Tag Archive for: listening

Why Introverts Make Powerful Leaders

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introvert leadersIntroverts are the folks who prefer to recharge their batteries alone rather than with other people. That isn’t to say they don’t like people — many introverts love working with others, but they also value their alone time. Sometimes, but not always, they may also have low self-confidence. They may not be able to see themselves in a leadership or administrative role. That’s where they’re wrong — introverts make some of the best leaders for several reasons.

What Is an Introvert?

An introvert is someone who may keep to themselves more often than not. They recharge their batteries by working and relaxing alone and may prefer small groups to large gatherings. However, being an introvert doesn’t mean someone is afraid of speaking or can’t step up to be a leader. Around 12% of people identify themselves as completely introverted, often drifting toward extroverted partners who likely can help them express themselves better.

Some traits commonly associated with introverted people include the following:

  • Quietness
  • Shyness
  • Thoughtfulness
  • Prefers privacy
  • Easily overstimulated

These traits are loosely related to introverts, meaning they may not fit every introverted person and might even relate to some extroverts. Many introverted people enjoy being around others and participating in social activities — they may just choose to take part on their own terms.

Introverts and extroverts have their places in business. However, workplaces with extroverted leaders yield 14% lower profits on average. While every person is different, introverts more often have traits that would make for exemplary leadership.

3 Stellar Traits of an Introvert Leader

Introverts often have traits that ensure they can lead teams well. Sometimes, the best leader isn’t an outgoing one who blazes the way — it’s the strong one who quietly reassures their team while supporting them from behind and picking them up when they fall. Strong leaders allow their employees to stand on their own without getting in the way of their successes, but they’re always there to provide guidance and offer a listening ear.

Many introverts are born with traits that naturally help them grow into better leaders than their peers. While some introverted people may not feel comfortable leading large groups, their quiet awareness and thoughtful decision-making can be vital to any team.

1. Expert Listening Skills

Many introverts prefer to listen over talk, participating more passively in conversations. Because they spend less time talking, they can study their conversational partners and pick up on small nuances, especially tone and body language, making them experts at listening to and reading people.

For example, something as simple as the pitch of someone’s voice can indicate whether they’re nervous or confident, something that people who aren’t as intuitive wouldn’t pick up on. Introverts might be able to identify these subtle changes in a person because their listening skills are often sublime.

2. Sincerity Above All

Extroverts can be genuine, too — they may find it easy to connect with other people and praise them for their exploits. However, you may be less likely to receive compliments from an introvert. Since introverted people often don’t talk as much as extroverts, going out of their way to compliment someone might mean much more than an extrovert who praises someone whenever they get the chance.

Around 96% of people feel praise makes them more productive, so an introverted leader who genuinely expresses their opinions is a must-have in any business. An introverted leader will assess the situation and praise anyone who deserves it — and they’ll be able to guide anyone who needs assistance.

Similarly, introverts will stand up for themselves. Introverted people may often come off as shy, but in a workplace, they can feel empowered to stand behind their decisions and won’t let people walk all over them. An introvert can exude confidence just as much as an extrovert, so employers can feel assured in enlisting an introvert in a leadership space.

3. More Creative Solutions

Extroverts and introverts can both be creative, but since introverts use self-reflection and think before acting, they have more time and opportunity to develop innovative solutions to tricky problems. When in business, you must understand situations from several angles. Having someone who considers every perspective is vital to the well-being of any company.

The best decision-making process relies on gathering the necessary information and sitting with it before making any conclusions too hastily. Many introverted people prefer to wait before making a decision and think over all the possible outcomes and variables so they understand the facts before making a decision. This person is valuable for any business, especially during times of crisis.

Introverts often use their intuition, leading them to success and practical decision-making. As a result, they’re more likely to realize when someone needs a little extra encouragement or just a friend to lean on. They’ll likely ensure everyone is involved in a project or feels appreciated in their team. That way, these leaders know everyone is included in a group.

How to Make Yourself a Better Leader

The good news is you don’t have to change yourself to become a better leader or pretend to be something you’re not. Both introverts and extroverts are valuable in leadership roles — as long as they demonstrate the right skills to prove they can support a team.

If you want to gain some of the most beneficial traits of a powerful leader, you’ll have to tap into yourself and learn how to reflect and listen more than you talk and act. Introverts make great leaders because they tend to solve problems more effectively, adding immense value to their company.

