Radical Candor CEO: Don’t Avoid The Tough Conversations
Selling With Stories
Strategic Listening: The Secret Weapon of World-Class Leaders
There are only two sides to a conversation: either you speak, or you listen.
Both are crucial, and you want to achieve excellence in both.
If I am honest, I used to be a terrible listener. For a long time, I fell into the trap of waiting for my turn to speak instead of listening to understand.
But I learnt this the hard way: You build your life and business one conversation at a time. And you can’t build deep relationships without truly listening.
And you build your life and business one conversation at a time.
As Kevin Kelly, the co-founder of Wired, put it: “Speak confidently as if you are right, but listen carefully as if you are wrong.”
It’s also necessary to understand the distinction between listening and hearing. Think of hearing as collecting data with your ears. Think of listening as the analysis that happens in your brain.
Hearing is passive. Listening is active.
Listening is the result of curiosity, a crucial trait for any problem-solving leader.
As leaders, we often talk about the 3 levels of listening:
“Me,” “You,” and “Us.”
"Me" Listening: You're waiting to speak, not listening to learn. This is the default mode of untrained listeners. It is bad, and we are good at noticing it.
"You" Listening:You're having a conversation, and you are present and intently focused. You're not waiting to speak, you're actively listening.
"Us" Listening: You're listening to understand, taking in non-verbal cues as well. You want to gauge how what is said affects your relationship.
But have you heard of the 4th level?
It is practiced by world-class leaders.
I call it Strategic Listening.
Here’s how you do it:
Impact on your team: You’re listening to understand not just the other person, but what it means for your team.
Impact on your organization: You’re gauging what the conversation says about your company.
Understanding a culture: Conversations help us develop a deeper understanding about the different cultures, backgrounds or generations we deal with as leaders.
The upshot: Every conversation helps us to understand not just the other person, but also to grow as leaders – if we apply Level 4 Strategic Listening.
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Radical Candor CEO: Don’t Avoid The Tough Conversations
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Positive feedback is easy. But if you’ve ever struggled with having tough conversations at work, this week’s episode of Speak Like a CEO is for you.
I’m joined by Jason Rosoff, CEO of Radical Candor, to discuss why radical candor – a balance of caring personally and challenging directly – is the key to creating a thriving workplace.
Jason shares how radical candor can prevent small issues from becoming big problems, create a feedback culture, and ultimately change your team’s dynamics for the better.
Tune in to learn how to be honest without destroying your relationships.
He shows that the basic principles of effective storytelling are universal, teachable, and more crucial than ever for business communication.
Jam-packed with Dicks’ own captivating stories, Stories Sell reveals the ingredients of a compelling story and demonstrates how they can be incorporated into persuasive marketing copy, face-to-face conversations, effective sales pitches, and presentations that people actually want to hear.
One of the best books on storytelling – hands down!
Have an inspired weekend,
Oliver
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