Monday, June 25, 2012

Listening Skills: the most under-rated quality of a top performer

This article talks about truly listening to your business managers and shows specific examples of how listening to your business managers allows a CEO to make great business decisions. Even though, I do not run a Fortune 500 company I see the difference between talking and listening. Here is an example:

A small business owner comes in and talks about how they are not getting the results they thought they should be getting from their business. After talking to them for a short period of time, we come up with the real problem, they have been in business for a number of years, have been trying the same marketing and advertising strategy of only advertising in the phone book and have not seen the same results they were seeing only a few short years ago...Does this scenario sound familiar?! It seems like business owners fall into the same traps each of us do. When things are not working the way we would like them to work first we get mad then we get frustrated then we...Change (hopefully).

As a CPA I have learned a lot of things outside of school, but the most important thing no one taught me was  how to listen. If you are not listening to others you are missing out on one of the most important, cheapest and easiest tools at you disposal. If you want to be great at what you do, or truly improve your business you have to listen; to your workers, your board and most importantly to your customers. If you listen to them analyze what they are telling you and improve your system you will have a limitless potential for success.

Here is a link to the article on the Harvard Business Review blog. 

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