Here are some soft skills you should work on building if you want to succeed in a leadership role:

  • Active listening: To help others solve their problems
  • Critical thinking: To solve problems with your head instead of on impulse
  • Proper communication: To get across ideas and uplift others

You shouldn’t have to change who you are to fit any role. However, improving certain skills and learning different methods of problem-solving and communication can benefit you as you transition into a leadership position.

Introverts Are Some of the Best Employees to Have

Introverts tend to lean on the more intuitive and reflective side, making them an asset to any business, thanks to the skills they’ve honed in their interactions throughout the years. They’ll provide a fresh viewpoint and sage wisdom after thinking over certain possibilities. While some introverts might not have the best conversational skills, they’ll do their jobs to the best of their abilities and tackle new things that come their way.

However, both introverts and extroverts can make great employees. The best team members are well-rounded and demonstrate characteristics that will help a business flourish and positively affect company culture. One personality trait can’t guarantee a good leader, but it can help people understand where they’re lacking and how they can improve for the sake of their workplace.

By: Mia Barnes is a freelance writer and researcher who specializes in mental wellbeing and workplace wellness. Mia is also the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Body+Mind magazine, an online women’s health publication.

(The opinions and views of guest contributions are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com).

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Great Listening Is Still A Two-Way Conversation

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With more of our interactions than ever happening in a virtual meeting room, are you truly listening? And if you are, at what level are you listening, as a leader?

Empathetic listening is an essential component of influential leadership—it fosters better connections, supportive relationships and increased commitment.

Not only does listening require a willingness to listen, but also understanding of both the spoken and unspoken messages, as well as active engagement with the speaker’s opinions and ideas.

If you’ve made a practice of simply not speaking while listening, or parroting back the speaker’s points, it’s time to redefine what good listening looks like.

Listening in a Zoom Office World

Previously, our multi-tasking technology was one of the distractions that made listening more difficult in the workplace. Now, technology has become the workplace itself.

As we conduct most of our group conversations online, we are more inclined than ever to zone out, whilst active listening is even more important to meeting cohesion.

According to Sarah Gershman in Harvard Business Review, President of Green Room Speakers, within a virtual meeting, we are especially subject to the “Ringelmann effect” – the bigger the group for a task, the less responsibility each person feels in making the effort a success and the less personal effort each exerts.

While this effect occurs in an in-person meeting too, the online office amplifies the tendencies to tune out and talk over each other. Whether leading the meeting, one of many participants or engaged in a one-on-one, your quality of listening still matters.

Strategies for doing your part in creating meeting cohesion include:

  • Before signing in, consider what value your participation holds for you and the group.
  • Reiterate previous points before introducing a new topic so others know they were heard.
  • Listen for and see themes raised by multiple speakers, asking reflective questions.
  • Note down peripheral thoughts that pop into your head, bring your attention back.
  • If you get distracted, acknowledge you lost the thread with a clarifying question.
Good Listening = A Conversation That Elevates

In Harvard Business Review, co-researchers Jack Zenger (CEO) and Joseph Folkman (President) of Zenger/Folkman, assert that good listening is not what most people think: simply not talking over others, making affirming facial expressions and sounds, and repeating back what was heard.

While it’s also not a ping-pong of contrasting viewpoints or oneupmanship stories, zipping your lips is not the golden standard of listening.

Rather, the researchers found that great listening experiences feel like an elevating conversation. The best listeners are more like “trampolines” than “sponges.”

“They are someone you can bounce ideas off of — and rather than absorbing your ideas and energy, they amplify, energize, and clarify your thinking,” writes Zenger and Folkman. “They make you feel better not merely passively absorbing, but by actively supporting. This lets you gain energy and height, just like someone jumping on a trampoline.”

Qualities of a Good Listening Experience

The researchers found these core components of good listening experiences.

Good Listening:

  • Becomes a dialogue: Exceptional listeners comprehend the speaker so well they can ask occasional constructive questions that carefully challenge assumptions that expand the conversation. So rather than being a one-way interaction, the listener enables the speaker to explore and share more.
  • Is supportive, permissive and builds self-esteem: Neither passive nor critical listening is enough. When a listener creates an environment that is safe for open discussion, regardless of the issue or differences, the speaker gains confidence and feels supported and positive about the experience of being heard.
  • Is cooperative, not competitive: In the best conversations, neither speaker nor listener becomes defensive as the conversation flows, even when assumptions are challenged. But if the listener highjacks the conversation to focus on making their own points or winning an argument rather than supporting exploration of the speaker’s viewpoints, the connection unravels.
  • Opens up the conversation with suggestions: While people often feel they aren’t listened to when the listener jumps to fix their problem through suggestions, the researchers also found that exceptional listeners do make suggestions—skillfully—- that “opened up alternative paths to consider.”
Leveling Up as a Listener

A good listener doesn’t have an agenda—instead, park your own needs, wants and self-concept. Mistake one can be to self-identify as a good listener. Instead, take ‘yourself’ out of the way.

