AGENDA

Listening Skills

Importance of Listening

Barriers to Listening

Strategies for Effective Listening

Listening in a Business Context

2Day

Listening Skills

Hearing is a passive process, listening is active

Hearing:

Need to pay attention to ensure that you

hear the message clearly.

Interpreting:

Analyze the speaker’s words based on your

experience, attitude, knowledge and

background.

Evaluating:

Let the speaker know whether you have

understood the message and respond to it.

Responding:

Evaluating the information received and

make decisions accordingly.

Listening Process

Attend

Understand

Hear

Respond

Remember

Importance of Effective Listening

Why do we need to listen well?

Listening leads to the understanding of facts

and ideas

To avoid miss communication during

interaction

Listening helps to gain new knowledge and

also for enjoyment

How well we listen has a major impact on our

job effectiveness and on the quality of our

relationship with others

Barriers to Listening

Attitudinal barriers:

Preoccupation with personal or work

related problems can make it difficult to

focus one’s attention completely on what

a speaker is saying,

Wrong assumptions:

It is wrong to assume that

communication is the sole responsibility

of the sender or the speaker and listeners

have no role to play.

Physiological barriers :

Genuine hearing problems or deficiencies

that prevent them from listening properly.

Physical barriers:

Distractions in the environment such as

the sound of an air conditioner, cigarette

smoke.

Barriers to Listening

Cultural barriers :

Accents can be barriers to listening, since

they interfere with the ability to

understand the meaning of words that are

pronounced differently. Gender barriers.

Lack of training:

Listening is not an inborn skill. People

are not born good listeners. They have to

develop the art of listening through

practice and training.

Bad listening habits:

Most people are very average listeners

who have developed poor listening habits

that are hard to shed and that act as

barriers to listening.

Strategies for Effective Listening

Be Attentive

Ask Questions

Don’t interrupt Unnecessarily

Use Body Language

Empathize

Take Notes

Listening in a Business Context

Effective listening is one of the essential

qualities of a successful manager.

Good listening skills can help you locate job

openings, fare well in job interviews and be

selected for the job.

Listening mistakes can lead to costly errors

such as retyping of important documents,

rescheduling of important meetings etc.

It can boost quality, profits and productivity,

whereas poor listening has the exact opposite

effect.

Listening to Customers

Organizations today are beginning to

recognize the importance of being customer

oriented.

Customer orientation means identifying and

then satisfying customer needs, which in turn

involves listening to what the customer really

wants.

A dissatisfied customer can create negative

word-of-mouth publicity for your product

and company.

Some approaches for handling customer

complaints and listening to customers.

Listening to Employees

Superiors need to be open to the suggestions and

complaints of employees.

This is an indication that they are listening to their

employees.

Listening also means inviting suggestions and personal

opinions of employees through regular downward

communication.

Performance appraisal is also part of downward

communication.

A manager doing a performance review of a subordinate should take care not to do a

destructive review, where the subordinate is criticized for poor performance.

Manager should also practice ‘therapeutic listening’, whereby the manager counsels the

employee on how to improve performance.

The

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