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Listening n (1996): "the process of receiving, constructing meaning from, and responding to spoken and/or nonverbal messages"

Sounds simple?  In principal, yes.  In practice, the ability to listen is one of the most significant and most difficult aspects of leadership.  Listening skills are crucial to being an effective leader, as well as being a major factor in the success or failure of team dynamics, supervisory relationships, and effective and productive project management. Being listened to means we are taken seriously, our ideas and feelings are known, and, ultimately, what we have to say matters.  This applies to everyone – irrespective of title, level, background, education or responsibility.  But the truth is that less than 2% of us have had formal educational experience with listening.

This course was designed specifically for a technical or project management audience.  For highly educated and highly trained personnel  the real challenge of listening often hedges on a strong self-perception of being right, irrespective of the input, knowledge or skill of the other party.  Listening becomes merely a means of proving that rightness. People serving technical and project management roles tend to be more task oriented rather than people oriented. Listening becomes filtered through the assumed logic of tasks.  The reality is that this filter is more of a block to effective listening and communicating.  The majority of individuals that you need to interact with do not have the same logic-based and structured orientation.  In order to ensure that the fruits of your professional expertise are included and leveraged, the ability to communicate with the business people who make those decisions is crucial.

In this session, you will:

• Assess your own listening skills
• Identify the key attributes of good listening
• Understand the do’s & don’ts of listening
• Address both the verbal and non-verbal aspects
• Moving from Task to People orientation
• Identifying Symptoms of Dysfunctional Listening
• Learn HOW to be listened to
• Listen for context and meaning
• Role-play effective methods

We listen at 125-250 words per minute, but think at 1000-3000 words per minute.  What does that mean?  It means listening is HARD. 

Barbara Waugh, Worldwide Personnel Manager at Hewlett Packard says:  “Listening requires that you slow down and stop for that moment in time you need to focus on the conversation and nothing else. Listening is the most critical skill for business success. If you are going to imaginatively listen to a customers needs, you need to listen to what they are saying as well as what they are not saying.” 

In the midst of crushing deadlines, and literally hundreds of competing tasks that you must perform every day – taking time to listen seems like a luxury.  The reality is poor listening skills result in much more time wasted in fixing mis-communication problems than taking the time to stop and really listen for understanding.

Who Should Attend:

Engineers
Technical Managers
Project Managers

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