Building High Trust Leadership
Being a success manager, team leader, business department or specialist takes good leadership skills. And in today’s workplace, good leadership skills includes becoming a skilled communicator. Whether this is online, by email, telephone or face to face, clear, accurate and brief messages are essential.
For example:
- Setting goals and objectives for your colleagues and co-workers
- Influencing behaviour and standards through coaching and training
- Managing and engaging with stakeholders
- Getting buy-in to your ideas from others
- Negotiating solutions or outcomes
Three keys to becoming a better communicator
If you are looking to improve and increase your managing and leadership skills – here are just three suggestions that will impress others and improve your results:
- Listening – including picking up/sending signals
- Empathy – the ability to see things from another’s viewpoint
- Questioning – appropriate use of question types
As the Harvard Business Review points out:
“Questioning is a uniquely powerful tool for unlocking value in organizations: It spurs learning and the exchange of ideas, it fuels innovation and performance improvement, it builds rapport and trust among team members. And it can mitigate business risk by uncovering unforeseen pitfalls and hazards.”
Active listening
Active listening is not just hearing what others are saying but rather really trying to understand what it means. The act of listening involves complex affective, cognitive, and behavioural processes.
It can have a positive effect on the person taking as well including to greater trust, rapport and respect for the person listening.
A good leader must learn to listen. This includes the motivation to listen to others; cognitive processes include attending to, understanding, receiving, and interpreting content and relational messages; and behavioral processes include responding to others with verbal and nonverbal feedback.
What is empathy?
Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another’s position. Definitions of empathy encompass a broad range of emotional states
By combining good questioning skills, active listening and empathy, real leaders can create a solid foundation of trust before presenting their thoughts and ideas,
