Strategic Listening - How Managers, Coworkers, and Organizations Can Become Better at Listening

Listening has many positive effects for organizations. The listening increases trust, commitment, job satisfaction among many other things. Despite the positive impact and that organizations have more communication channels than ever before, too little time is spent listening to customers, employees, and significant other stakeholders. How can it be so? The simple answer is that it is difficult, but it is possible to get better at it, both as an organization and as an employee. Organizations need to manage listening as a strategic issue to be able to exploit this great potential. At the same time as managers and employees need to be made aware of the importance of listening and practice it. Listening is an aspect of communication that has received much attention the last couple of years, and the pandemic made the importance of listening in organizations even more important. In communication between humans, listening is a particularly important part of creating and maintaining good relationships, trust, and psychological safety. Research shows that when managers are bad at listening, it can lead to higher turnover, burnout, dissatisfaction, and low commitment among employees. Listening to customers is another aspect that also has got more attention both in practice and research. The main aim of the book is to increase knowledge about listening and help organizations and individuals become better at strategic listening. And through this, contribute to strengthening the listening skills of organizations and individuals. The book provides both theoretical explanations and practical tools, and in the last chapter the authors present their model of how organizations can work more systematically with listening.