Effective Listening Skills for Leaders: How to Be A Leader Who Listens

Описание: Effective listening skills for leaders shows you how to be a leader who listens. Human connection begins with our ears, not our mouth. This is video one in a six-part series on effective communication for leaders and managers.

► ► FREE EBOOK ◀︎ ◀︎

Sales Coaching Success: Five Secrets

It’s the most important thing you can do as a sales leader: master the skill of sales coaching.

It’s the difference between hitting your number every once in awhile and achieving over-goal performance year after year. It’s the difference between moving up in your career or moving out.

Yet so few sales leaders know how to coach their salespeople. Do you? Bill Zipp’s new ebook, Sales Coaching Success: Five Secrets, will help you:

✓ Understand why the goals you set with your reps aren’t working very well.
✓ Discover the powerful habit that supercharges any salesperson.
✓ Create a cadence of accountability that drives real revenue results.
✓ Learn a proven process for conducting effective weekly one-on-ones.
✓ And best of all, love being a sales leader again!

DOWNLOAD at https://billzipp.com/sales-coaching-s...

— Effective Listening Skills for Leaders: How to Be a Leader Who Listens—

It doesn’t bode well when your child comes home from school with a report card that says, “Does not play well with others.”

The only silver lining in that cloud is that your son or daughter might end up in sales, like you. Many a successful salesperson received that same childhood epithet due to their competitiveness, drive, and intensity.

When a salesperson becomes a sales manager, however, everything changes. As I’m sure you’ve discovered, there’s lots of others you’ve gotta play well with: the salespeople on your team, your fellow sales managers, your manager, and other parts of the business like HR and operations, enablement and marketing.

How’re you gonna do that?

Effective communication is the key to playing well with others. That is, being able to engage in positive, productive conversations, even when the heat is on, and being able to collaborate with those who see things differently than you. We’ll look at all these issues in this series, but first let’s address the essential foundation: effective listening skills for leaders.

God gave us two ears and one mouth, so it only stands to reason that they should be used in the same ratio. Most of us in sales, however, talk way more than we listen, and, as a result, fail to foster effective communication.

Here are three ways to listen better as a leader:

1. Be fully present in all your conversations.

Interruptions are the enemy of listening, and they come in two flavors. There are external interruptions, the buzzes, beeps, and rings of digital notifications, and internal interruptions, the distractions we allow in our minds while someone else is talking.

Being fully present in all our conversations require us to silence both. Use technology to tame technology and turn off all your notifications when you’re talking with someone, face-to-face and on Zoom. Set fixed times in the day when you get back to email, texts, and chat, instead having them be a constant stream of distraction.

Now set aside the conversations going on in you head. Give the people you interact with your undivided attention, the gift of your presence. Enter into their experience fully, feeling what they feel, live, in-the-moment.

2. Don’t be compelled to have a perfect response.

When we listen to give a response, we’re really not listening. We’re waiting to have our say.

Good listeners do not have an agenda. They simply take everything in.

This business of people having the perfect response to something someone says only happens in a Hollywood movie starring Tom Hanks. In real life, the perfect response comes to us days later, if at all.

So give yourself fully to listening and give up the expectation to say anything profound. Except …

3. Ask curious questions.

Curious questions keep the focus of the conversation on the person speaking instead of shifting the focus to you, which makes listening a selfless act.

Simple questions like, “What brought you here from New England?”, “How did you get interested in veterinary medicine?” and “What have you enjoyed most about living in our college town?”

Those are three questions I asked last week to a friend of our daughter’s. They got her talking like there was no tomorrow and put me on the supportive adult side of the equation, not the self-absorbed parent side.

Curious questions will do the same for you with prospects and customers, colleagues and coworkers, and will transform you into a leader who listens.

In my next video on effective communication for leaders, we’ll explore how to communicate in conflict.