In organizations, while many do want to listen to each other, it is very easy to slip into giving advice in the heat of the moment, correcting and/or giving directives. With the multiple demands employees have on themselves, managing day-to-day, good communication skills, including effective listening, can often be pushed to the back burner. However, research has shown, time and again, that the skill of listening needs to be learned and mastered by each individual for them to be able to hone all of the other communication and interpersonal skills that help them succeed professionally and even personally. This paper takes a look at how to listen effectively.

Words which, I am sure, will take many of us back to our childhood and kindergarten classes (Figure 1), right? Right back to our teachers shouting and trying their best to get us to listen to their lessons and to their instructions. That we have to maintain silence in order to be able to listen is an age-old formula that we have always been taught and will continue to teach for generations to come... and rightly so too.

It cannot be just a coincidence that the words LISTEN and SILENT are anagrams, i.e., are made out of the same letters (Burley-Allen, 1995). It is therefore but natural that for us to learn how to LISTEN, one must learn to be SILENT first! Let us now understand what being SILENT means:

Soft Skills Journal, Silent, Listen