Need for effective listening?

Need for effective listening?

March 23, 2011

We are passing through an age where dissemination of information is happening on a scale and at a rate never experienced before.

Gathering enough reliable information to enable one to arrive at a knowledgeable decision is becoming ever more difficult. We urgently need to reverse this trend. In the process, we need to deal with a number of fundamental questions: how to interpret the motivation that drives your personnel. How do you implement changes if you do not know what people deep down in the organization think and feel, if you do not know the reasons for their resistance to change? How can you get to find out about the opinions of teams spread across a wide geographical area without spending hours travelling and sitting in meetings? In short, how to listen to your collaborators effectively? It is a challenge trying to ascertain the opinions of people confronted head-on with problems, and to subsequently communicate them down-the-line. You need to find a way to garner information about the interaction amongst collaborators (“many to many”) and to pass this on to the parties that will be taking the decisions (many to one). Synthetron evolutionary chatstorm meetings are a way to engage the opinions of many people and gain instant valuable insights that matter for you from the people you want to reach. The Synthetron discussion platform meets the criteria for getting ideal feedback in real time, provided in interactive, written and conclusive discussions involving from 10 to as many as 1,000 participants. These “chatstorms” are anonymous and take typically one hour. Participants respond to a set of 5-7 clearly-drafted questions from a moderator and comment to the statements given by others, both through verbal comments and by evaluating them according to a fixed value-scale, all of this by using the convenience of their own PC. At the end, you have an instant list of top ideas and opinions: the real finger on the pulse of what people think and feel on the topic.

‘To get an excellent qualitative understanding of a company or a department, I know of nothing that outperforms Synthetron’, says Professor T. Compernolle, PhD. and executive coach. Some examples. Amongst others, HR managers (Human Resources) use it to research a great number of problems (diversity, stress plan, value creation, co-creation… etc.). Strategy managers will busy themselves with strategy roll-outs, project launch, stakeholder updating. Project managers, in turn, will address matters such as gauging satisfaction, checking marketing plans with sales, corporate culture, government proposals with citizens, Think-Tank panels, depending on the individual cases. Change managers will follow up on, and evaluate, new elements (agents of change, project groups, issues to precipitate changes), thus to understand what kinds of facilitators and obstacles are at work within the process. Conference planners use Synthetron to engage participants before the meeting. PR managers use it to engage many external participants. In short, there exist a great number of applications and, at every level, managers can readily adapt the particular attributes of the Synthetron system to suit their specific needs.

Source: Communication Business Solutions