The business world is full of leadership training. And it's full of leaders put up on pedestals for others to worship. In reality, the world needs both leaders and followers. The most effective people are not leaders but listeners. They can make changes, operate efficiently and smoothly, lead when appropriate and follow when appropriate because they understand the people around them, the environment they are in and the value of both.
This cornerstone can actually be considered the bedrock and founding principle of Systemic Creative. The vast majority of most organisations' systems consists of people and so in order to engage effective systems thinking and creativity, one must listen to and really understand everyone involved. And that is getting harder and harder in today's world in which we are all bombarded by communications from all quarters - emails, social media, text messages, smartphones, smartwatches and even smart houses. Information is more abundant and omnipresent than ever before and yet true listening skills are becoming rarer and less used.
The staccato, 24 hours a day nature of modern communication pulls us toward a more superficial type of engagement in which subtle details and meaning are lost, leading to unnecessary friction, inefficiencies and sometimes crises. The working environment can often become more adversarial, and thus less productive, as a result. Yet listening, understanding and effective interpretation are often taken for granted as something everyone can do automatically. The cornerstone of Listenership is here to address this.
In the Listenership training course, we define what listenership is, why it is so important and what you need to do to get it right. We look at attention, bias, the myth of objectivity, the relationship between vulnerability and creativity, and the evolutionary nature of mutual structural coupling and what it means for the effectiveness of teams and organisations.
Working through these concepts helps to provide focus, empathy and genuine engagement in the working environment. People are happier, feel valued and engaged and work more effectively. Information flows efficiently and is communicated accurately. The organisation becomes more dynamic, productive and conscious.