Business Leverage: Learning To Listen

This is article 4 in the series of articles about applying the sort of leverage to your business that fuels exponential growth.

Learning to REALLY listen to your customers, your staff and your suppliers is a critical skill in business that cannot be emphasised enough.

Most people do not listen properly because their internal dialogue is running, they make assumptions about what the other person is saying and they are trying to control the conversation.  Listening is a skill that is very difficult to master, as I found out when I attended a personal leadership programme.

In most cases, we try to offer solutions too quickly without digging below the surface.  In business consulting, I was taught that ‘prescription without diagnosis is malpractice‘.

What would you think of your doctor if he prescribed the cure before carrying out a proper diagnosis?  Yet in our businesses we  do that every day.

We set up businesses without finding out what the market really wants, we don’t systematically have processes for listening to our customers, we make our sales presentation without first asking relevant questions and we are left wondering why the customers are not hammering down our doors for our products and services.

By listening superficially to our customers, we do not properly understand the problem.

For example, a business with a cash flow problem will not be fixed by lending it extra money – you need to understand why the problem arose in the first place and fix that, otherwise the business will have a similar problem but at a higher level.

The iceberg on the left symbolises why many businesses sink like the Titanic – they never saw what was lying just below the surface.

Here are some really good questions to ask when trying to get ‘below the surface’:

• could you elaborate on that for me?
• could you tell me more?
• why is that such an important issue for you?
• what would the effect of that be?
• would it be useful if …?
• in what other way could this help you

The skilled communicator is always working at these deeper levels – it never stops because peoples needs are constantly changing and evolving.

Renegade Professional, of which I am a member, is setting up a programme called ‘Coaching Cognition‘.  A key part of that training will include listening skills.  Why?  Because it’s absolutely fundamental to business success.

Finally, a poem called ‘Listen‘:

When I ask you to listen to me

And you start giving advice

You have not done what I asked.

When I ask you to listen to me

And you begin to tell me why I shouldn’t feel that way

You are trampling on my feelings.

When I ask you to listen to me

And you feel you have to do something to solve my problems

You have failed me, strange as it may seem.

When you do something for me that I can,

And need to do for myself

You contribute to my fear and weakness.

So please listen and just hear me

And if you want to talk,

Wait a minute for your turn

And I will listen to you.

If you would like me to help you with your web marketing then take a look at Web Marketing Machines.

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Tagged as: business coaching, business development, business leverage learning to listen, coaching, coaching skills, how to start a business, leverage, listening skills, personal leadership programme, web marketing machines