How are you gathering data and intelligence from your employees, peers and bosses to make smart decisions?
In other words, how well do you listen?
It’s a skill all of us can work on. Once you’ve mastered the fundamentals, there are a number ways to raise the bar. Follow these steps to become a better listener:
- Approach each dialogue with the goal to learn something. Think, “This person can teach me something.”
- Stop talking and focus closely on the speaker. Suppress the urge to multitask or think about what you are going to say next.
- Open and guide the conversation with broad, open-ended questions such as “How do you envision…” or “Help me understand how you’re thinking about this.”
- Then, drill down to the details, where needed, by asking direct, specific questions that focus the conversation, such as “Tell me more about…,” “How would this work?” or “What challenges might we face?”
Read full post by David Grossman via yourthoughtpartner.com
As summer arrives you may you’re the one who gets burned when planning summer vacation sche...
If you want to be a better communicator, take a moment to consider these five tips, then give the...
Last week I facilitated two long days of review and planning sessions for a client. From 8 a.m. t...
Whether you’re writing creatively, for academia, or blogs, one of the most important aspects of ...
Search engine optimization is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. So...
As I prepare to head west for this year’s IABC World Conference and then east for the Communitell...
This week, I was one of numerous folks twittering the Employee Engagement and Social Media Confer...
We started this project about four years ago, and what this book is all about is about an organiz...
You can complain “I don’t have any leverage; I can’t change the cubicles, I can’t rewrite the re...
Throwing chairs, tossing zingers and misusing the English language are probably not the best tact...
Have you ever designed or facilitated an all-hands meeting where senior executives addressed an e...
7. Spend time with time wasters. The classic business plan imposes efficiency on an inefficient...
Why do we think of so many great ideas in the shower? Four conditions are generally in play: Ou...
With his team, Saku Tuominen, founder and creative director at the Idealist Group in Finland, int...
With his team, Saku Tuominen, founder and creative director at the Idealist Group in Finland, in...
In this interview, Paul talks about how to use storytelling as a leadership tool, ways that stor...
Mission statements don’t have to be dumb. In fact, they can be very valuable, if they arti...
A corporate communicator was listening to her CEO complain about how hard it was to get a strateg...
Just back from Vancouver and the IABC conference. My speech (“I heard it Through the Grapev...
Is busyness bad for business? The answer isn’t a simple “yes” or “noR...