Running head: LEARNING ACTIVE LISTENING 1

Learning Active Listening

Robin Teegarden

PURDUE UNIVERSITY
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In this class focused on learning about active listening, I gained many skills that

will be useful for my career to become a more effective leader and team member. In this

class, topics that were discussed included collaborative leadership, oral communication,

motivational cues, understanding social and environmental context, all of which are

important to improving active listening skills. I have been applying active listening for

several years, but have not been able to fully describe or articulate the skills I have

been using. Now I understand that I have been employing many useful skills, but I also

realized that I have used some techniques that would more likely stop people from

talking with me than encouraging them. Because of this class, I have been able to

recognize some of the practices that I have employed that will interfere with or prevent

having the most effective conversations I can with people, both in my personal and

professional life. In addition, I had the opportunity to participate in role play exercises

which helped me understand my strengths and weaknesses as an active listener. I also

know now how to improve on these skills, drawing out more information from those to

whom I am speaking and having more meaningful and effective conversations. This

Leadership: Active Listening class has helped me become a better listener, and given

me more skills to help others, which is important in my career because I hope to lead

teams of designers, artists, programmers and entrepreneurs to create games.

Collaborative leadership is when people in lead positions take time to work with

their teams, working not only to craft a good work environment, but also to improve the

work of the team and themselves. I learned about collaborative leadership for the first

time in this class. I plan to improve my skills in this area in the future by working in

teams and to applying the skills we learned about in class; all of which inform

collaborative leadership. It is important to work with your team to learn about them,
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their strengths and weaknesses, and how everyone can bring the whole project to a

new level. Working to create a good work environment makes you more approachable

so that team members will come to you if problems or conflicts arise, or if they feel that

you have been disrespectful. If you address all these situations calmly and thank them

for bringing it up to you, you will gain the respect of those people which will help in

professional situations to improve the work and project results of a team. If someone

has a problem with an action that offends them, if the environment allows them to feel

comfortable enough to bring it up for discussion, this can help resolve issues and

improve the ability of the team to work. If issues about you are brought to your attention

and you work to change your behavior, you will earn the respect and trust of the team. I

think that it is important for me to improve my skills as a collaborative leader because I

plan to lead teams in the future to develop games. My strengths and areas of growth

are discussed below as each of these topics are important in being an effective

collaborative leader. I think that leading a team can be as educational as it can be

satisfying and rewarding because you can learn even more about and improve yourself

through leading (Shankman, Allen, & Haber-Curran, 2015).

Interpersonal skills are very important for leading, such as being able to talk to

others and relate to their experiences. This is the area where I had the greatest growth

during this class. I learned many skills related to this topic, particularly in the role play

exercises. The skills I learned and better developed during this class in the area of

interpersonal skills were validating the experiences of others, summarizing or

paraphrasing what they said, minimal encouragers, greater eye contact and asking

open ended question to bring out more information. Now that I am aware of these skills,

I plan to work to continue to improve these specific skills by practicing them in all my
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interpersonal interactions, including in teams. Being able to relate to others allows me

to have better, more meaningful, relationships and to better understand others. These

interpersonal skills also helps with resolving conflicts and understanding others which

contributes to effective leadership (Nichols, 2009).

Oral communication is also very important for effective leadership. Talking with

others allows one to build relationships in professional situations. Oral communication is

also very important in communicating ideas and concepts to others, such as in my

professional field of game design. I have adequate oral communication skills, but there

are some areas in which I need to improve. When giving presentations and during

discussions, I now am aware that I use many ‘filler’ words, and am working to reduce

them. Within the game design field, one must be aware of and understand the

terminology of several disparate fields, which is another element of oral communication

skills. Knowledge in these disparate fields will give me the ability to communicate across

these fields, thus helping me to create a better game with a team, and I still have much

to improve on in terms of learning key words in different fields in game. Thus, in this

class I learned new elements that are important to oral communication skills in teams or

for leaders, and have identified specific skills I will work to include in my future team

interactions (Nichols, 2009; Shankman et al., 2015).

Leaders need to be aware of the social context and environment within which

they working. By being aware of the social context, a leader can make informed

decisions when presented with information, and be able to handle the information

appropriately, such as being aware that someone wants to remain anonymous. By

paying attention to the social environment in a team, a leader knows when a conflict is
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taking place, and can properly handle the situation. My peers have told me in this class

that one of my strengths is being aware of social and environmental contexts. Using

awareness of the social context and environment allows a leader to know better how to

handle situations (Shankman et al., 2015).

Another important skill for a leader is to recognize internal and external

motivational cues and be able to utilize them to encourage peers to work effectively.

Motivation is what drives one to complete tasks and accomplish goals. External

motivation is when something requires you to complete a task, and this is usually

accompanied by a deadline. Internal motivation is when you are working to accomplish

something for yourself to gain a sense of satisfaction. I now understand what internal

and external motivation is, and an area of growth is that I need to work more to identify

what internally motivates team members with whom I am working. I think that a leader

needs to recognize what drives a person both internally and externally. If a leader can

harness someone’s internal motivation, they can encourage them to work much harder

than forcing them to work only through external motivation (Nichols, 2009).

