Five Ways To Tap Your Listening Skills

An old Argnetine proverb puts it quite simply. “He who speaks, sows; he who listens, reaps.” In a world rich with social platforms to express oneself, good listeners are a rare species. But at the workplace, using your listening skills can get you far. Shreya Roy speaks to experts, to find out five ways to best leverage your listening skills.

1 Resolving Conflicts 
Good listeners tend to be better equipped to resolve conflicts. “Leaders are more approachable if they offer to lend their ears to team members during a crisis at work which results in a better constructive method to solve the issue,” says Minhaj Zia, managing director, Polycom India & SAARC.


2 Defying Distance and Barriers 
In today’s world, we are constantly collaborating with people from various countries, who belong to wildly diverse cultures, and we rarely even get to personally interact with them. Using your listening skills to the maximum becomes a necessity, and not just a good trait to have, in order to achieve such collaboration smoothly.


3 Listen to Connect the Dots 
The ability to draw commonalities between multiple conversations improves dramatically if a person is a good listener. As a leader, this can help in improving fact-based judgement. “Asking for clarification will allow you to probe for additional facts. Using this effectively shows your ability to connect,” says Mark Driscoll, Human Capital leader, PwC India.


4 Driving Innovation 
When you allow someone to talk for 20 minutes, and just listen, they tend to come up with their own solutions. “One can come up with interesting new ways of working and infuse new life into projects by spelling out the objective and then letting the team come up with suitable action plans rather than prescribing a traditional approach,” says Zia. 

5 Establishing a Rapport 
A distraction-free conversation portrays to your speaker that you care about his view points, and are not just obsessed mentally with what you will say next. Even in a meeting with multiple people, you can build a better rapport with colleagues, by actively listening to speakers, and responding non-verbally.

(The Economic Times, Mumbai, 08-04-2014)