Speakers Platform: Listening Skills: How to Recognize and Repeat Them


			You are here: --> Meeting Planners --> Feature Articles Listening Skills: How to Recognize and Repeat Them by Katie Davis You probably understand the importance of listening and communication skills in your business. After all, people must listen to each other and to your customers in order to work as a team, improve performance and processes, and conduct business successfully. But before you can coach listening skills in your work force, it`s important to review the elements of effective listening. What Successful People Do The overall best performers are people who are consistently able to read their audience and from that foundation, build a following. In the simplest of words, they listen. They diagnose people`s inclinations and the logical content of their thoughts, needs and wants. They find out precisely what it would take to provide leadership, contribute to teamwork, offer service, solve problems, or advance opportunities, and then they act. These are subtle but highly effective skills. Skills that we all use in our most successful moments--but that we find difficult to describe or to make use of consciously. However, there are ways to break these skills down, explain them and coach them in others. With this type of coaching people are able to use these skills more frequently and with greater success. Some Keys to Effective Listening: 1. When beginning a conversation with others, keep in mind that everyone is a decision maker--and a customer--for your ideas. Their decisions about whether to cooperate and how much effort to put into it influence your results! 2. Begin listening to others from a neutral, open-minded state. This allows you to really concentrate and focus on what others are saying to you. 3. Pay attention not only to the logical content of what someone is saying but also to how they say it, that is, how they feel about the subject under discussion. It turns out that how people feel about an issue or a person is a key determinant in decision-making. If you listen for emotions rather than words, you`ll notice an interesting thing--you`ll absorb both and understanding will be deeper. 4. Respond in such a way that you prove you are taking the other person seriously. Demonstrate respect for their point of view. These skills are easy to describe. They are much more difficult to put into daily practice, and more difficult yet to spread throughout an organization. However, these are coachable skills that can be improved through practice and training. The challenge is to go beyond standard listening techniques, to really build genuine skill and competence at listening and communication.