listening in business context.pptx

Listening skill

1. Contents: Listening Skills. Importance of Listening. Barriers to Listening. Strategies for Effective Listening. Listening in a Business context.

2. Listening Skills: Hearing: You need to pay attention to make sure that you hear the message clearly. Interpreting: Analyze the speaker’s words based on your experience, attitude, knowledge & background. Evaluating: Evaluating the information received and make decisions accordingly. Responding: Let the speaker know whether you have understood the message and respond to it.

3. Listening Process:

4. Importance of Listening: Why do we need to listen well? Listening leads to understanding of facts. To avoid miscommunication during interactions. Listening helps to gain new knowledge and also for enjoyment. How well we listen has a major impact on our job effectiveness and on the quality of our relationship with others.

5. Barriers to Listening: Genuine hearing problems or deficiencies that prevent them from listening properly. Distractions in the environment such as the sound of a TV or the smoke of cigarette etc. Physiological/Physical Barriers: Preoccupation with personal or work related problems can make it difficult to focus one’s attention completely on what a speaker is saying. Attitudinal Barriers: It is wrong to assume that communication is the sole responsibility of the sender or the speakers and listeners have no role to play. Wrong Assumptions:

6. Barriers to listening: Accents can be barriers to listening,since they interfere with the ability to understand the meaning of words that are pronounced differently. Cultural Barriers: Most people are very average listeners who have developed poor listening habits that are hard to shed and that act as a barrier to listening. Bad Listening Habits: Listening is not an inborn skill. People are not born good listeners. They have to develop the art of listening through practice & training. Lack of Training:

7. Overcoming Barriers to Listening: Lower barriers of physical reception Focus on speaker & analyze what you hear Be open minded Write Down Improve your memory

8. Strategies for Effective Listening: Be attentive. Ask Questions. Don’t interrupt Unnecessarily. Use body language. Empat h ize. Take Notes.

9. Listening in a Business Context: Effective Listening is one of the essential qualities of a successful manager. Good listening skill can help you locate job openings, farewell in job interviews & be selected for the job. Listening mistakes can lead costly errors such as retyping of important documents, rescheduling of important meetings. It can boost quality, profits and productivity, whereas poor listening has the exact opposite effect.

10. Listening to Customers: Organization today are beginning to recognize the importance of being customer oriented. Customer orientation means identifying and then satisfying customer needs, which in turn involves listening to what the customers really wants. A dissatisfied customer can create negative word-of-mouth publicity for your product & organization. Some approaches for handling customer complaints is listening to customers.

11. Listening to Employees: Top managers need to be open minded to the suggestions & complaints of employees. This will indicate that they are listening to the employees. Listening also means inviting suggestions & personal opinions of employees through consistent downward communication. Downward communication also includes performance appraisals. ⯍ A manager doing a performance review of subordinates should avoid doing a destructive review by criticizing the poor performance of the employees. ⯍ Manager should also practice “therapeutic listening” by counseling the employees on how to improve the performance.