“I don’t know, what do you think?” Writing in the Harvard Business Review,  Melissa Daimler, head of Twitter’s Global Learning & Organizational Development team, says this is a question leaders should be unafraid to ask those who work with them. “But,” she warns, “it only works in an organization that values listening.”
 
In organizations that do leading edge work, Daimier says, there may be more than one right answer.  “You’ll only hear it if you listen,” she adds, reminding us that listening “can be a challenging skill to master.”
 
Twitter’s management development sessions highlight three levels of listening:
 

• Internal listening, focused on your own thoughts, worries, and priorities, even as you pretend you are listening to another person;

 

• Focused listening, where you are paying some attention to another person, but still missing the nuances;

 

• 360 listening, where the magic happens.
  

 
When you engage in 360 listening, Daimier says, ”You’re not only listening to what the person is saying, but how they’re saying it — and, even better, what they’re not saying, like when they get energized about certain topics or when they pause and talk around others. She adds that “listening creates spaciousness…” and the converse is also true: I listen more when I create space in my day…When I strategically create space on my calendar to reflect on a conversation and prepare for the next one, I can be more present for others.”
 
We want to hear: What percentage of your listening time do you think you devote to 360 listening. How do you think you can up this amount?  To join the conversation, click "comments" on our Community of Practice Forum.
 
If you would like to read more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our book: Be Quiet, Be Heard: The Paradox of Persuasion.

Millennials are now the largest generation in the workplace, and will represent nearly 75 percent of the work force by 2030. This influential cohort has some strongly held beliefs about how relationships between employers and employees should be structured. According to Forbes, research shows that Millennials:

• Have an entrepreneurial spirit. If you want to keep them from moving on, give them more challenging work to do.

 

• Want a boss who is a coach, and want to feel supported and valued by leadership.

 

• Prefer frequent check-ins to a formal annual review process.

 

• Value flexibility in job structure and measure success via output rather then time spent on a task.
  

 
What this all adds up to is that Millennials value a workplace that is collaborative and inclusive. Let’s hope that as more and more of them move into leadership positions, they will continue to hold these values and to implement them!
 
We want to hear: If you are a Millennial, what about your work culture is most important to you? If you manage Millennials, what are you doing to inspire them to remain loyal and stay productive? To join the conversation, click "comments" on our Community of Practice Forum.
 
If you would like to read more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our book: Be Quiet, Be Heard: The Paradox of Persuasion.

In a recent Ted talk, management theorist Simon Sinek shows how members of any type of organization prosper when leaders set a tone of trust and cooperation that lets people feel safe.
 
When leaders make the choice to put the safety of others in the organization first, remarkable things happen, says Sinek—citing as one example the story of a company that avoided layoffs after a financial setback by having each employee take a four-week unpaid furlough. Because everyone felt protected, employees immediately started trading—those who could afford to take more swapping time with those who could afford less. In the end, the company saved $20 million and retained every single worker.
 
When leaders find ways to make people feel valued and secure, the benefit they reap is that people genuinely want to follow them—rather than obey them out of fear. Every organization has heroes—and by making people feel trusted, respected and safe, you can be one.
 
We want to hear: Have you had a leader who made you feel safe, and what was your response? How do you make those you lead feel secure, and how do they respond? To join the conversation, click "comments" on our Community of Practice Forum.
 
If you would like to read more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our book: Be Quiet, Be Heard: The Paradox of Persuasion.

We’ve heard a lot lately about the power of stories, and about how the content of a good story stays with listeners more than any other type of information (e.g. facts, statistics, or even analogies). Now scientists are beginning to understand why.

 
According to a recent New York Times article, scientists recently mapped the experience of listening to podcasts, (specifically NPR’s “The Moth Radio Hour”) using a scanner to track brain activity. They laid out a detailed map of the brain as it absorbed and responded to each story: “Widely dispersed sensory, emotional and memory networks were humming, across both hemispheres of the brain; no story was ‘contained’ in any one part of the brain, as some textbooks have suggested.”

The researchers broke the stories into units of meaning—e.g. social elements, locations and emotions—and found that these concepts fell into 12 categories that tended to cause activation in the same parts of people’s brains at the same points throughout the stories. They then retested that model by seeing how it predicted M.R.I. activity while the volunteers listened to another Moth story. The “kaleidoscope of activation” explains why any of us can get so utterly entranced by a good tale that time flies as we listen to it—yet we remember it long after.

We want to hear: Have you ever felt completely engrossed when listening to a good story? Do you use stories in your business life, and do you have a favorite you’d like to share? To join the conversation, click "comments" on our Community of Practice Forum.
 
If you would like to read more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our book: Be Quiet, Be Heard: The Paradox of Persuasion