In the fast-paced business world, people increasingly have more to do in short periods, frequently compromising communication. The importance of better communication between leaders as well as their colleagues is therefore even more important to the success of the organization. There are great opportunities for growth when you listen and learn from others. This may be done when you give people the possibility to open up and express themselves.
Encouraging a culture of listening may help the company to bypass any potential problems, give praise, and motivate workers, and make the workplace more efficient and productive. Though you can be thinking to listen is a soft skill and cannot give business direct results, honing your listening skills will reap rewards in the longer-term. For several managers, it’s a career-long work in progress that demands effort to implement efficiently and to ensure it’s at the forefront of the culture of the business.
As a business consultant, we put together these efficient tips to help you improve your listening skills and become a great manager you may like to be. Here are a few ways that will make you a good leader after being a good listener efficient forms of listening that’ll help get you started:
Engage Yourself
Beyond caring, engage yourself in matters that are necessary and essential to workers. When they will share the opinions, ask them questions, and encourage them to elaborate on their perspectives. When you engage yourself actively, hold yourself accountable and follow-up with your workers, they’ll know, you’re listening, paying attention, and trying to understand what matters most to them.
Show That You Care
When you care about workers, they tend to work hard and goal to exceed expectations. Workers need to be led by those who care about who they’re and what they represent to the team and organization at-big. Do not view your workers as resources for your own success but as people and valuable assets who bring perfect abilities and aptitudes not essentially limited to their job functions.
Ask questions
Asking questions shows you’re interested and also, are engaging with the conversation and what they’re saying. It offers clarification and helps to avoid any misunderstandings that can crop up in the discussion. Be mindful not to jump in and interrupt somebody by asking a question. Your questions need to be asked at a proper time, as questions may sometimes take a conversation off in a different direction and the worker will not be able to go back and end up what they were saying.
Maintain regular eye contact.
Additionally, to hearing what the speaker is saying, keep your attention on them and utilize eye contact to show you’re listening. Avoid intense, hard starting as this may be perceived as aggressive and disrespectful.
Direct your body towards the speaker.
Face your whole body towards the speaker to show them that they have complete, undivided attention.
Use non-verbal language to confirm your understanding.
To show that you’re listening via body language, you should show that you’re understanding. For instance, affirmatively moving your head can make more of an effect on the speaker than you did think. It is frequently a good choice than interrupting to communicate your understanding using words.
Leave small gaps of silence
Take some time to process what you have heard and select the right words before responding. Little gaps of silence will offer you time to understand the message and make sure you leave the speaker ample opportunities to clarify, add more ideas, and ask questions. They’re useful to help others concentrate on the subject and may prevent them from feeling interrogated.
Paraphrase and summarize
Utilize active listening skills to clarifying the message and confirm, you’re both on a similar page. Paraphrasing may be utilized to demonstrate and back up that you have, actually, been paying attention to what they are saying and minimize any potential confusion. Summarizing what is said is the best way to bring up the main points discussed and to highlight the important action points to move forward with.
Body language
Eye contact, gestures, and posture are all essential to make workers feel comfortable and show that you’re listening to them. Eye contact is a natural part of engaging in a conversation but mixing it with smiles as well as gestures like nodding may place the person at ease and reassure them. Posture may be a telltale sign of how a piece of info is being received. If you sit their resting head in hands, most possibly they’ll take it that you are bored. A similar goes for mirroring an action of the person, which helps to show understanding and empathy in sensitive circumstances.