Understanding Listening Strategies

Listening is one of the most valuable skills a leader can have.

Many people assume that listening is a passive experience, but it actually requires active participation. There are a variety of methods for effective listening, including:

• using attentiveness, silence, and neutrality
• reflecting and summarizing
• sorting and patterning
• noting gaps and interruptions
• expressing feeling and testing for responsibility.

When people talk, they expect others to listen to them, but they generally give little thought to what this means. The following are some first steps to good listening:

• Focus your attention on the person who's talking. Maintain eye contact. If your body language says you're not interested, the person will sense it.
• Remain silent, except for recognition that you're following along, such as a semi-verbal "uh-huh" or a head nod. This says you're paying attention.
• Maintain a neutral frame of mind. This means not judging or attempting to control the conversation, not suggesting or correcting, and not praising or criticizing.

There are two other techniques for making people aware that you are paying attention. First, use reflective statements. These are words that echo important words or phrases that the patient uses. Second, summarize what you have just heard and repeat it back to the speaker.

You can also wait for a break in the narration, and then sort out and find patterns in their experiences. This can help to sort out the differences between symptoms and deeper problems.

Try to notice inconsistencies in narratives. What is left out of a conversation can be as helpful in analyzing a situation as what is included.

Toward the end of a conversation, you can encourage the speaker to step back from their story and summarize it for themselves.

Remember that effective listening requires active participation. You should use attentiveness, silence and neutrality when listening. It's important to use reflective statements and summarize the employee's message. You should also sort symptoms from deeper problems, note gaps and interruptions in your employee's story, encourage your employee to express feeling, and test for responsibility.

Understanding Group Communications

Group communications are essential to successful organizations.

Leaders can improve group communication by:

1. increasing team communication
2. improving organizational communication
3. using informal communication networks.

Increasing team communication
There are a number of things you can do to improve the way your group shares information. Some of these are shown below:

• Use a variety of formats to get the team together to talk, including team meetings, informal chats, and scheduled informational discussions.
• Ensure everyone understands the purpose of these sessions.
• Ensure that the group understands how proud you are of their work.
• Some people in a group can be bashful about raising questions, so you could attempt to anticipate their needs when responding to others' questions.
• You could use newsletters, bulletin boards, and e-mail to communicate with your team.

Improving organizational communication
In addition to improving communications, it is important to contribute to the communications of the larger organization. The following are examples of how contributions to organizational communications could be made:

• Every organization needs a dependable internal communications program. In larger companies, someone is usually in charge of this. In smaller companies, it can be a collective function of leaders at all levels.
• Good organizational communication means that the members are well informed on all significant issues which affect them, including business challenges, policy changes, and operational and strategic issues.
• Other issues which are included in organizational communications include organizational structure, customer service, workplace improvements, and the use of information technology.
• Leaders should always be searching for ways to improve communications outside of their immediate realms. You are also responsible for correcting any misinformation about your subordinates or department.
• It's also necessary for a leader to actively communicate with other departments to discover information that you need but has not been given to you.
• Another way of improving communications among different groups is to suggest a shared function such as a potluck lunch or weekend social activity.

Using informal communication networks
Another means used to communicate is to use informal networks. This is not much different than what is commonly called the grapevine. Leaders can use this type of communication in the following ways:

• An informal network, or grapevine, can complement or detract from other group communications.
• Accept the fact that grapevines can't be eliminated and are very difficult to control. They are, however, easy to use.
• Talking informally or casually with your subordinates and others can provide you with a vast amount of information about your organization.
• As a leader, it's your responsibility to correct and dispel any incorrect information that you discover in the grapevine.

You can use a variety of methods to improve communications among your group and between your group and the rest of the organization. How can these techniques improve your own group communications?

Project Outputs: Activity List Updates

Project activity lists, which are elements of the project management process, may sometimes have to be updated after activity duration estimating is completed. In some cases, after activity duration estimating, an activity may be divided, or otherwise redefined, in order to show the correct logical relationships. Dividing or redefining an activity might cause it to take longer to complete. In other cases, the change will cause the activity to take less time than originally estimated.

The activity list must be updated to reflect these changes, since the duration of the activity will be affected. These activity list updates are important outputs of activity duration estimating.

For example, an activity list included writing code for a software project as one activity required to complete a project. Upon completion of the activity duration estimating process, it was found that the coding activity should be split up into three separate activities—developing interfaces, scripting, and testing. The activity list needed to be updated to reflect the change in the original activity.

