Monday, May 10, 2010

Powerful Listening

It takes work to listen! Some people are gifted with more of a people oriented bend. They tend to value what others say and some actually take the time to ask questions to get one to expound. Others act like every conversation is a challenge; they are busy defining their next argument before the other person ever finishes his/her first sentence. Have you ever worked with such people? It’s hard to get anything through to them, because they are not listening. The other type of person is so task oriented that they focus on other things as they are “listening”. This is not a good practice either, for one, it’s not listening to the other person fully, as other things are processing through the brain. And when people don’t feel like they are getting heard, they tend to shut down. They don’t express ideas, they don’t share their feelings… it basically limits their productivity. We all have had experiences with each of the above scenarios. These examples are just based on various behavior styles.

So how do we focus on becoming better listeners? First it helps to recognize your own behavior style. Are you fast and driving, and the task at hand is most important? Or are you social and love to talk and interact with people, but you tend to dominate the conversation and not let them participate much. Others run at a slower pace and tend to be either people focused or task focused. These people focused people tend to be better listeners, they go slower and ask questions and often can not focus on multiple tasks while communicating. People with the other slower style are more task and detail oriented and mainly communicate when they need to, to get the task complete.

So what is your dominate style? Are you aware of other styles, and how they function? This is not intended to be a full description of behavior styles, but just enough to alert you to different styles. To help you understand that as you work on listening to others you may have to do some self talk, to modify your dominate behavior style to listen and empower others effectively.

Vision Interface, is working with SBLO Co, and TTI to offer behavior analysis studies that focus on the key points of communication, team building, hiring, and business growth. Feel free to contact us to find out more information.