The Excellent Leader: Influence Using the Art of Observational Listening

Part one of a series of three books on Excellent leadership. This first part focusses on why Observational Listening is an excellent way to understanding the people you want to lead. Also why you should want to understand them better (the short answer: So you can influence them) and most importantly how to listen using this methodology.

This book will give you the tools that make your leadership more effective.

The Excellent Leader
Research reveals that employees are dissatisfied when there is too little pay, but the reverse is not true. Once sufficiently compensated, money hardly motivates and has little impact on wellbeing, which is the extent to which someone feels satisfied with their work life. For wellbeing in the workplace, individuals do better when they have:
Autonomy - the need to decide for yourself what to do and not feel pressured or forced to do something.
Mastery - the need to deal effectively with your environment and with the challenges the environment presents.
Connection is the need to build positive relationships and feel accepted and valued.
Although people differ in the extent to which they need each of these, it gives someone a sense of security and safety and increases an employee’s job happiness. Excellent leaders are mindful of these needs in both the employee and themselves and explore them together to better meet them.

The Excellent Leader also provides an in-depth overview of observational listening. Markus explains that listening with one’s brain differs from hearing, which is done with one’s ears. Observational listening means actively listening to what the team member has to say, observing them, and listening to what emotions are going on inside them. It means the leader imagines what it would be like if they were in the same situation as their team member.

Markus shares that by asking open-ended and follow-through questions, using attentive behavior such as humming and nodding, leveraging silences, giving a literal reflection or a reflection of emotion from time to time, paraphrasing, summarizing, and showing the leader is attentive to the story and the underlying emotions, the employee feels heard, seen and acknowledged. Additional benefits of observational listening include deepening listening comprehension, understanding the person behind the message, and achieving the desired depth in conversations almost effortlessly and more quickly.

Readers of The Excellent Leader will also learn how to enhance their conversation skills, focus their attention to promote psychological safety, and use questions as a powerful tool to gather information and steer the conversation in the right direction.

It is a must-read for any professional looking to become a better listener and leader, influence their team members, positively impact their wellbeing, provide them with the right attention, and turn situations around for the better.