The estimated duration for the original activity, writing code, also needed to be updated. The project manager used the tools and techniques of activity duration estimating to obtain estimates for the three new activities.

Updating the activity list is an important process for a project manager because it:

• helps the project manager create a more accurate schedule
• ensures that all team members are informed.

Remember, activity list updates are valuable outputs of the project activity duration estimating process, since they help project managers create more accurate schedules and keep team members informed.

Understanding Communication Strategies

Many employees are expected to argue for themselves in order to promote the organization's interests through their own department.

But how do you monitor the strategies these people use to argue for their interests?

You can encourage people to use communicative strategies to resolve conflicts. You can also stress the importance of avoiding contentious strategies that result in division. To do this, considers these points:

• rules for open communications
• conflict-resolution methods
• avoiding contentious strategies.

Rules for open communications
When you hire someone for your department, or when meetings start to get out of hand, you could bring up a series of basic rules for open communication. These are communicative strategies. The following provide more about the elements of open communication:

• I statements: When discussing your feelings about an emotional situation, use statements such as, "I feel this way when this happens." It's non-accusatory and expresses what you feel.
• willingness: People on both sides of a disagreement need to indicate their willingness to resolve their differences.
• listening: Everyone needs to hear the speaker and acknowledge through verbal and nonverbal means that he or she is listening.
• restating: When it's your turn to speak in reply to what someone else has said, restate what you believe you heard him say. This helps eliminate misunderstandings.
• agreements: It's also important to point out what interests you have in common with those you disagree with. This sets an optimistic tone for possible agreements.
• requests: It's divisive to ask someone to stop doing something you don't like; however, it's OK to request a change of behavior, especially if you suggest alternatives.
• consistency: Be consistent with your verbal and nonverbal message.
• word choice: Be careful with the words you use when describing negative feelings. Try to choose noninflammatory language and tone down your emotions.

Conflict-resolution methods
There are other strategies you can use, but these strategies should be used as a last-resort tactic, when nothing else has worked. These strategies lie somewhere in between communicative and contentious.

The following provide more about these strategies:

• Giving in is an acceptable strategy when you won't suffer long-term harm. It can be an effective bargaining chip that lets you move on to a more important point.
• When it appears that a conflict is about to escalate, it's OK to break off or even give up on trying to resolve it.
• Avoiding a problem can be OK if time will take care of it. This is a difficult decision to make.
• In emergencies, when quick and decisive actions must be taken, when you must implement an unpopular decision, or when someone is playing games with you, it is OK to be abrupt.

Avoiding contentious strategies
It is very important to point out to the people in your group what you consider to be contentious strategies. The following provide more about these inappropriate tactics:

• Sometimes, when people try to become your new best friend, and flatter and compliment you, they may be trying to get you to make a decision against your interests.
• Inducing guilt is an inappropriate way to get someone to change her mind.
• Gamesmanship is the use of maneuvers that further your own position over others.
• Another contentious tactic is the use of threats.
• Side issue remarks are derogatory comments directed at your opponent.

To resolve a conflict with an employee, it's important to use appropriate communicative strategies and avoid contention. You should show willingness and consistency in resolving a conflict, use I statements and proper word choice, listen to and restate a message, find common ground and request a change of behavior.

If these strategies do not work, you should then use an appropriate last-resort strategy.

Understanding Good Questions

To accomplish your goals as a businessperson and leader, one of the best strategies is knowing how to ask key questions.

Key questioning strategies can help you:

• uncover the problem in front of you
• identify the purpose of your actions
• discover the premise you're following
• determine the resources you need
• determine customer interest
• gather the data you need.

One questioning strategy used by Japanese teachers of quality is the use of Why? They suggest asking this question five times to discover the underlying causes of a problem and then finding solutions.

Another key question is aimed at discovering the purpose of any action. For example, whenever someone suggests a new project or product, you could ask, "What is the purpose of this?"

You should also subject every suggestion or idea that is presented to a question concerning its premise. A premise is the belief or attitude that forms the basis of an assumption.

Every new project, idea, or suggestion that is presented to you requires effort and resources to be carried out. To help employees figure out how to convert these thoughts into actions, you should ask them questions about resources.

Occasionally, your employees will come to you with a suggestion that you know they have not researched. Instead of dismissing the idea, use questions designed to encourage employees to come up with the data they need.

You can maintain a thriving business by knowing how to ask good questions that engage your employees in the process of improvement.