How well do you listen? Take the "good listener" test. It could make you a better leader.

How the best leaders listen in order to inspire.
Some of the most inspiring leaders I have met are also the most skilled listeners I know.
They look at me in the eye. They make me feel like I am the only person that matters around them. They concentrate on my every word. They resist distractions around the room. They make notes and send the signal that what I am saying is noteworthy. They wait for me to finish, and never interrupt unless it is to clarify. They ask powerful questions and dig deep for my ideas and views. They emphasize with my views, even if they don’t agree. They make me feel understood. They disagree where appropriate, with respect, to stand up for what they believe. They take action based on our conversation, or they explain why they will not act. Either way the make me feel that they care about me, and that makes me care about meeting or exceeding their expectations.
It is no coincidence e that leaders who are great listeners are the ones who are most likely to be perceived as effective.
Research I recently commissioned from YouGov, the online research agency, among 4,000 managers and employees, showed that employees rated the ability to make staff feel cared for and respected as the single most important attribute in a manager. The managers we surveyed agreed.
One way to make employees feel cared for is by being a good listener. No surprise then that this is another top skill of managers highly valued by employees.
When asked how managers perform on both these attributes, however, views differ wildly. Managers (nine out of 10) believe they show they care, and are good listeners. Only four out of 10 employees agree, and one third actively disagree.
As a result of not being listened to, employee motivation levels and sense of engagement drop dramatically, as does their performance. They start doing what is necessary or what they are contractually obliged to, rather than giving their all. In the gap between doing only what they have to do and going the extra mile lays the difference between acceptable and exceptional performance. Not listening demotivates by reducing feelings of responsibility, control and importance.
The benefits of listening
Genuine listening generates respect, rapport and trust. Productivity is improved and problems solved more rapidly. Miscommunication and conflict uncovered quickly. People’s true motives, values and feelings are surfaced. Ideas and solutions are generated. Most importantly, genuine listening generates shares purpose, values, meaning and alignment – all key to effective teamwork and to high performance.
So, if you lead a team, how good are you as a listener?
Bad listening. Do you recognise any of the following traits?
•You tend to speak more than others.
•You interrupt, and believe this is a natural part of conversation.
•You come to conclusions quickly and form options before the speaker is finished.
•You get impatient and can’t wait to talk.
•You find yourself thinking about what you want to say instead of concentrating on what the speaker is saying.
•You are easily distracted.
•You make judgements about the speaker.
•You get angry when you hear things you don’t like and you show displeasure, especially at bad news.
If some – or even all – of these points ring true, then you are a non-listener, or at best a superficial listener. Beware! Not only are you likely to be a poor leader, you might even be disliked.
Marginal listener. Do you have these traits?
•You want to get to the bottom line quickly.
•You want facts rather than ideas.
•You’re not interested in how people feel, you just want to know what they’ve done.
•You often forget what people told you.
•You listen selectively, dipping in and out of attentiveness..
Beware! You may be a marginal listener. You will be missing a lot of the content and exposing yourself to huge misunderstandings. Worse still, the speaker may leave the room believing that he or she has been listened to and understood, while nothing could be further from eh truth.
Well intended listener. Do you exhibit these traits?
•You actively try to hear what the speaker is saying, but you don’t always try to understand.
•You are more interested in content than feelings.
•You don’t try to observe body language and facial expressions, and you stare into space while listening.
•You tend to listen without facial expression, remaining silent.
•You propose solutions as soon as the person is finished speaking.
Beware! You may fall into the trap of believing that you are a good listener, and that you understand the speaker’s message. The problem is that you may have missed important clues to what the speaker was really saying and will be puzzled as to why there appears to be little progress because of the conversation. The speaker could leave the room feeling that you have heard but not understood, and remain frustrated. Worse, if you have taken over by giving people solutions to problems when al they wanted was some coaching; they may now feel disempowered and demotivated.
Be a bad news junkie.
Poor listening is a common trait, and, the most dangerous consequence is that leaders are cut off from the information that could prevent a crisis or enable a breakthrough. In today’s world, it is essential that leaders create an environment in which people can bring them bad news very quickly. The faster bad news gets to you, the faster you can take action. However when you display your displeasure at bad news, people will soon stop bringing it to you and you will be cut off from the very things you need to know to do your job. Indeed without getting this constant stream of bad news quickly, you may soon be out of a job.
You have to make sure that you don’t only listen to those who agree with you. You have to actively seek out those whose opinions and thoughts are different to yours. You have go to those who will challenge you, stretch you and even discomfort you. It is often in this discomfort zone that you will make the biggest progress. And, sometimes, you simply have to listen in order to let people in.
To be a good listener, leaders have to have a rare mix of humility and confidence and curiosity. They must have the humility to admit that they do not have all the answers and are prepared to learn from others. To show that level of vulnerability requires confidence, and to be interested In people requires curiosity.
I have heard it said 85% of what we know we have learned through listening. In a typical day, we spend 45% of our time listening, 30% of our time talking, 16% reading and 9% writing. Listening is critical and yet less than 2% of the leaders I have interviewed said that they had had any formal learning to understand and improve listening skills and techniques.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-listening-leaders-more-inspirational-kevin-murray?trk=mp-reader-card

