Empathetic listening.
Its Powerful Benefits and How to achieve these in our daily interactions.
Active Listening with empathy is the most effective form of listening. At its core, it is to try to understand others perspective and view of point.Empathetic Listening is critical to leadership effectiveness. The ability and willingness to listen with empathy is what sets a leader apart.
Benefits of Empathetic listening
1. Builds trust and respect.
2. Enables people to see reveal their emotions ( including tensions)
3. Facilitates openness of information sharing.
4. Creates an environment that encourages collaborative problem solving
With so many valuable benefits, it becomes truly important to develop listening with empathy.
4 Ways How Leaders can listen with more Empathy
1. Recognizing verbal, non verbal cues: Pay attention to tone, facial expression, body language. Rceive information through all senses. Sensitive leaders pay attention to what others are not saying, understand how others are feeling and acknowledge those feelings
Sample Phrases
“Thank you for sharing how you feel about the situation, it is important to understand where the team is coming from on the issue .”
“You seem excited ( upset) about this situation, and I would like to hear more about your perspective.
2. Processing : It involves understanding the message and keeping track of points of the conversation,
summarize points of agreement and disagreement, capture global themes and key messages.
Sample Phrases
“Here a couple of key points I heard from this meeting. “Here are our points of agreement and disagreement .Here are few more pieces of information we should gather.” Here are some suggested next steps- what do you think?”
3. Responding : Effective responders give replies through verbal acknowledgments, deep and clarifying questioning or paraphrasing, Important non verbal responses might be head nods, full engagement in the conversation and use of acknowledging phrases
Sample Phrases
” That is a great point.”
” That’s a fresh perspective, you inspired me in the process.”
4. Follow up : Follow up is an important step to showcase that true listening has occurred. Itcould be in the form of incorporating feedback and making changes, following through on promises made in meetings , or if not incorporating the feedback- explaining why they made their decisions.
In doing these we are able to recognize the multi- dimensionality of empathetic listening and act appropriately.
” If there is any great success in life, it lies in the abillity to get the other person’s point of view and to see things from that
person’s angle as well as from ones own
-Henry Ford.