WHY IS LISTENING IMPORTANT FOR EVERY LEADER

There are a lot of skills leaders must have in order to become one. We all maybe have some idea what skills those may be: communication skills, bringing people together, having a good vision and so on and so forth. However, among all of those skills listening is the one which stands as a priority for every leader. If you have many skills and still feel like you are not doing great and you employees don’t seem to look at you as a leader- be careful to your listening skills.

Among all of your employees you will hardly find an employee who would like not to be heard. And, being honest, the question here is not that much of being heard but you to listen to them. What you may think you are doing: wasting time, but what you are actually doing is: caring about people and their opinions, giving them freedom to think and develop.

Here are some things you should do while having a communication with your employees and listening to them:

• Show that you care about them – Well, it is obviously not just about showing, but starting feeling. While you start developing you listening skill, you simultaneously start caring about people. Your employees will definitely feel that their opinions, ideas and suggestions are important and that they are being the part of something. If your employees learn that you care about them and their opinions, believe us, they will start working harder, as they will have the wish of meeting your expectations. So start showing your care to them by just listening to them.
• Be engaged in the conversation – When we say listening- we actually mean LISTENING, not just hearing, not just having that HAVE TO DO stuff that you in reality have to show off. We say you should listen and get engaged into the things your employees take you to. Ask your employees questions about this or that idea, try to encourage them in their overtaking, be as positive as you can. This is how leaders do: they always encourage others: and this is how innovations are being born.
• Turn off the judgmental thoughts – If you feel like the idea doesn’t seem to be interesting and even if you are sure that you could do something more useful at that moment, turn off the judge in you. Don’t wait everyone with whom you are working with to be genius or leaders, or innovators, or… etc. They won’t be and they don’t have to be. Here is the secret ability of the leader. Doesn’t matter who is in front of you – you are still a leader. Which means, how you perform and how you interact with a person mostly depends on you, not on that person.
• Try not to interrupt – If you still have some suspicion around this fact let’s go back – remember yourself at the high school age. How would you like the situation, when you are publicly speaking about a topic and the half or the 70% of the audience is not listening to you. Well, we won’t be too rude here, but will you respect them? Or will you carefully listen to speech of the person who was talking by phone during your presentation. Well, we think the answer is obvious. Now, come back to our days and imagine how your employee is gathering the thoughts and with all of the pressure tries to say something. It is tough. And if you are interrupting your employee’s talk every once in a while, then we think the speech won’t be that long.

We hope these simple listening skills will help you during the communication with your employees and, in general with everyone. All of us want to be heard and understood and if there is someone who listens to us carefully we would respect him as a leader.