Chapter 4: Effective Listening Are you a good listener?

Effective Listening in Organizations Listening to Customers Listening to Employees Listening to Supervisors Listening to Coworkers (listening creates community) – Comprehension – Therapeutic – Critical

Signs of Poor Listening Breaking the Chain of Command – Example page 104 Learning about events too late – Example page 105 Always putting out fires Information must be repeated Tasks given to others Increase in written communication Increase in poor listening habits – Page 106

Causes of Poor Listening Physical barriers Personal barriers – psychological distractions & attitudinal biases – Questions on page 108 Gender barriers – Take quiz on page 109 Semantic barriers – meaning of words

Improving Listening Skills Understand the stages: – Sensing- listeners select or ignore one or more stimuli – Interpreting- listeners assign meaning to the messages that they have seen, heard, and felt – Evaluating- think about the message, make more extensive inferences, evaluate and judge the speaker and the message – Responding stage – Memory stage- decide what parts to retain and store in memory Listen more each day Listen for key points

Payoffs of Effective Listening Discover the values, needs, expectations, and goals of others. Better management-employee relations. Better decisions are made in emergency situations. We learn from others’ experience.