Great leadership is not always about providing inspiration, effectively sharing ideas, or making important decisions – how you listen to the people around you also plays an important role. At the very basic level, active listening can be crucial in setting the foundation for trust, collaboration, and inclusivity. In this article, our main focus will be on how listening helps bring innovation and shapes great leaders in the workplace.
Key Ways Active Listening Drives Innovation and Leadership
Promotes Employee Empowerment
Everyone wants to be heard and their ideas taken seriously, whether in the workplace or anywhere else. Employees are definitely not an exception as far as this is concerned. With active listening, leaders can create a workplace culture where their employees feel valued and heard.
However, it is important to note that the empowerment journey requires the input of both the employer and the employee. For employers, the input can be as simple as active listening. However, employees need to find new ways to improve their communication skills and emotional intelligence. One of the easiest ways to achieve this is through soft skills training for employees.
Helps in Identifying Unmet Needs
Businesses are in constant competition, so innovation is essential to their survival. To effectively innovate, these companies need to stay on top of their problems. That involves various things – perhaps addressing issues before they become a major roadblock. And that is where active listening is important.
Active listening allows business leadership to pick up subtle cues from employees, customers, and everyone around them. That allows them to recognize unmet needs that no one explicitly stated, effectively creating the building blocks for innovation.
Enhances Decision Making
Another way active listening drives innovation and leadership is by enhancing decision-making. An essential thing about decision-making is that you need a clear understanding of the situation. And, in a workspace setting, no one is better at providing accurate information than an employee who is present for everyday operations.
Active listening ensures the employees’ ideas are included whenever decisions are made. Additionally, it reduces the risk of miscommunications and encourages data-driven decisions based on inputs from different ends of the operation.
Encourages Collaboration and Trust
Besides enhancing decision-making, active listening also encourages collaboration and trust within the workplace. It is essentially the building block for teamwork – thanks to its effectiveness in creating an environment where every individual feels respected, valued, and heard.
How to Improve Active Listening as a Leader
All these benefits show that leaders can create stronger connections with their teams if they actively work on improving their listening abilities. Here are a few practical strategies leaders can use to enhance their ability to listen effectively and make informed decisions:
Avoid Interrupting
When practicing active listening, it only makes sense to avoid interrupting someone in the middle of their explanations. As a leader, you need to learn to let a speaker express their thoughts without any interruption.
Interrupting someone before they finish speaking can make them feel unheard or dismissed, discouraging open communication in the workplace. Allowing the speaker to express their complete thoughts also gives the leader the full context, ensuring better understanding and, potentially, more thoughtful responses.
Seek Clarification
In addition to avoiding interrupting, seeking clarification when conversing with employees is also important. Seeking clarification is essential for various reasons. For starters, it ensures a leader fully understands the message conveyed by the other individual. Secondly, it eliminates the risk of assuming meaning – making assumptions can lead to misunderstandings.
As a leader, you should learn to rephrase what you heard or ask thoughtful questions to confirm comprehension. These two primary steps will not only ensure you are not missing important information but also show employees that their input is highly valued.
Ask Open-Minded Questions
Last but not least, it is important for a leader to practice asking open-ended questions during conversations. Such queries are essential for promoting deeper discussions and allowing employees to share their thoughts openly. They allow for more detailed responses, unlike yes-or-no questions, which lack depth and don’t offer valuable insights into employee’s perspectives.
Examples of questions you should have in your arsenal as a leader include the following:
- What challenges are you facing in this project?
- How do you think we can improve output?
- What support do you need to improve the turnaround time on this project?
The list is endless. Basically, ask questions that encourage the listener to express their thoughts and perspectives in detail.
Conclusion
Active listening is a mindset that every leader needs to adopt and hone. It brings many benefits, from identifying unmet needs and empowering employees to improving decision-making and promoting collaboration. In other words, it provides a foundation on which innovation can flourish. Leaders can improve their ability to listen actively in various ways, including avoiding interrupting, asking open-ended questions, and seeking clarification.
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