Speaker’s Non-Verbal Cues : Watch out for the speaker’s gestures, facial expressions, tone and volume of voice, as being alert to these cues increases your ability to comprehend the full message.
No ‘Overtaking’ : ‘Overtaking’ on the verbal highway or finishing off the speaker’s sentences makes his/her feel rushed and under pressure. Wait till the speaker has finished before interjecting with your comments. If you interrupt by mistake, apologise.
Summarise : If you aren’t sure of the message, ask the speaker to repeat it. Then, you summarise it, evaluating your own understanding while doing so.
Ask Questions : This shows genuine interest and offers encouragement to the speaker. Questions like "Do you mean to say…" or "Is this what you have in mind…?" paraphrase the speaker’s remarks.
Fight Impatience : As we think several times faster than we speak, we become impatient and lose concentration. Instead, use your mind to analyse the speaker’s message and extract the essence.
Pause : A pause is an effective communication tool – it shows you are thinking before speaking and also creates a certain degree of suspense.
As Ernest Hemingway famously remarked "I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen."
Building an Environment towards Success (TOI)
ELICITING THE BEST performance from your employees goes beyond just setting them high expectations. They will not start playing at the highest level till the leader creates an environment that can help and support them in reaching their goals. Good leaders create organizational settings that can lead to high performances in the following ways:
Provide permission to succeed : The path to the fulfillment of expectation is as important as the declaration itself. This becomes all the more important in the case of high expectations as the person thinks it is almost unachievable because of its enormity. A seemingly impossible expectation can make a person afraid that he may not be able to achieve it – that he might not live up to it, that he does not have adequate talent or strength and that he might end up losing. A leader, supported by the entire system, should point positively towards the person’s enormous capabilities and should help him break any psychological barriers he might have on his course towards achievement.
Provide incentives to succeed : People always do things for their reasons and not for yours. Hence a good leader should take time to explain why the person should achieve what is expected out of him. He focuses on building a system that would provide powerful incentives to help the person steer himself towards the goal. Interestingly, these incentives need not be just salary hikes or promotions, but could also be a powerful vision of the future or how it could change their lives. The more powerful the incentive the leader is able to provide, the more motivated the person will be, leading to a quicker achievement of the expectation.
Provide opportunities to succeed : Many a time expectation fulfillment takes more than just one person’s efforts. A good leader realizes this, and hence devotes his energies to aligning the person with the right team and with the right kind of opportunities.
Monitor fulfillment of expectations : A leader should never give the impression that his expectation out of his people are passive ones. He, along with the system, should demand their fulfillment. He should keep the person focused on results and not just efforts. That would mean putting processes in place that can monitor progress on a constant and continuous basis, detect mistakes early and bring in course correction mechanisms, if ever required.
Simple steps to improving your listening skills :
Awareness : Recognising it as an area of improvement sets you on the path to becoming a better listener.
Conveyed Interest : Set aside whatever you’re doing and give the speaker your 100% attention. This offers encouragement to the speaker and he/she doesn’t feel compelled to speak faster or abbreviate their message. Convey interest non-verbally by nodding, maintaining direct eye contact and leaning forward.
Speaker’s Non-Verbal Cues : Watch out for the speaker’s gestures, facial expressions, tone and volume of voice, as being alert to these cues increases your ability to comprehend the full message.
No ‘Overtaking’ : ‘Overtaking’ on the verbal highway or finishing off the speaker’s sentences makes his/her feel rushed and under pressure. Wait till the speaker has finished before interjecting with your comments. If you interrupt by mistake, apologise.
Summarise : If you aren’t sure of the message, ask the speaker to repeat it. Then, you summarise it, evaluating your own understanding while doing so.
Ask Questions : This shows genuine interest and offers encouragement to the speaker. Questions like "Do you mean to say…" or "Is this what you have in mind…?" paraphrase the speaker’s remarks.
Fight Impatience : As we think several times faster than we speak, we become impatient and lose concentration. Instead, use your mind to analyse the speaker’s message and extract the essence.
Pause : A pause is an effective communication tool – it shows you are thinking before speaking and also creates a certain degree of suspense.
As Ernest Hemingway famously remarked "I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen."
Building an Environment towards Success (TOI)
ELICITING THE BEST performance from your employees goes beyond just setting them high expectations. They will not start playing at the highest level till the leader creates an environment that can help and support them in reaching their goals. Good leaders create organizational settings that can lead to high performances in the following ways:
Provide permission to succeed : The path to the fulfillment of expectation is as important as the declaration itself. This becomes all the more important in the case of high expectations as the person thinks it is almost unachievable because of its enormity. A seemingly impossible expectation can make a person afraid that he may not be able to achieve it – that he might not live up to it, that he does not have adequate talent or strength and that he might end up losing. A leader, supported by the entire system, should point positively towards the person’s enormous capabilities and should help him break any psychological barriers he might have on his course towards achievement.
Provide incentives to succeed : People always do things for their reasons and not for yours. Hence a good leader should take time to explain why the person should achieve what is expected out of him. He focuses on building a system that would provide powerful incentives to help the person steer himself towards the goal. Interestingly, these incentives need not be just salary hikes or promotions, but could also be a powerful vision of the future or how it could change their lives. The more powerful the incentive the leader is able to provide, the more motivated the person will be, leading to a quicker achievement of the expectation.
Provide opportunities to succeed : Many a time expectation fulfillment takes more than just one person’s efforts. A good leader realizes this, and hence devotes his energies to aligning the person with the right team and with the right kind of opportunities.
Monitor fulfillment of expectations : A leader should never give the impression that his expectation out of his people are passive ones. He, along with the system, should demand their fulfillment. He should keep the person focused on results and not just efforts. That would mean putting processes in place that can monitor progress on a constant and continuous basis, detect mistakes early and bring in course correction mechanisms, if ever required.
