Active listening is an important communication tool to build trust with employees, co-workers, customers and anyone you want to build a relationship with.
When done when, active listening helps build trust and mutual understanding. By using active listening, conflicts can be averted, and confrontations can be positive and productive.
This demonstration is a follow-up to my article and video on the steps to active listening.
The Best Leadership Style for Improved Employee Performance & Retention
Your leadership style has a direct impact on employee performance as well as employee retention. To use the best leadership style requires some understanding of the various styles of leadership as well as developing self-knowledge.
Self-knowledge is important because your inborn motivations, fears, strengths and weaknesses impact your leadership style. By understanding yourself better you can control what influences your leadership style and adjust for the person and situation.
I recently spoke with a general manager of a construction business who has four direct report project managers. They supervise construction workers daily and manage the day to day operations of their projects.
One manager is very goal and results driven. He has no problem confronting employees and shouting orders. The problem is that he lacks diplomacy in his approach with the workers and comes across as aggressive at times. His employees have complained about this and some have just left to work elsewhere.
The general manager realized the importance of leadership development and becoming better balanced as a leader. This means balancing the use of your three intelligences for the person and situation.
The three intelligences are the intuitive (body) intelligence, the emotional (heart) intelligence and the intellectual (mind) intelligence. All three are important and need to function in harmony. Some people are more intuitive by nature and others may be dominated more by emotions or the intellect.
By learning about yourself and the three intelligences you can better develop the qualities of all the intelligences to work for you in greater balance. Therefore, personal development is greatly important and brings tremendous benefits.
In the case of the project manager who is motivated by results and very direct with employees, his greatest fear is ineffectiveness. He fears that if employees are not productive and doing things the right (his) way, then he cannot achieve the results and goals he has in mind. This type tends to put tasks (getting things done) over people and they often do not realize the impact their directness and lack of diplomacy has on others. This type needs to develop the quality of diplomacy and become more empathic with his employees.
The emotional dominant type is more sensitive to people and how they feel. But they may fear conflict or becoming disliked. This could cause them to avoid confrontations and saying no.
The intellectual dominant type can be great idea generators, problem solvers and strategists. But they could forget to consider the ideas of employees or over analyze decisions and hold back change.
The evolved leader/manager is one who understands how to adapt to the needs of his employees and each situation. A leader who is body intelligence dominant as described in the example above, would work on developing diplomacy and active listening to improve his relationship with his employees.
This would build trust and when an urgent situation occurred the required a more control and command style leadership, the employees would understand why the leader is acting that way.
A good analogy is the fire chief who works with his crew to train and coach them when there is no fire. But as soon as a fire occurs the chief takes on a command style role. All the firefighters know that this style of leadership is what is required in that situation to save property and lives.
Humans are like a rainbow, processing all the colours in the universe. Our colours are our positive traits and so we need to have them all available to us when needed. It is the wise and evolved leader who can use these traits and be instantly adaptable to the person and situation.
To learn more about what type of person you are please consult the book CrazyZoo, Know-Thyself Made Easy by Fritz Glaus.
Employee training can be greatly enhanced by using praise and positive reinforcement to boost self-confidence.
It is normal for people to lack confidence in learning a new task. The more complex the task is, the greater the doubt the person may have that they can learn and perform to expectation.
Breaking down the training by steps and giving praise and positive reinforcement when the employee successfully completes a step will greatly boost their self-confidence and belief that they can keep learning the more complex steps.
When the employee fails to do the step just keep it positive and have them do the step again or break it down even further. Keep communicating your belief in their ability to learn and perform the task.
To effectively conduct a brainstorming session with a group of employees, you must follow specific principles of brainstorming.
Brainstorming is a way to generate lots of ideas to solve a problem, find opportunities for improvement and spark innovation. Brainstorming is not a problem-solving technique, so once the ideas are generated there are other tools and techniques to use to solve the problem or treat the idea.
A structured approach to thinking, which helps a group of people utilize their collective brain power to generate new ideas.
Quantity of ideas is favoured over quality. Use the round robin approach by going around the room one person at a time and record their idea on a flip chart. Keep the rounds going until all ideas are exhausted. You can start with a silent brainstorm where individually people take a few minutes to jot down their ideas. Encourage people to keep thinking of ideas during the session.
By having each person give one idea at a time as you go around ensures equal participation. If someone has no further ideas, they can say pass but can continue to contribute when it comes to their turn again.
The only bad ideas are those that are withheld. You must encourage everyone to share whatever comes to mind. This is how some of the best ideas get generated. One crazy idea may spark a similar more practical idea in someone else.
Neither positive or negative criticism is allowed during brainstorming as it could cause people to hold back, especially when you have different levels of leadership in the session.
Appoint a scribe, someone to write down the ideas on a flip chart. Use paper so the list can be left in view or posted to the wall. Once again, no criticism or editorializing is permitted.
Don’t rush into analysis or other problem-solving techniques. Leave the list on display so people can reflect on it and new ideas might be generated or suggestions for combining items.
Remember that brainstorming is an idea generation tool and there are techniques like nominal group technique, force-field analysis and others that need to be used to find solutions and treat the ideas further.