You can skill up by asking yourself these questions, related to levels of listening, which may also lay the trust foundation for making suggestions:

  • Are you creating a safe environment to bring up complex and emotional discussions?
  • Are you clearing away distractions to help bring your focused attention to the conversation?
  • Are you seeking to understand the substance of what is shared, and clarifying with the speaker to confirm that you do?
  • Are you listening to the 80% of communication that comes from nonverbal cues such as posture, facial expressions, eyes, gestures, breathing, energy, tone? (even more challenging over a screen)
  • Are you grasping the emotions and feelings at play from the speaker’s perspective, and are you acknowledging without judging and validating them with empathy?
  • If doing all of the above, are you able to ask the questions that clarify assumptions and help the speaker to consider the topic in a way that is expansive?
Extra Tips From Listening Leaders

According to Enterprisers Project on being a better listener, CEO Chris Kachris of InAccel suggests to take a page from reflective parenting: “Don’t try to reject or beautify their concerns, their stress, and their worries. Don’t try to convince about your opinion without first understanding their worries.”

Dr. Bahiyyah Moon, president and chief data officer of Polis Institute, advises, “The most important rule of listening is the 3-1 ratio. Listen three times longer than you talk. The next rule is to ask more than you respond. Typically people have a comment after another person speaks. Great leaders follow up with questions.”

Ed Jaffe, founder of Demo Solutions, shares, “It is not just listening, it is trying to see the problem from the side of someone else, and understand why they are saying it. You do not have to validate the idea, but you must validate the person.”

“Listening is the key to asking the right questions” says Nicki Gilmour, the head coach of Evolved People Coaching and Founder of theglasshammer.com. “Tuning in to people requires hearing not just the content of what they are saying, but listening for the meta messages of what is really going on to help people identify what really matters.”

Ultimately, leveling up your listening can only create better connections, and enable you to become a more empathetic and expansive leader.

By Aimee Hansen 

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You Might Not Be Having the Conversation You Think You are Having

Two Happy Business women outside the office talking to each other.

By Aimee Hansen

You’re not half as good at listening as you think you are.

What’s your first inclination? Dismiss the suggestion? Defend yourself? Conjure up anecdotes supporting just how attentive and caring and compassionate of a listener you truly are?

Would you be proving the accusation true? Most of us aren’t nearly as good of conversationalists as we perceive ourselves to be. In fact, some of the things we think make us great conversationalists might hinder our ability to listen to and support others.

In her book, “We Need to Talk: How To Have Conversations that Matter,” award-winning journalist and author Celeste Headlee, asserts that “conversation may be one of the most fundamental skills we can learn and improve upon.”

Bad communication not only harms our ability to relate to each other. It’s also expensive for business. Cognisco has found that poor communications cost business $37 billion a year.

While good communication, Headlee points out, is profitable: “Companies with leaders who are great communicators have nearly 50 percent higher returns than companies with unexceptional communicators at the helm.”

Here’s a touch of what she highlights in her collection of studies and work and why it matters for relationships of all sorts:

Five ways you might be compromising conversation:

1) You’re not actually having conversations.

Given the choice, over 65% of JPMorgan Chase employees dumped their voice mail in 2015. In 2014, only 6% of Coco-Cola employees kept theirs.

While we’ve culturally shifted to text and e-mails for reasons ranging from speed to control to record-keeping to habit, Headlee writes that research has shown “we are more likely to get our message across through conversation – either in person or on the phone – than we are using a written message.” A 2012 McKinsey study showed that a more selective and intentional use of e-mail would increase productivity by up to 30 percent.

Research summation across 73 studies found that empathy has been in decline over the past thirty years, but especially since 2000. Sitting in front of someone, or hearing the subtle intonations in his or her voice, can build empathy and understanding in a way that bridges gaps and “connects” us again as human beings.

2) You’re keeping your device at the ready.

It turns out that even having a phone on the table during a conversation – regardless of whether you ignore it – has a negative impact on the perception of the connection shared. A British study paired strangers at a table to chat, half the time placing a phone on a nearby table and half the time not. The researchers found that when a cell phone was present in the room (without being touched by either party), the participants reported a lower quality of connection, as well as lower empathy and trust levels for their conversation partner.