An important skill for a leader is to be able to effectively build relationships. One

factor is that developing a set of shared values in a team or group helps build

relationships. I think that building relationships is one of my strengths because I can

craft a set of shared values effectively. By creating a shared set of values, you create a

shared set of ethics, which better helps define the actions of the team, and this

contributes to building better relationships in the team (Shankman et al., 2015).

Empathy is working to understand what others are feeling, and understanding

why they are feeling this way. I think that empathy is very important, and I think that
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being empathetic is one of my strengths. There are many reasons empathy is good to

use, especially when talking with others. For example, empathy allows one to avoid

interpersonal reactivity, or a negative reaction to something that one might say.

Interpersonal reactivity happens when someone reacts to feeling attacked or

discredited. Empathy also allows you to celebrate with your team members their

accomplishments (Nichols, 2009; Shankman et al., 2015).

To be an effective leader, you need to know yourself. By knowing yourself, you

can recognize your limitations and places that you need help to accomplish a task. This

allows you to improve, and allowing a better product to be created by a team. Although I

think I am somewhat in tune with myself, this is an area I can improve on to be a better

leader. To lead others effectively, knowing your limitations and where the team can

cover those limitations is key. Because members of the team can work in areas that you

cannot, and you recognize this, the team can create a better project (Shankman et al.,

2015).

Perspective taking is a very important skill to learn and practice as a leader

because this entails seeing the situation from someone else’s point of view which will

help inform actions and decisions of the team. To understand someone else’s

perspective, you need to understand how they see a situation, and what they are

feeling, among other things. To get them to talk to you about their feeling about the

situation you must show empathy and understanding, gaining their trust. This topic was

very informative for me, and I plan to work further to improve my skills to be aware of

others perspectives. Perspective taking gives leaders insight into the emotional
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perspective from which their team members view the situation so the leader can make

more informed decisions to help the team work better (Stone, Patton, & Heen, 2000).

One of the most important skills to practice as a leader is to be open to

differences of opinion within a group. This encourages people to come to you with

problems with both coworkers and with you, but to utilize this skill to its fullest you also

need to be able to communicate effectively. Communicating effectively allows you to

engage your peers and team in meaningful and constructive conversations.

Conversations and discussions happening between peers that are working together

create an open and sharing environment, allowing space for improvement and

collaboration. Without conversations, or when an environment of hostility is present

where arguments are prolific and there is little resolved, tensions can rise and team

members withdraw from the conversations. People withdrawing from teamwork causes

more tension, and the spiral perpetuates. In my interview with Dr. Whittinghill, I also

learned that this was an important area to work on for a leader. He said being open to

differences of opinion within a group was very important to understand and work on

because the team you work with will have a very different set of personalities. If you

can get them to work together, the end project will be better. I think that recognizing and

respecting differences is one of my strengths. If I were in a hostile workplace, I would

work to talk with everyone, getting to know them, work to understand the differences

and try to resolve tensions, and improve the teams work.

In the future I hope to use what I have learned in this class to improve my

leadership and active listening skills. In this class, I learned that I have used active

listening techniques in the past and have strengths in some of these, including empathy,
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recognizing differences, and understanding social and environmental contexts.

However, I learned I was also using some harmful practices when I was talking with

others, such as saying I understand, when I didn’t really understand, which caused

people to stop talking as openly with me. I also need to work to better acknowledge that

their experiences are different. In addition, I will work also work to summarize or

paraphrase what team mates said, improve eye contact and ask more open-ended

questions to encourage their conversation. I plan to integrate these skills to become a

better leader to prepare me to work in my professional field of game design where

working in teams is critical. Game design is a field that also requires very good

communication skills, and an understanding of the vocabulary, practices, and cultures of

many disparate fields of expertise. My goals for future growth and development are to

incorporate these skills to be able to lead a team effectively, be able to resolve conflicts

with no raised voices, and be trusted and respected by my peers for my skills, abilities,

and conscientiousness. My plan of action to meet these goals are to work hard with

teams, using skills that I have learned in this class, and building on them to further both

my skills and the project that I am working on at that time.

In conclusion, I have learned much about leadership and how important listening

is in leadership. Over the course of the semester, the people in the class I have worked

with have pointed out places that I could improve, such as keeping eye contact with the

person I am talking with, encouraging the people with whom I am talking too to talk

more, and validating their opinions. I recognize that my active listening skills have

greatly improved over the course of this class, but I also recognize that I have room to

improve and intend to actively incorporate what I have learned in order to improve my

collaborative leadership skills.

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Bibliography
Nichols, M. P. (2009). The Lost Art Of Listening (2nd ed.). New York, NY: The Guilford

Press.

Shankman, M. L., Allen, S. J., & Haber-Curran, P. (2015). Emotionally Intelligent

Leadership (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Stone, D., Patton, B., & Heen, S. (2000). Difficult Conversations (10th Anniv). New York,

NY: Penguin Books.