Active Listening for Leaders
What's involved in an active listening course?
A critical skill in effective communication is deep, active listening. How well you listen has a major impact on the quality of your relationships with other people. This course teaches about active listening, attending to others, and giving feedback with empathy and understanding. We will define listening, describe the process of listening, analyze challenges to effective listening, and apply strategies to enhance listening skills. (The $25 course includes printable workbook.)
Why develop active listening skills?
In this age of the Internet, smart phones and social media, it seems like people are talking at each other more than listening to each other. Pause for a moment to consider how many emails, text messages, voice mails and other interruptive, one-way communications you receive every day. Clearly, there’s a lot more talking than active listening going on.
And yet, few skills are more critical for effective communication and strong leadership than the ability to listen. Active listening enable employees, customers and other stakeholders to feel that their perspectives are heard, accepted and understood.
Active listening is an art, a skill and a discipline that takes a high degree of self-control. To develop good listening skills, you need to understand what is involved in effective communication and develop the techniques to sit quietly and listen. This involves ignoring your own needs and focusing on the person speaking — a task made more difficult by the way the human brain works.