Are you listening?

Editor’s note: Michelle Stockman is an independent consultant with her company, Fort Smith-based Msaada Group. Stockman earned a bachelor’s degree from Loyola University-Chicago in communications and fine arts, and earned a master’s in entrepreneurship from Western Carolina University. Her thoughts on business success appear each week on The City Wire.

Entrepreneurs often seem like live super heroes. They work tirelessly on starting and growing their businesses, multi-task with super human strength and carry their business world on their shoulders. They are business men and women who only take yes as the answer, plan their way through marketing and balance their spreadsheets with each breath.

Entrepreneurs are leaders who are often pushed to be assertive or aggressive to ensure the business stays alive. However, we seldom talk about how entrepreneurs also need to be good listeners. In all the madness of selling, hiring, managing and balancing, listening is a key skill to practice in all areas of the business.

Why would an energetic, go-getter entrepreneur want to stop and listen? For starters, listening allows the business owner to gain valuable information. Listening to customers helps you modify the product or service to make it better and more attractive to others. Listening to potential customers will give you valuable information on how to close the deal with them or get them to take a sales action.

Listening to your accountants will help you put the right tax saving measures in place at the start of the year over desperately seeking ways to cut tax liabilities at the end of the year.

Listening to your employees will help you improve business processes which often turn into cash savings.

Listening to your family helps you maintain a sane work/life balance.

Listen to your lawyers, and you are likely to stay out of court longer and listening to business advisors will help you maintain your focus to work smarter.

Listening does have a great amount of value. It is the number one communications tool you can use, and it doesn’t cost you anything. If listening is so great, why do we all struggle to engage in listening that produces positive results? To start, people have different communications styles that range from aggressive to passive. Obviously, each extreme will yield unfortunate results. Somewhere in the middle is an assertive communications style that emphasizes listening and appropriate responses.

A good listener is simply someone who remains quite while another person is talking. Listening is hearing another person talking, taking the time to respond after the sharing is finished, gleaning additional information to ensure the listener understands and summarizing what was heard to make sure both parties have the same understanding of what is being said. Good listening engages positive body language and focus on the one speaking.

In this age of constant distractions, engaging in active listening is a skill worth working toward. Active listening involves looking at the person speaking, maintaining good posture, keeping an open gesture and jotting down occasional notes. Asking the speaker open ended questions (those questions that require more than a yes or no answer) and summarizing the context of the discussion engage you as a listener and help you tune in to key words or phrases that may have gotten lost in the conversation if one was thinking about the time, other tasks, playing with your smart phone, thinking about emails and so forth.

It may be your nature to jump in a conversation to share your ideas, ideals or your perception of a given situation. However, if you stop to hear the full thought of the person talking to you, verify what you heard and summarize what if any response is needed by you, imagine how your relationships will change. This is a tough skill for entrepreneurs to learn, because their attention is needed in many different areas of the business. However, this skill can save time, money and frustration not only to the entrepreneur, but to all of us.

Ask any lawyer or mediation professional what could change most of their cases, and they would answer good communication skills where both parties listened to each other.

In this day of getting tasks done faster, it is ironic that slowing down to listen can in fact speed your work up.

Feedback
Stockman can be reached at [email protected]