The Leadership Skill You’re Probably Overlooking: Active Listening

How good a listener are you?

The importance of active listening for business applications like customer success and customer experience management is clear: successful companies and executives are attuned to the needs and desires of what customers want. But there are simpler, day-to-day things like team meetings and one-on-one conversations through which the quality of the interactions has an enormous overall effect on important things like employee trust, productivity, corporate culture, and effectiveness of leadership.

Leaders are often poor listeners

Leaders are often the worst among us as listeners as they are so focused on driving growth, meeting numbers and deadlines, and asserting out authority that we often forget that our most valuable resource is our employees. That’s not just a cliché; Our employees usually have the deepest knowledge of our products, services, and customers. They often know more about how our organizations work than we do. They are the ones who can provide the context we need to actually meet our goals. But we can’t learn from them without listening.