Listening is one of the most important skills you can have. How well you listen has a major
impact on your job effectiveness, and on the quality of your relationships with others.
We listen to obtain information.
We listen to understand.
We listen for enjoyment.
We listen to learn.
Given all this listening we do, you would think we’d be good at it! In fact we’re not. Depending on the study being quoted, we remember a dismal 25-50% of what we hear. That means that when you talk to your boss, colleagues, customers or spouse for 10 minutes, they only really hear 2½-5 minutes of the conversation.
Turn it around and it reveals that when you are receiving directions or being presented with information, you aren’t hearing the whole message either. You hope the important parts are captured in your 25- 50%, but what if they’re not?
Clearly, listening is a skill that we can all benefit from improving. By becoming a better listener, you will improve your productivity, as well as your ability to influence, persuade negotiate. What’s more, you’ll avoid conflict and misunderstandings – all necessary for workplace success. )
Coach, Don't Demonstrate
When you're under a time crunch, it's tempting to demonstrate a task rather than to provide supportive directions. When you say "Let me show you how" your motivation is probably just to get the work done rather than help the team member learn. This can be devastating to that team member's skill development and makes him dependent on you. In the long run, the individual to whom you've demonstrated skills will require guidance for just about everything. Since you've done everything for him, he may be hesitant to make decisions or take action without checking with you first.
Provide Constructive Criticism
If you're providing feedback, be sure to communicate the bad and the good. It's always hard to hear criticism, but if you highlight the good things too it makes taking the bad a little easier. Also, provide clear suggestions on how your team members can improve. You don't have to give them all of the solutions, instead guide the group by sharing your knowledge and experience.
Back Off
Perhaps you've assigned a project to a team member that's of particular interest to you. Initially, you should provide some guidance and communicate that it's an open door policy for additional questions that may come up along the way. Now, it's important to back off! It may be tempting to get overly involved, but try and bite your tongue unless the individual comes to you for input or guidance. As a team leader, you must prove to your group members that you believe in their abilities and talents. By staying out of the picture, this shows team members they'll get a fair chance to demonstrate what they can do without interference.
Try To Be Positive
Enthusiasm is contagious… if you're excited about your group's project, it's likely they'll feel a reason to be also. As a leader, your team members look to you for direction. If you notice that the group's motivation and output levels are in a slump, this is your wake-up call! Have a meeting to discuss what needs to be changed, and really listen to what your team has to say. If you think they may have a difficult time admitting this, get them to write their comments on paper instead. It's important to stay in tune with your group. You may be surprised by what they have to say – it could be a dramatically different perspective from your own.
Value Your Group's Ideas
Don't discount your group's ideas. Avoid phrases like "Yeah, but…" or "We've already tried that". If a suggested idea was attempted in the past but failed, consider that it may not have been executed properly or that it simply wasn't the best time. Consider each and every idea that your group members generate and encourage them to communicate their insights on a regular basis. If you're overly critical of ideas or immediately discount the ideas of others, your group will hesitate sharing anything. After all, for every twenty mediocre suggestions, there's bound to be at least one stellar idea.
Source: effectivemeetings.com
How o Be an Effective Team Member
Working on teams can be rewarding, but at times it can be difficult and downright frustrating. If there are poor communicators on your team, you may often feel left in the dark, confused or misunderstood. To create a successful team, effective communication methods are necessary for both team members and leaders. Even though some people understand their communication skills need improving, many aren't certain how to improve them. So, in the following article, we've outlined how to avoid some common team blunders as well as some helpful advice on how to be a better teammate or leader overall. Go… team!
If You're a Team Member
Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
If you have a problem with someone in your group, talk to him about it. Letting bad feelings brew will only make you sour and want to isolate yourself from the group. Not only does it feel good to get it out, but it will be better for the team in the long run.
Don't Blame Others
People in your group lose respect for you if you're constantly blaming others for not meeting deadlines. You're not fooling anyone, people know who isn't pulling his weight in a group. Pointing the finger will only make you look cowardly. Group members understand if you have a heavy workload and weren't able to meet a deadline. Saying something like, "I'm really sorry, but I'll get it to you by the end of today." will earn you a lot more respect than trying to make it seem like it's everyone else's fault that you missed your deadline.
Support Group Member's Ideas
If a teammate suggests something, always consider it – even if it's the silliest idea you've ever heard! Considering the group's ideas shows you're interested in other people's ideas, not just your own. And this makes you a good team member. After all, nobody likes a know-it-all.
Personal Time Management for Busy Managers
The "Eff" Words
The three "Eff" words are (concise Oxford English Dictionary:
- Effective – having a definite or desired effect
- Efficient – productive with minimum waste or effort
- Effortless – seemingly without effort; natural, easy
Personal Time Management is about winning the "Eff" words: making them apply to you and your daily routines.
What Is Personal Time Management?
Personal Time Management is about controlling the use of your most valuable (and undervalued) resource. Consider these two questions: What would happen if you spent company money with as few safeguards as you spend company time? When was the last time you scheduled a review of your time allocation?
The absence of Personal Time Management is characterized by last-minute rushes to meet deadlines, meetings which are either double booked or achieve nothing, days which seem somehow to slip unproductively by, crises which loom unexpected from nowhere. This sort of environment leads to inordinate stress and degradation of performance: it must be stopped.
