Effective Listening Behaviour, Managerial Implications - Coursework Example

The Author’s Name] [The Professor’s Name] [The Course Title] [Date] Management Skills Introduction In the present era, you can demonstrate a caring attitude easier through compassionate, complete listening than through talking or even asking questions. Listening often is described as the most important communication skill. (Tung 29-43) By fact gathering in listening, you can confirm what you have most in common with those people, in that moment. Only then can you consider where to build bridges to deepen relationships. Active listening is listening in combination with questioning to stay engaged with others and better understand the issues they are raising. (Tung 29-43) Managers need to really listen to employees. Show respect for them when they speak. Ask questions to show interest and clarify expectations. Managers should not just "talk" open door policy. They need to "walk" it by being visible and talking to employees. (Tung 29-43) Given the importance of listening, think about how much formal training you’ve had in listening: 2 weeks, 1 week, 1 day or maybe none for many of us. Yet listening is critical to our ability to influence change. Next, we must realize that listening is not a passive activity. Listening is actually a dialogue, not a monologue where the speaker speaks and the listener merely listens. Listening requires the use of our eyes, mouth, brain, body and, oh yes, our ears. We need our eyes so we can see the expression and body language, our mouth to acknowledge and clarify our brain to assimilate the message, our body to indicate we are open and understanding, and our ears to hear the words and how they are spoken. This simple model should be most helpful in growing our listening skills. (Wright 295-320) Managers should allow people to disagree and to come up with new ideas. Some components of active listening include: Restating or Paraphrasing: Responding to the person's basic verbal message by feeding it back to them in different words –e.g. “or putting it another way, you want to occur, is that correct?” (Tung 29-43) Reflecting: Reflecting approaches, skills, or substance that have been known or professed by indications – e.g. “you appear to be frustrated by this decision, probably angry about this situation” (Tung 29-43) Interpreting: Presenting a cautious explanation about the other's stance, needs, or connotations –e.g. “if I understand you correctly, by saying you mean” (Tung 29-43) Summarising, Synthesising: Bringing together feelings and content; providing a focus – e.g. “OK, so far I believe we’re agreed that we need to do X, Y and Z before we can go further. Is that your understanding?” (Tung 29-43) Learning active listening skills will enable you to get to the core issues and resolve problems more quickly than reacting with advice to what the other person has to say. What you heard may not be what they meant. The only way you will know for sure is to ask clarifying questions and receive feedback. Benefits Learning to use active listening in emotional situations is a critical skill set that can be applied across the board in personal as well as professional situations. Interpersonal skills are at the top of the list of deficits many professionals have because they focus so much on honing their technical skills. (Considine 166-78) Listening and being listened to are the cornerstones of managerial skill development and relatedness. It is hard to imagine an intimate, close, or curative relationship where listening does not occur, or where one does not feel seen through the process of being heard. The need to be listened to is never outgrown. Being listened is to allow us to be understood in all our complexity. It allows our experiences to count and ourselves to matter. Being listened to be not an optional experience. It sustains us throughout the life cycle. It is not something we need less have as we mature or grow older, wiser and more self-sufficient (Considine 166-78) Being appreciated for who we are necessary for the development and articulation of the self. Listening strengthens us and strengthens our relationships. Being listened creates within and around the individual a sense of coherence, safety, belonging, and value. While being listened validates our experiences, it does not inoculate us against them. We must inevitably face our difficulties. Yet, listening can soften the blow. Listening other often helps us transcend the pain and isolation that color life and living. (Wright 295-320) Researchers and practitioners have widely recognised that effective listening is crucial for managers to succeed. (Wright 295-320) Although listening is important in almost every profession, it seems particularly significant in the managerial position (Shepherd et al. 1997), since it is a fundamental aspect of the interpersonal communication process between the managerial person and the employees. From the employee’s perspective, a survey of industrial purchasing agents suggested that listening may be the single most important behaviour that managers can implement. Effective Listening Behaviour According to the personal selling literature, interpersonal listening has three stages: sensing, processing and responding (Kotter 56-60) They represent consecutive stages in the listening process, which implies that a message must be sensed before it is processed, and must be processed before it can be responded to (Kotter 56-60), The first stage, sensing, encompasses the reception of stimuli and attending to the message. Sensing goes beyond simply attending to words of verbal communication. It also includes attending to nonverbal signals, such as body language or facial expressions (Kotter 56-60). The second stage, processing, focuses on the cognitive processes which allow manager to decode the received message such as understanding the meaning of the message, evaluating the message, and retaining it in memory. The last stage, responding, is mainly concerned with the message that the manager sends back to the employees in response to his/her message. It implies answering at appropriate times as well as offering relevant information to the questions asked (Courpasson 14-61); Questioning also plays a major role at this stage of the listening process. Questions can be used to probe for more information or clarify the received information. (Courpasson 14-61) Listening can be either effective or ineffective. Schein argues that the most effective level of listening implies that the manager listens empathetically to the employees, that is to say, empathy is an aspect of effective listening (Schein 177-40). Effective listening "occurs when there is a high degree of correspondence between the sender's original message and the listener's recreation of that message" (Schein 177-40). Effective listening exists on a continuum ranging from low to high levels of correspondence. In the job environment, such correspondence is achieved when the manager is able to verify that the message he/she is "hearing" is, in fact, what the employee’s means to say. (Considine 166-78) In other words, the manager is able to respond, both assuring the employees that accurate listening has taken place and encouraging communication to continue. (Considine 166-78) Responding can be seen a result of the other two stages because it requires that the manager has previously