What leaders want from the leaders they hire

For my books on leadership, I have now been fortunate enough to interview 120 CEO’s. When I asked them about the most important skills of leadership, communication always featured as a top 3 skill.
Often, it was the second most important (behind strategic thinking) and sometimes the most important.
As you might imagine, I also always asked what else they were looking for in the leaders they hired in their own organizations. The answers were very consistent.
Most often mentioned, in order of priority, were:
•raw intellect and the ability to think strategically, and with clarity;
•the ability to choose the right people and then align them to a cause;
•the ability to inspire people and take them with you;
•a good communicator, a good listener;
•a strong sense of mission;
•integrity, authenticity, strong values, honesty, openness and curiosity;
•domain excellence (knowledge and experience of the business they lead); and of course,
•numeracy, and a focus on performance and results.
High on their list of desired skills and attributes are many of the same things wanted by followers: a future focus; strategic ability; a sense of mission; strong values; honesty; the ability to inspire; authenticity; integrity.
Authenticity came up a great deal. When I asked what it was and why it was necessary, here is what they said: ‘It is about being true to yourself. And true to others.’
To do this, they said you have to know your own strengths and weaknesses. You have to be clear about the beliefs that underpin your strengths. You must figure out your sense of purpose. Articulate all of the above. Only then can you talk from the heart and be true to yourself.
The leaders also said you cannot lead if you are not trusted, and people cannot trust you if they don’t know who you are, so you have to be visible – show up and be accessible. You have to talk about your values, you have to treat people with respect, as one adult to another, and be interested in them and always admit to mistakes or that you don’t know all the answers.
Most of all, you have to be a model of the behaviours you want. The signals you send in your body language, the way you dress, the look on your face, the policy you don’t enforce, all communicate more powerfully than the words you speak.
Language is a system, the CEOs said, and not just a set of words.
My research with them has been about trying to understand the system they used to be more inspiring, to engage employees, to enable people to super-perform.
The leaders I interviewed said that the purpose of leadership communication is to influence and inspire (in order to achieve great results). To do so requires you to deliver 12 key components of inspirational communication.
The 12 principles are:
1.Learn how to be yourself, better, and reveal more of yourself in the way you communicate, in order to build trust.
2.Give voice to a compelling purpose and a powerful set of values, to create a framework that enables empowerment, action and decision making.
3.Combine this with a vivid picture of the future, which you communicate relentlessly to drive behaviours in the present.
4.Keep your people focused on the key relationships that your organization depends on for success – especially customers; use those insights to drive change, and make building trust in those relationships a priority.
5.Make ‘engagement’ a strategic goal, and use powerful, courageous conversations to engage.
6.Become a fanatic about understanding audiences, before trying to communicate with them.
7.Listen in new and powerful ways, and learn to ask the right questions.
8.Prepare a potent point of view to communicate your messages.
9.Use more stories and anecdotes to inspire the right behaviours.
10.Be aware of the signals you send through your body language and your behaviours, which can overwhelm your words.
11.Prepare properly for every public platform, internal or external – your credibility is at stake.
12.Learn, rehearse, review, improve – humility is a major asset. Always strive to be a better communicator.
Above all, make the building and maintaining of trust a strategic goal.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-leaders-want-from-hire-kevin-murray?trk=mp-reader-card

The inspiration gap

New research reveals CEOs aren’t as compelling as they might think when communicating their vision to employees. 
The ability to inspire others is one of the most important skills of leadership.  Yet new research indicates that inspirational bosses are in short supply in the UK.  It also reveals that, although the vast majority of leaders appreciate that they are not perfect, they rate their ability to inspire more highly than employees do.
If companies want to improve productivity they need to focus their leadership development on helping managers at all levels to be more motivational.
I recently commissioned the online research agency YouGov to survey a nationally representative sample of more than 4,000 workers in Britain.  Results show that, among those who have a boss, one third of them (33%) rated their boss as uninspiring, with 12% rating them as “extremely uninspiring”. Only 21% rated their boss at the “excellent” end of the spectrum, with just 5% rating their boss as “extremely inspiring”.

