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Key Management Development Secrets - The Importance of Listening and Questioning Skills

Guest post by: Martin Haworth

Article Overview: With communication being the most important of the competencies for anyone in a management role, the tools we need to use are pretty obvious. What we tell people and what they tell us, simple as that. Or is it?

Key Management Development Secrets - The Importance of Listening and Questioning Skills

When we interact with those employees we manage, we have an obligation that goes both ways. We need to be able to get our message across and we also need to be able to understand exactly what our people mean when they communicate with us as well. To appreciate how we are getting our message across, we must seek the feedback of those we are giving information to, as well as being able to absorb that information ourselves.

When we want to get information from others, we need to be open enough ourselves to receive and where necessary, elicit clarity from those we are working with.

To do this we need to sharpen up our ability to listen properly to them - and then embellish that listening with superb questioning skills that will help us find out much more than the top line.

We need to be able to listen very attentively and actively to what we are being told. This can often mean going beyond the words being spoken, right through to watching their body language and 'hearing' words that don't get said and are implied. Sometimes it's creating a sense of awareness; an inkling that there's more to it than meets the eye.

Now, that's the first stage. From there, we need to show that we've been listening closely to build the relationship and then, because they know and trust us better now for this, to ask discovery questions of them, that help us understand more.

Individuals get sorely tested when they feel misunderstood, so as managers, we have an obligation to work as hard as we can to get our messages across in a manner that our people will understand. And even more important, is to ensure that we fully understand them in the first place.

You see, if you get these two pretty simple activities right, you will, without doubt have the keys to success - because every action that a manager takes part in, requires first class standards of listening and questioning, to make sure that everyone is 'singing from the same hymnsheet'.

Yet, how many times have we struggled when someone didn't hear what we said correctly and even more challenging, where we didn't pay full attention and listen to them and failed to appreciate their point of view.

Managers sometimes blame their people for 'not understanding' or even failing to deliver something where the instructions weren't really clear. In fact, the manager is ALWAYS the person upon whom the onus is on to get the communication just right.

Of course this can be challenging - that's what learning and development is all about. And it's not that you've gotten where you are by being desperately poor at it.

The key here is to focus on your own actions, by listening carefully with full attention - and where you need to know more, fine-tune your listening and questioning techniques so that you can be even better at the way you communicate effectively with your team!

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Article Tags: communication skills, employee engagement, listening skills, management development, questioning skills



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