Listening to People

"Effectiveness of spoken word", say Ralph and Leonard in Harvard business review, "hings not on how people talk, but mostly on how people listen".

I attend lot of meetings and find generally people lack the listening skills, people start discussions even before a presenter makes his point. So one has to decide, when people want to be a crocodile (speaking with loud mouth) and a rabbit (listening with long ears).

However, as it is put by the authors, " communication is all about listening to some body or some one listening to you".

A poor listener is not necessarily an unintelligent person, to be good listener, some one has to apply their experience and training.

As we all know there is a huge difference between hearing and listening. Hearing is all about the sound waves travelling in the air and reaching your ears. Listening is effectively hearing, processing in mind and understanding what other person is saying.

Well a basic human being can speak 125 words per minute, however our brain can process the words much....much faster than speech. That means we have lot of spare time to think and that is where we wander, while listening.

The basic medium of thought is language, that is also some times influenced by so called "mother tongue", means your effective listening can vary based on the comfort of your language skills.

The authors say, from various research they found four mental ways to be practiced for effective listening for an effective communication between individuals.

1. Engage mind to think ahead of the listener, trying to anticipate where the discussion is leading to and what conclusions will be drawn.
   
2. Weigh the evidence used by the talker, whether it is complete.
   
3. Periodically review what you listened and summarize in the mind.
   
4. Listen between the lines i.e. simply pay attention to "non verbal communication"

One must understand, a human being always swayed by his emotions, which in turn effects the ability to listen or act as filters.

well while you are engaging your mind on the above four effective activities, but remember the following to tide over the filters.

• While listening withhold your evaluation of speaker, means judgements and decisions should be reserved at the end of the conversation.
  
• Do not hunt for negative evidence, means trying to prove what you believe is correct or to prove what you are listening is wrong.

As we all understand, communication plays a major role in a organization and in our social life....you can make enemies or friends based upon what you talk. As a there is a proverb, which says...." If you slip your leg, some one can correct, but if you slip your tongue, it is difficult to correct".

Leadership Communication

Most of us know, the role of communication in an organization or life to be successful person. More over, a Leader's communication can create a positive or negative impact on employees and can create an image around the personality. Quite often you can communicate easily with authority, but difficult when one needs to influence others.
let me share here some of my learning.
Especially a leader communicates in various roles and at different stages of organization life cycles.
Most often these communication change its styles and frequencies based on the level of maturity of the people. When you deliver the message, pl, pay attention to non-verbal communication apart from verbal;People pick faster through non-verbal than verbal.

A leader can be a Community Architect; this could be initial stages of laying out vision for an organization or at the beginning of a project. A leader needs to communicate effectively his vision, by creating a shared need for employees and connecting them to big picture (goals). this speech is more motivational and meaningful to employees.
Lot times leaders depend upon nice stories, I learnt this from my previous bosses...I used to use video clips from my favourite movies like 300, Nemo, Rambo, Lagaan etc....

for example in my organization, the vision is simply centered around 3 numbers, Customer Satisfaction, Employee Retention and Productivity, every single member in the organization understands this.

Its like a Navigator on a ship, leader should be able to set the direction in which the ship should sail to reach the destination (goal of the organization). Leader should be able to link every employee's contribution to the organizational vision/goal. Its all about sailing together, decides at what speed you would reach the goal. I always use the phrase of " let us sail together, those who can not peddle, can be out of the boat".

Most of the times, leader should be able to answer the "how" part in a broader sense, at least so called 30,000 feet level. This is the stage, where leader should convert his vision/goals/thoughts in to actionable plans.

A Leader should play a role of Renewable champion by constantly assessing the progress of a project while in execution mode. He/She can employ a certain frequency to review the progress to revitalize or to keep on the rails. This rigor is so important that the leader should break in to various levels based upon what he/she wants to see " at a quick glance", "High Level" and "Deep Dive", for example it can be daily, weekly or monthly reviews.

It some times the last minute race...how much you energize and drive people to stretch beyond the expectation.

Thought Leadership would be at test for the leader at this stage, how many innovative ideas he/she could bring depends upon ones expertise and experience to fuel the speed of execution.
Learning from mistakes and keeping the blame-game out of the context, work on only process failures makes a leader the most acceptable and rallied around.