Are bosses failing Britain?
The research also revealed inspiration hotspots and blackspots, depending on where you live – an inspiration postcode lottery.  Scotland appears to be a ‘blackspot’ of worker inspiration with the lowest national figure for people who feel their boss is “extremely inspiring” (2%) and the highest percentage of people who feel their boss is “extremely uninspiring” (16%).
On the other hand, London is a more promising place to work if you want to feel fully engaged with your career with 7% of employees claiming they find their bosses “extremely inspiring”, the highest figure in the country.
Significant variations in inspiration also appear across industries.  Employees from the media, marketing, advertising and public relations sector are most likely to rate their bosses as inspiring (31% rating 8 or higher on the scale), followed by those in the IT industry (28%).  It’s worse news for public sector leaders, with only 20% of employees in government rating their bosses as inspiring.
Meanwhile, two fifths of workers (40%) who work in travel and transport say their bosses are uninspiring (i.e. gave a rating of 1-4 on a scale of 1-10), suggesting they are the least engaged in the country.

How inspiring are you?
Altogether the findings indicate there is a significant need for leaders across the country to take action.  It boils down to how leaders communicate and the language they use to inspire those around them.
My research in this area has found that the most inspiring leaders have developed a lingua franca that involves using 12 principles of communication.  Using this as a framework, I have developed an online ‘inspiration quotient calculator’, which anyone can try, here: http://www.language ofleadersbook.com/thinking/
Already, leaders and aspiring leaders across the world have taken the test and have found that it not only highlights their strengths and weaknesses, but also offers relevant practical tips on areas where they can improve.
To measure the size improvement required, I included a question in the YouGov research which asked people to rate their boss’ ability to inspire on a scale of 1–10.  The results show that British workers gave their managers an average ‘inspiration quotient’ of less than 5.5

Intriguingly, when leaders were asked to rate themselves the average answer was 7.  From this it would seem that, although leaders know they need to improve, they feel their performance is 27% better than the performance reported by the people they manage.
The area in which managers feel least able to perform is on their ability to ‘engage’, scoring themselves very low against the comment ‘My leadership team are having enough meaningful conversations with our employees so they feel engaged, motivated and committed to what we are doing’.  This is clearly an important issue to address, as studies show that companies with high levels of engagement among employees outperform their competitors.
Engagement is achieved through conversations: structured, potent exchanges that allow employees to fully understand the big objective, and work out with their leaders what they have to do to help achieve the goals. It is in these conversations that the rubber hits the road, where the plan gets traction.
Too often, this is an area that’s neglected, and middle managers are neither trained for, nor measured on their ability to interact effectively. Worse still, top management doesn’t check on the quality of those conversations, or seek out their feedback in a systematic way.
Can you communicate a vision?
Surprisingly, leaders also judge themselves lowest on the ability to articulate an inspiring vision and deliver a clear future focus. Yet the ability to win people with an inspiring vision of the future is one of the most important attributes cited by employees.
The skill leaders feel they are best equipped for, is their ability to provide a point of view, scoring themselves highest against the comment ‘People in the organisation can look at me and say that I speak out strongly and clearly on the issues that are important to me and to our organisation’.  This is fantastic news.
However, for the best impact these ‘points of view’ should bring together the organisation’s purpose and values, as well as drawing attention to the benefits of doing things the leader’s way. These messages should call people to action, because a strong point of view is powerful.
I believe every leader has it in them to be a great deal more inspiring. To do this they must learn to listen more attentively, become a more proficient conversationalist, bring more of their personality to their leadership, be more audience-centric and learn how to tell stories. They also need to articulate a clear sense of purpose that provides a ‘true north’ for their leadership.
Contact
To find out how you or your leadership can put in place a systematic approach to deliver an inspiring vision and clear future focus for employees, Kevin Murray can be contacted at: kevin@kevinmurrayandco.com or 01491 825816.
First published through Criticaleye, The Community of Leaders.