A leader’s listening ability has a tremendous impact on their effectiveness. Active listening skills are important and necessary soft skills, especially in developing your career.
Active listening skills affect your leadership and management style, especially during difficult situations that arise at work. The skill set allows you to improve your teams and their work performance, analyze strengths and weaknesses, and determine goals and future action plans. Active listening skills facilitate the recognition of stresses of the people you work with; you can then empathize and help them solve their problems by processing feedback. Many think that interpersonal skills are solely innate, but these skills can actually be learned and developed easily with continuous practice.
When you are in a leadership position, your active listening skills must be polished because they impact the way you lead. You can enhance your active listening skills by adhering to the HURIER model. The model uses a behavioral approach to active listening and is focused on six key areas:
● Hearing
● Understanding
● Remembering
● Interpreting
● Evaluating
● Responding
After using the HURIER self-assessment tool to assess your personal listening skills, you can elicit feedback from your colleagues. Then, compare your self-assessment to your colleagues’ perceptions and identify areas to improve your listening. To facilitate and improve a listening environment, the role of a Servant Leader must be undertaken. This can be done in the following steps:
1. Observe and analyze a team.
2. Create an action plan that strategizes listening environment enhancement.
3. Act on the recommended improvements to the listening environment.
Develop good listening skills to play multiple organizational roles effectively by taking the Active Listening and Processing Feedback course offered by Genashtim in collaboration with eCornell. . The course is under the Leadership Essentials certificate program.
eCornell courses are approved by SkillsFuture Singapore for SkillsFuture Credit as well as by HRD Corp Malaysia under its HRD Corp Claimable Course Scheme.