Key leadership principles, 5 Levels of listening, 4 developmental stages of empathic listening - Essay Example

Seek First to Understand Then to be Understood Key Leadership Principles In his book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey goes to substantial lengths to enlighten his audience on some of the behaviors and skills they should possess in order to bring the best out of themselves customarily. The key leadership principles highlighted on habit five titled seek first to understand then to be understood are essentially character and communication (Covey 240). Covey reaffirms the need to demonstrate character repeatedly while communicating with family members, friends and colleagues, as such a mechanism looks into the interests of all the entities involved.

Five Levels of Listening Going through the section on habit five, Covey asserts that even though individuals are always taken through other aspects of communication such as reading, writing and speaking, listening is similarly of great significance. According to Covey, any communication process involves five levels of listening. The first level is ignoring, which is characterized by not really paying attention to the perceptions of the other party, and that the practice of pretending is the second level of listening.

Covey emphasizes that the aspect of hearing only a few positions, which is known as selective listening is the third level of listening and that attentive listening that is characterized by taking note of one’s energy on the words being said is the fourth level. The author strongly believes that in as much as people are able to make sense of the perceptions of others when they go through the four levels of listening highlighted above, there is need to practice emphatic listening, which is essentially skill based and truncated from both character and the relationship that exists between the parties at hand.

Emphatic listening is of great significance in communication because it focuses on listening with intent to understand rather than concentrating on the how to reply, control and manipulate the conversation (Covey 248). Similarly, Covey holds the opinion that emphatic listening is far-reaching in communication, as it enables the parties involved to look inside their frames of reference and see through the worlds of each other, thereby understanding how each party feels instead of exhibiting sympathy.

The author recommends that emphatic listening should make use of the ears, eyes and the heart and though it has often been put forward that such an approach makes individuals more susceptible to manipulation, it is important, as it provides accurate data to work with.Developmental Stages of Emphatic Listening To demonstrate how productive emphatic listening is during communication, Stephen Covey refers to it as deeply therapeutic, for it provides psychological air to those relaying information between one another.

He argues that for an individual to practice emphatic listening, he or she should begin by mimicking the content. The individual should then proceed to rephrase the content by making use of the left side of the brain and then employ the right hemisphere of the brain in order to reflect upon the feeling of the conveyor of the message. Finally, the fourth developmental stage is to rephrase and reflect on the message at the same time. Works-CitedCovey, Stephen R. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change.

Melbourne: Business Library, 2005. Print.