We are increasingly lacking real presence in conversations, which mindfulness practices helps us to address.

3) You’re banking on your intellect.

Headlee shares that being smart and articulate doesn’t make you a good conversationalist. In fact, “the smarter you are, the worse you may be.”

“I thought that because I was articulate, I was also good in conversations. But that’s absolutely not true,” Headlee writes. “Being a good talker doesn’t make you a good listener, and being smart might make you a terrible listener.” In fact, it does make you more susceptible to bias.

Headlee says we often fall into what Daniel Kahneman, author of “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, calls System 1 thinking, which is “quick, intuitive, and relies heavily on patterns we’ve learned after years of experience”. It simplifies by relying on assumptions or mental short-cuts, but short-cuts aren’t always right and are often more emotionally reactive than we realize.

She also points out that “a good conversation requires its participants to use their IQ and their EQ.” Too often we meet vulnerability of emotional sharing with a rational response, which does nothing to support someone who is sharing feelings.

Headlee gives the example of a person sharing vulnerably about his pending divorce and you throw out data on the percentage of marriages that end in divorce in an attempt to suggest it’s normal and okay. It doesn’t help provide the emotional support requested.

“Approaching emotional problems with logic is a strategy that is doomed to failure,” Headlee writes. Assuming you get it without really listening can be another.

4) You’re not transparent in expectations.

One of Headlee’s tips is to “explain what you want and what you expect, and be honest.” She asserts that it puts the other person at more ease when we are transparent about what we hope for from a discussion – and it makes you get clearer on that yourself.

She gives this example from her experience: “I’ve called you in to give you an official reprimand. But that’s as severe as this gets. You’re in no danger of being fired. I want to start this discussion by saying how valuable you are to me and the company. My goal is to help you succeed and make you aware of some issues that might be holding you back.”

It’s also important to be transparent with yourself about your own feelings, before you go into conversation, checking in on what you’re really bringing into the talk.

5) You are dropping out at the first hint of disagreement.

“What bothers me is that we don’t talk to each other but at each other,” writes Headlee. “and we usually don’t listen.”

Western countries are becoming unreadily polarized. A 2016 study found that “most Americans now believe people who disagree with one another demonize one another so aggressively that it’s impossible to find common ground.”

This is exasperated by the “halo and horns effect”, she writes: When we approve of one thing about a person, we generally judge everything about them more positively. When we disapprove of something particular, we’re more likely to judge them negatively in many other ways. We all make incorrect assumptions due to bias.

We are less and less willing to connect with people we disagree with, but Headlee asserts, “the need to have difficult conversations has never been greater” and on top of that, “there is no topic so volatile that it can’t be spoken of.”

“Listening to someone doesn’t mean agreeing with them,” she writes. “The purpose of listening is to understand, not to endorse.”

Despite different opinions, we need to bridge through our humanity, being able to empathize with the other person, including cultivating the ability “to see other individuals who face daily challenges that are equal to mine”.

Disagreement can’t be the end of discussion. It needs to be a basis for it.

“It only takes one good conversation to change your understanding of someone else’s world, your world and the world at large,” writes Headlee.

What Makes for Good Conversation?

Headlee raises ten strategies for sharing better conversations, and they all involve taking stock of your role in co-creating the conversation.

One example is becoming aware of our habitual compassion to switch the conversation back into our control and make it about ourselves, even when it seems like we’re “listening” – what Sociologist Charles Derber calls “conversational narcissism”.

In the Huffington Post, Headlee shares how she attempted to comfort a grieving friend by sharing in the experience of losing a father, but actually what she achieved was to turn the conversation around to herself in a way that made her more comfortable with the topic area and detracted from her friend’s pain and need for support in her grief.

Rather than support what the person is saying to us by seeking more insight into their experience, we’ll often shift and relate it back to our own. Because our minds seek convergent information, we’ll scan and find an experience that’s comparable and begin to mentally overlay that on rather than simply listen, which also means we may distort what is being shared with us.

Another behavior we can become aware of is unnecessary and harmful repetition, especially when it comes to negative feedback. Headlee points out that the chances of remembering something increases for you when you repeat it, but not necessarily for the listener. It usually just serves to create aggravation and can even prompt people to lessen their attention.
Those are just a couple examples of many ways we can improve our conversation skills in a profound way.

Overall, thinking we are great listeners or conversationalists doesn’t at all mean we are.

Like many things, however, we can train ourselves to improve through awareness, and dramatically elevate the true quality and effectiveness of the conversations we share.

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