What do you value in a company? Why are you loyal to your favorite companies?
A common feature of successful businesses is active listening. They listen to their clients – and their employees listen to each other. When employees communicate well and participate in active listening in business, they build strong relationships that make their operations run efficiently and increase profits.
ACTIVE LISTENING COMES FROM OPENNESS TO CHANGE
To listen effectively, employees must be open to different perspectives and change. This involves more than just listening to words, but listening to people. Listening is an active, deliberate process. You listen to get to know someone or something better and show you care. Hearing is just your ears picking up sound waves.
Many business leaders are satisfied with their companies’ achievements and resist change because they don’t want to risk ruining a good thing. They may be missing out on fantastic innovations because they put their team’s ideas, concerns and perspectives on mute. Closing off communication impacts the entire organization by reducing cooperation within the team and decreasing productivity.
DEALING WITH RESISTANCE TO CHANGE
Effectively dealing with resistance to change from the top down can help your organization realize the value of each employee’s perspective.
The A-to-Z exercise seen in Learn2’s ‘Handle Resistance Naturally’ is a valuable tool that will help you identify constructive and destructive behaviors that are profitable and unprofitable to your organizational culture. It will also help participants learn to incorporate the values of their business into their roles.
LEARNINGS FROM HANDLE RESISTANCE NATURALLY
Participants learn five things in this exercise:
- How to be open to change
- How to identify the needs of clients and other employees
- How to engage clients and other employees
- How to set attainable business objectives
- How to leverage strengths instead of disputing weaknesses
After you complete this exercise, your ears will open to insights as you learn to actively listen in your business organization. If your team compiles this information about team behavior into lists, the manager and team can use them as job aids in the future to put them on track or stay there and get motivated to make changes in their business that lead to results.
Together, teams as small as ten members or largely staffed organizations can learn tools that will help them overcome resistance to change. We delivered this program to Cadbury with over 500 participants and condensed a major change in the company from eight months to eight weeks.
PROMOTE ACTIVE LISTENING AND ENGAGEMENT IN YOUR BUSINESS
When you listen to your team and open yourself up to changes in your business, you create a positive, cooperative work environment for your team that saves your business money and leads to progress and success.
