10 TIPS FOR YOUR BEST LISTENING

By Dr. Denny Coates

When interacting with people, there will be plenty of opportunities to share thoughts and experiences. It’s important, though, to recognize when you need to use listening skills instead—to understand what someone is trying to tell you. Here are some tips:

Be alert for listening moments. It’s hard to listen well when you miss the opportunity to listen. The time to listen is when someone is trying to tell you something.
Engage “the listening mindset.” Effective listening is empowered by your attitude about listening. Remember: When someone is trying to tell you something, it may be something you really need to hear.
Exercise listening with other communication skills. Listening is powerful not only because of how it affects other people, but because you can use it with other skills, such as giving feedback, receiving feedback, resolving conflict, and others.
Listen instead of indulging in conversation. Listening does involve some speaking; but there’s a huge difference between listening and conversing. Conversation is a great way to connect with people, but when you have a listening moment, resist the temptation to indulge in offering your own stories and opinions. There’s a time to enjoy conversation, and there’s a time when you should simply focus on listening to understand.
Don’t interrupt. While listening, you may feel like offering your own thoughts and experiences. But it’s a mistake to interrupt. Doing so sends the message that what you have to say is more important than what the other person has to say. Think of interrupting as a form of rudeness; people resent being interrupted. Instead, engage your best listening skills.

Avoid reacting emotionally. While this may be a natural response when you hear something that bothers you, reacting emotionally is likely to block further communication. When you feel your emotions rising, quietly take a few breaths to calm down before saying anything. Then engage your listening skills.
Refrain from offering advice or solutions. Instead, ask questions that get the other person to think. Then follow this up with listening to understand what the person has to say.

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Keep an open mind. When listening, you may hear things you don’t like or agree with. You’ll be tempted to offer your own opinions or engage in debate. It’s more profitable to hear a person out. You’ll discover what’s going on in their mind, and you might learn something.
Be patient with difficult speakers. Not everyone speaks in well-organized essays. The speaker may be upset or unsure about what they’re trying to say. Your task is to be patient and use your listening skills to get clarity about what they’re trying to express.
Learn from listening experiences. Listening is a power skill that you can never stop improving. And improvement only comes with practice. The idea is to reflect on your experiences, no matter what happens, so you can learn lessons that make you more effective.

From time to time review basic listening skills, which are described in Chapter 4 of the book Connect with Your Team.

Connect with Your Team

Dennis E. Coates, Ph.D.,
and Meredith M. Bell

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Connect with Your Team is your how-to guide for working on leader-team communication skills and is a key resource in the leader development system, Grow Strong Leaders.

174: The Cost of Not Paying Attention

180: A Leader Who Checks His Ego at the Door

319: Cultivating a Culture That Lasts

Company culture isn’t just a buzzword—it’s the foundation of an organization’s success or failure. Brad Federman shares how businesses can create a culture that balances people and results. He explains where many organizations go wrong when developing their values and why culture must be designed to outlast leadership changes. Brad also reveals how companies can avoid common pitfalls, such as tolerating bad behavior and adopting trendy policies without considering business needs.

We dive into practical strategies for aligning culture with business goals, reinforcing positive behaviors, and holding leaders accountable. Brad describes the importance of continuous culture audits and experiential activities that make culture tangible. Whether you’re a business leader, HR professional, or culture champion, this episode provides actionable insights to create an environment where employees thrive and customers stay engaged.

Brad is the founder of PerformancePoint, a firm dedicated to helping organizations engage employees, strengthen customer relationships, and cultivate resilient, collaborative cultures through effective leadership. With over 25 years of corporate experience, he’s worked with global companies like Hilton Hotels and Resorts, Nordstrom, and Mayo Clinic. Brad is an international speaker and the author of Cultivating Culture: 101 Ways to Foster Engagement in 15 Minutes or Less.

You’ll discover:

The biggest mistakes companies make when defining their values
Why culture must be stable, not built around a single leader
How to hold employees and leaders accountable for culture
The role of feedback and culture workouts in shaping workplace norms
Strategies for overcoming resistance to cultural change

Watch the episode:

Connect with Brad

Brad’s Resources

Website

PerformancePoint

Brad Federman

Books

Cultivating Culture: 101 Ways to Foster Engagement in 15 Minutes or Less

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Leader-team communication and character skills

Grow Strong Character

Dennis E. Coates, Ph.D.

