Aligning #Communication and Building a Strong #Listening #Culture Through Listening Training with Laura Janusik

How do we develop a listening culture that helps us listen more effectively to create better relationships in our personal lives and at work? One way is through listening training using meta-cognitive strategies. Learning how to listen to our listening behaviors WHILE we are listening, so that we can grow and adjust for more impact.

Laura Janusik helps individuals and teams better align their communication through the Power of Listening. She is considered a worldwide expert in teaching and training listening based on her 20+ years of being a scholar, researcher, teacher, and trainer. She is currently helping leaders in the private industry as well as ICF certified coaches.

In this episode, Laura shares fascinating multicultural listening behaviors across the world and how this helps us lay the foundation to find common ground to understand each other, allowing for better communication. She also highlights that for change to happen and for diversity, equality, and inclusion to be truly felt, listening should be tied down to the organization’s bottom line because that’s when better results happen. She shares stories, research and strategies for leaders to develop a listening culture.

“The better relationships we have with people are developed through better listening.” – Laura Janusik 

 Listen IN Notes:

07:11 – Laura’s listening program: I’ve got 12 different chapters. And each chapter is based on research, and it targets a different area. 

09:39 – Fascinating perceptions on turn-taking and silence in other cultures

12:40 – The confusion that comes with intercultural communication behaviors

15:24 – Creating communication patterns that help us understand multicultural listening behaviors

17:32 – Important elements of listening: First, that listening is a habit. Second, a study found four dominant listening habits

19:13 – Explaining the four dominant listening habits: Connective, Reflective, Analytical, Conceptual

22:33 – The blindspot that opened up for Laura with her analytical listening habit

23:29 – Laura’s experience of the power of listening that had a huge impact on her

29:48 – Practicing listening in her work: working in leadership development with both individuals and leaders, or with leadership teams to develop listening cultures.

32:01 – Mindblowing listening experience: to see that other people could see different things and feel different things and understand different things while we were all looking in and experiencing something together. 

34:45 – Laura shows interest in doing research on the metacognitive listening strategies

39:49 – Leaders need to understand listening: One of the most important things to recognize is that perception is reality

41:31 – How leaders can support a listening environment: It really needs to come from the top down. Once we are better able to tie listening to the bottom line through the research, I think that we’ll see a lot more organizations wanting to become listening-centric or listening-focused.

43:39 – The challenges facing the diversity, equality and inclusivity (DEI) movement

46:18 – Goal of communication versus the goal of listening

48:56 – Message of inspiration from Laura: It’s never too late to become a better listener. 

Key Takeaways:

“That’s what gets really confusing with intercultural communication because we use our own norms to judge whether the other person. And we then make so many incorrect assumptions of what’s going on.” – Laura Janusik

“When you see how you’re listening, you recognize what your blind spots are, what you haven’t been listening for, and what you’ve been allowing to just strain through your strainer. And you begin to understand why other people on your team have very different interpretations than you do. Because they prefer a different listening habit.” – Laura Janusik

“The quality of listening determines the quality of relationships.” – Laura Janusik

“Whenever you’re going to change a culture of listening, you have to start at the top.” – Laura Janusik

“It’s irrelevant how good of a listener (leaders) think they are. Instead, we have to look at their direct reports and their colleagues, and how the leader is perceived by them, because that’s how they’re showing up as a listener.” – Laura Janusik

“I like to help leaders understand right off the bat HOW OTHERS perceive them is much more important than how they perceive themselves.” – Laura Janusik

Notes/Mentions:

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