Poor time management is often a symptom of overconfidence: techniques which used to work with small projects and workloads are simply reused with large ones. But inefficiencies which were insignificant in the small role are ludicrous in the large. You cannot drive a motor bike like a bicycle, nor can you manage a supermarket chain like a market stall. The demands, the problems and the payoffs for increased efficiency are all larger as your responsibility grows; you must learn to apply proper techniques or be bettered by those who do. Possibly, the reason Time Management is poorly practiced is that it so seldom forms a measured part of appraisal and performance review; what many fail to foresee, however, is how intimately it is connected to aspects which do.
Personal Time Management has many facets. Most managers recognize a few, but few recognize them all. There is the simple concept of keeping a well-ordered diary and the related idea of planned activity. But beyond these, it is a tool for the systematic ordering of your influence on events; it underpins many other managerial skills such as Effective Delegation and Project Planning.
Personal Time Management is a set of tools which allow you to:
- eliminate wastage
- be prepared for meetings
- refuse excessive workloads
- monitor project progress
- allocate resource (time) appropriate to a task's importance
- ensure that long-term projects are not neglected
- plan each day efficiently
plan each week effectively and to do so simply with a little self-discipline.
Since Personal Time Management is a management process just like any other, it must be planned, monitored and regularly reviewed. In the following sections, we will examine the basic methods and functions of Personal Time Management. Since true understanding depends upon experience, you will be asked to take part by looking at aspects of your own work. If you do not have time to this right now, ask yourself, why not?
Current Practise
What this article is advocating is the adoption of certain practices which will give you greater control over the use and allocation of your primary resource: time. Before we start on the future, it is worth considering the present. This involves the simplistic task of keeping a note of how you spend your time for a suitably long period of time (say a week). I say simplistic since all you have to do is create a simple table, photocopy half-a-dozen copies and carry it around with you filling in a row every time you change activity. After one week, allocate time (start as you mean to go on) to reviewing this log.
Much of what managers and supervisors do is solve problems and make decisions. New managers and supervisors, in particular, often solve problems and decisions by reacting to them. They are "under the gun", stressed and very short for time. Consequently, when they encounter a new problem or decision they must make, they react with a decision that seemed to work before. It's easy with this approach to get stuck in a circle of solving the same problem over and over again. Therefore, as a new manager or supervisor, get used to an organized approach to problem solving and decision making. Not all problems can be solved and decisions made by the following, rather rational approach. However, the following basic guidelines will get you started. Don't be intimidated by the length of the list of guidelines. After you've practiced them a few times, they'll become second nature to you -- enough that you can deepen and enrich them to suit your own needs and nature.
(Note that it might be more your nature to view a "problem" as an "opportunity". Therefore, you might substitute "opportunity" for "problem" in the following guidelines.)
1. Define the problem
This is often where people struggle. They react to what they think the problem is. Instead, seek to understand more about why you think there's a problem.
Defining the problem: (with input from yourself and others)
Ask yourself and others, the following questions:
a. What can you see that causes you to think there's a problem?
b. Where is it happening?
c. How is it happening?
d. When is it happening?
e. With whom is it happening? (HINT: Don't jump to "Who is causing the problem?" When we're stressed, blaming is often one of our first reactions. To be an effective manager, you need to address issues more than people.)
f. Why is it happening?
g. Write down a five-sentence description of the problem in terms of "The following should be happening, but isn't ..." or "The following is happening and should be: ..." As much as possible, be specific in your description, including what is happening, where, how, with whom and why. (It may be helpful at this point to use a variety of research methods. See .
Defining complex problems:
a. If the problem still seems overwhelming, break it down by repeating steps a-f until you have descriptions of several related problems.
Verifying your understanding of the problems:
a. It helps a great deal to verify your problem analysis for conferring with a peer or someone else.
Prioritize the problems:
a. If you discover that you are looking at several related problems, then prioritize which ones you should address first.
b. Note the difference between "important" and "urgent" problems. Often, what we consider to be important problems to consider are really just urgent problems. Important problems deserve more attention. For example, if you're continually answering "urgent" phone calls, then you've probably got a more "important" problem and that's to design a system that screens and prioritizes your phone calls.
Understand your role in the problem:
a. Your role in the problem can greatly influence how you perceive the role of others. For example, if you're very stressed out, it'll probably look like others are, too, or, you may resort too quickly to blaming and reprimanding others. Or, you are feel very guilty about your role in the problem, you may ignore the accountabilities of others.
2. Look at potential causes for the problem
a. It's amazing how much you don't know about what you don't know. Therefore, in this phase, it's critical to get input from other people who notice the problem and who are effected by it.
b. It's often useful to collect input from other individuals one at a time (at least at first). Otherwise, people tend to be inhibited about offering their impressions of the real causes of problems.
c. Write down what your opinions and what you've heard from others.
d. Regarding what you think might be performance problems associated with an employee, it's often useful to seek advice from a peer or your supervisor in order to verify your impression of the problem.
e.Write down a description of the cause of the problem and in terms of what is happening, where, when, how, with whom and why.
3. Identify alternatives for approaches to resolve the problem
a. At this point, it's useful to keep others involved (unless you're facing a personal and/or employee performance problem). Brainstorm for solutions to the problem. Very simply put, brainstorming is collecting as many ideas as possible, then screening them to find the best idea. It's critical when collecting the ideas to not pass any judgment on the ideas -- just write them down as you hear them. (A wonderful set of skills used to identify the underlying cause of issues is Systems Thinking.)
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