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Listening for Employee Engagement: Going Deeper into Content + Emotion + Intention

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Are you picking up the full content, emotion, and intention communicated by employees?

Here are some terrific questions to help you go further into engaged listening for content, emotion, and intention.

Content (the content and context of the speaker):

  • What is the speaker saying?
  • What are the facts?
  • What are the inferences?
  • What does the person mean?
  • What is the speaker not saying?
  • How are they slanting what they say?
  • How much of their content is experience (what happens to them)?
  • How much of their content is behaviour (what they are doing)?
  • How might someone else say this?
  • How might they say this to someone else?
  • Is there conflict in the content?
  • What is the context of the communication?

Emotion (feeling and mood communicated in speaking):

  • How is the person communicating with me?
  • What is the emotion or emotions?
  • Do I sense a motion in the emotion?
  • Is the emotion stable or is it changing?
  • How comfortable is the person with their emotional expression?
  • At what level if the emotion guiding or governing the speaker?

Intention (stated or implied action):

  • Why is the person speaking with me?
  • What is my role in this listening encounter?
  • What is it that they want me to do?
  • How much of the intention is embedded in the emotion?
  • Is their intention stated?
  • Is their intention implied?
  • How does the intention change as I listen to the person?

David Zinger has a Master’s of Education degree. He specialized in counseling psychology and learned to fully listen and teaching engaged listening while teaching counseling psychology for 25 years. Hire David to speak at your organization or conference.

 

The engaged listening equation: Listening for employee engagement

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The Engaged Listener Equation

Introduction. Are you an engaged and engaging listener? Have you leveraged the power of listening to draw more engagement out of the people you work with? Here is a cogent formula to help you capitalize on the 3 main elements of engaged listening.

The equation. Listen for content, emotion, and intention.  This skill is based on your ability to hear what is being said and to find an engaging way to respond to what was said. The equation can be represented by the following formula:

Engaged Listening = Content + Emotion + Intention

                                            Listening x Responding

Content: What?

What is speaker saying and not saying? You listen to the actual words and ideas communicated by the person speaking.  You also listen and respond to the implied message in what the person is saying.  Remember there may be ambivalence and conflict in content communicated.

Emotion: How?

How is the speaker talking? What is the emotion behind the words? Identify and give words to the emotions communicated by the speaker.  The emotion may contradict the content.  The engaged listener has a rich emotional vocabulary.  This is not touchy-feely mushy stuff, rather emotions govern much of our behavior and actions. When you take the “e” off of the word emotion you have motion. Much of the speaker’s emotion is communicated nonverbally.  Listen carefully for the motion in emotion.  This gives you a strong clue to the speaker’s intentions.

Intention: Why?

Why is the speaker saying what they are saying? What is their intent? The engaged listener listens to what the speaker  intends to do about what they are saying. Intentions are the explicit or implicit goals embedded in what a person communicates to you.

Listening x Responding: Foundation of understanding engagement.

Listening is not a passive exercise.  Your effectiveness in listening is multiplied by your responding and demonstration of listening. We must go beyond seeking to understand to seeking to understand and demonstrate our understanding. The engaged listener responds frequently.  My rule of thumb is: I respond if I do not understand what the speaker is saying or if I believe the speaker does not know what she or he is saying.  I believe that engaged listening involves good dialogue not a monologue on the behalf of the speaker where the listener just keeps quietly nodding his or her head.

To read the first post in this series, 14 zingers for engaged  listening and employee engagement, click here.

Next Engaged Listening Post: 24 exceptional guidelines to bring out the depth of content, emotion, and intention in engaged listening.


David Zinger believes that engaged listening is one of our most powerful, potent, and basic tools to foster strong employee engagement. Hire David to listen for engagement and speak about engagement at your organization or next conference.