Leadership Focus: Comprehensive Listening as a Leadership Skill

The power of listening has been rediscovered by successful organisations as one of the essential elements of leadership. It has been identified as a primary communication skill. In Leadership programmes executives learn how to use the skills of comprehensive and attentive listening and how to monitor their own inner voice while listening.
Comprehensive Listening is a combination of seeing, hearing, thinking, understanding and speaking. Only through the interaction of these individual elements do executives develop the ability to listen to employees, ask questions and give them feedback that they can accept. 
Comprehensive Listening is a prerequisite for understanding and being understood yourself. This essential skill creates the space for dialogue and mutual understanding that is needed in order to be able to lead by example.

Target Group

This workshop is designed for scientific leaders as well as administrative staff leaders who wish to improve their interactions and leadership skills through comprehensive listening.

Goals

Participants learn what they can do in order to become more attentive listeners and how this affects their interactions with their employees. Participants are able to distinguish their own evaluations from observations, recognize and use their own inner voice for positive non-verbal communication and open questions.
Participants can identify and apply the elements of comprehensive listening. They learn to assess their own listening skills using self-check questions and how to apply, demonstrate and identify non-verbal mirroring.

Content

We will address questions like:  

• Why companies address listening as a leadership skill and how it works.
• What comprehensive listening means, how it works and how it is used to facilitate dialogue and understanding. With examples from research, companies’ leadership programs and practical examples from conflict mediation.
• What is it that makes comprehensive listening so powerful?

In this workshop you will be exposed to different relevant working tools that will allow you to use comprehensive listening as a skill during the communication with your employees and your colleagues. Learn how to monitor your inner voice and how to speak nonverbally. Build your own listening-skill-toolbox. Experience both the skill of comprehensive listening in action and how it is when somebody listens comprehensively to you.

Experience how it is to listen and to be listened to. How to learn comprehensive listening. How to keep checks and balances on your own bias and how you can lead while using skills related to listening.

Methods

Individual work, interactive group work and self-checks

• Elements of comprehensive listening
• Mastering your Inner voice
• Nonverbal cues and how to establish contact without using words
• Self-check active listening