Order from Amazon

Connect with Your Team

Dennis E. Coates, Ph.D.,
and Meredith M. Bell

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Emerging Leaders Need Skills

EMERGING LEADERS NEED SKILLS

By Dr. Denny Coates

Leadership is the ability to guide and empower a group toward achieving a key organizational goal. Being successful requires judgment, decision-making, and responsibility while inspiring teamwork, trust, and motivation. Emerging leaders need to learn these skills.

“Knowing what to do isn’t the same as being able to do it.”

Skills vs. Concepts

Recognizing the need for productive teams, many organizations have created programs to introduce emerging leaders to fundamental leadership concepts and principles. Even many business schools are now offering courses in leadership.

Traditionally, instructors share basic concepts and principles with emerging leaders and assume that learners will understand them, remember them, and apply them on the job.

The problem: knowing what to do isn’t the same as being able to do it. Concepts and principles, as important as they are, are not the same as skills.

Practice: The Key to Skill Mastery

Simulated classroom exercises can be great introductions to new skills, but they are inadequate for actually establishing the skills. Skill mastery requires repeated application in real-world situations, which can’t happen in the classroom. Over time, many repetitions of a behavior stimulate the brain cells involved in the skill to connect with each other. This impact on the brain causes a circuit of interconnected brain cells to form that enables the behavior to become an automatic response.

Because of this need for repetition, mastering leadership skills is like acquiring the skills needed for competitive sports. For example, it takes extraordinary skill for a player to hit a baseball rocketing towards him at 90 miles per hour. The batter has no time to analyze the pitch and think about the best way to make effective contact with the ball. The necessary skills have to be automatic, established during months of practice.

In exactly the same way, leaders often have little time to think about the best way to react. They need to have invested a lot of time using the skills at work to engage with people effectively.

Replacing Old Habits with New Skills is Challenging

The challenge for an emerging leader is that old habits for dealing with people compete with efforts to replace these behavior patterns with more effective ones. Pressured by the challenges of work, a manager might be tempted to go with what has come to feel familiar. The failure to apply what they have learned can be discouraging. They may conclude that the new skills are so different and uncomfortable that they aren’t a good fit for them, so they give up on the sustained effort to improve.

Coaching Encourages Emerging Leaders

Because the path towards mastery inevitably includes many such frustrations, coaching is a vital ingredient for replacing old habits. Coaching helps an emerging leader to be held accountable, to be asked about what was learned from failures, and to receive encouragement.

In short, instruction can impart knowledge, but skill-building requires a dedicated, long-term follow-up. Coaching is important to develop leaders at all levels, so an economical solution is for the leaders to coach each other. With this kind of peer support, emerging leaders are more likely to continue doing the work that leads to mastery.

The ideal leadership development program, then, not only offers excellent introductions to the best practices, but it also supports what needs to happen afterwards: a long-term program of on-the-job application to establish essential skills involved in interpersonal communication and character strength. As leaders practice the most effective ways of connecting with members of their team, they create effective action while nurturing leader-team relationships.

Learn more about Essential Leadership skills for emerging leaders in Connect with Your Team.

Connect with Your Team

Dennis E. Coates, Ph.D.,
and Meredith M. Bell

Order from Amazon

149: Becoming a Highly Effective Leader

318: The Power of Speaking Up: Turning Fear into Strength

Have you ever found yourself not speaking up, whether it’s in a 1:1 situation or in a group? For a variety of reasons, women often hold back instead of using their voice. Jennifer Wilkov, founder and CEO of Speak Up Women, learned to speak up in a powerful way herself and now teaches other women to do the same. Whether you’re looking to build confidence, advocate for yourself, or become a more effective leader, you’ll take away actionable strategies to amplify your own voice.

Jennifer shares her personal journey, from a successful career as a certified financial planner to an unexpected wrongful conviction that tested her resilience. Rather than staying silent, she turned her experience into a movement—empowering women to embrace their self-worth and use their voice with confidence.

Speak Up Women is a community that’s cultivating women’s self-expression and empowerment. Jennifer speaks to women through her inspiring personal message, “You have the right to remain fabulous! – regardless of any situation, circumstance or condition.” She is passionate about elevating the self-esteem of women everywhere and encouraging their self-worth.