Are You Listening?
An essential part of leadership and managing your direct reports is intentional listening. When you listen carefully to your people, you…
- Learn about the person
- Build trust with the person
- Understand more about the content/issue/circumstance
- Position yourself to collaborate and problem solve
- Ask better questions that lead to uncovering the real problem
- Respond instead of react
- Realize you might be wrong
These are just some of the advantages of intentional listening.
Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist, speaks about various types of approaches to communication in his conversation with Dan Harris on The Ten Percent Happier Podcast. Grant describes the preacher, the politician, the prosecutor, and the scientist. He defines the preacher mode as wanting to persuade because we have already found the truth, the politician is campaigning for approval, the prosecutor mode is about proving the other person wrong and the scientist has a curious approach and wants to learn.