sensed and processed all the relevant information provided by the employees (Lawler 383-91). Consequently, if the manager is responding effectively, then he/she is listening effectively. (Considine 166-78) Research has shown that the activities included in the responding stage - as opposed to those included in the sensing and processing stages, - are the ones that have a major impact both in job performance, and in employees satisfaction and trust in the manager. Managerial Implications Our findings should be extremely relevant to managers. It has often been said that listening is an important aspect of the negotiation process. (Schein 177-40). Negotiation requires listening, and listening can serve as a relatively inexpensive concession to the other party. Research has also shown that effective listening increases performance and plays a major role in building buyer-seller relationships. Consequently, companies need to foster a manager’s listening behaviour. Our findings have implications for the recruitment, training, rewarding, supervising and evaluating of managers. When recruiting and selecting, managers should seek candidates with strong "trait" empathy, since they will be relatively easy to train in effective listening techniques. (Schein 177-40) Empathy tests may help to identify such individuals. The most appropriate instruments for this purpose appear to be the "perspective taking" and "empathetic concern" sub-scales of Wright 295-320) measure. Alternatively, recruiters might expose interviewees to stressful listening situations for the purpose of observing the degree of empathy they reveal in their responses. Likewise, the interviewer could mention several pieces of information throughout the interview and later subtly assess the candidate's memory of that information. The fact that women tend to be better listeners than men may be considered when selecting managers; but always taking into account that it is not legal in some countries to discriminate against employees based upon gender. Since the ability to use employees knowledge had a significant and positive influence on effective listening, managers should pay particular attention to developing not only such knowledge, but also the ability to use it. In this sense, managers need to be trained to distinguish different categories of employees, and to be sensitive and focused on their needs as well as their buying motive. These training programmes should take into account the knowledge structures of more experienced and better performing managers. (Lawler 383-91) The appropriate order of training should be formal classroom training to provide the necessary employees knowledge, followed by participative training that creates/reinforces the ability to use such knowledge. . (Lawler 383-91) This participative training may take place in two steps. Firstly, through role playing sessions where typically one trainee plays the role of the manager and another trainee acts as the buyer. The role playing is video recorded or performed live for a group of observers who then critique the performance. Secondly, the knowledge and abilities learned in previous training sessions need to be consolidated through on-the-job training. (Lawler 383-91) On-the-job training puts the trainee into actual work circumstances under the observant (it is hoped) eye of a supportive mentor or manager. While managers may be trained to listen effectively, some resist being good listeners since they do not think it is important. (Courpasson 14-61) Including effective listening as a criterion in the performance evaluation process would highlight the importance of good listening practices. Moreover, this ongoing development should be integrated into the entire socialisation process of managers, as well as managers. Managers often interact with employees, so their listening skills should be honed, but they also need to listen well to their managers. (Courpasson 14-61) As role models, the quality of their own listening should be exemplary. (Courpasson 14-61) Managers who listen effectively in their interactions with their managers set the stage for the use of effective listening by managers. Conclusion To listen effectively managers must first subordinate their (Wright 295-320) Listening involves more than simply hearing another's words. It involves asking non-judgmental questions, then hearing and responding to the answers, it requires open and honest two-way communication, responding to what is said and inquiring as to what was left unsaid. It requires one to hear what is being verbally whispered and see what is being physically shouted. If we pay attention to the "tone" of another's body language, we can often "hear" more by watching than by listening. . (Wright 295-320) Listening is a complex phenomenon. In order to make people matter (and to matter to them) we should always: • Ask what others think. • Act not only on what they say but on what you see that they may be afraid to verbally reveal. • Remember that those around you will respond (and listen) to you in the .same way you respond (and listen) to them. Wouldn't it be an interesting world if everyone listened twice as much as they talked, moved forward only after looking into all predictable alternatives, and held onto the past only as long as necessary to move into the future. Maybe that's why we have only one mouth so that we can communicate loudly with our actions before ever beginning to whisper softly with our words. We have considered the responding stage of the interpersonal listening process. Even though research has shown that this is the most important stage in this process, future research may incorporate the other two stages: sensing and processing. This would also allow additional research to examine the relationship between listening and performance in depth, since previous research has always adopted an exploratory perspective. In addition, further research is needed to include other organisational and personal antecedents to effective listening such as supervision, socialisation, training and evaluation, and manager's satisfaction and commitment to the company. Moreover, analyzing the effect of other types of reward systems, such as employee’s satisfaction incentive systems, should prove useful. Finally, other studies of manager's effective listening might take a dyadic approach, analyzing the extent to which effective listening, as perceived by the manager, influences relational outcomes such as trust and commitment, as perceived by the employees. Works Cited Considine, M. (2000) Managerialism strikes out, Australian Journal of Public Administration, 49, 2, 166–78. Courpasson, D. (2000) Managerial strategies of domination: power in soft bureaucracies, Organization Studies, 22, 141–61. Kotter, J. and Heskett, J. (2002) Corporate Culture and Performance. New York: The Free Press. Lawler, E. and Ledford, G. (1999) 'A Skill-Based Approach to Human Resource Management', European Management Journal, 10 (4): 383-91. Schein, E.H. (2005) Organizational Culture and Leadership: A Dynamic View. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Tung, R.L. (2004) 'Strategic Management of Human Resources in the Multinational Enterprise', Human Resource Management, 23 (2): 129-43. Wright, P. and McMahan, G. (2003) 'Theoretical Perspectives for Strategic Human Resource Management', Journal of Management, 18 (2): 295-320. Read More