Can You Hear Me Now? Good Listening Skills = Good Instructional Design.

When a recent storm left me without electricity for almost a full day, I was amazed at how quiet the house was without all the usual sounds that accompany modern, electrified life. The quiet also was an opportunity; it made it so much easier for me to focus during a face-to-face conversation.

This incident reminded me how distractions and poorly executed communication skills can take away from effective workplace interactions. I know from my own experiences as an instructional designer that being practiced in the art of listening is crucial for working with subject matter experts as well as when consulting with business leaders. The ability to truly listen and understand the message by employing active listening techniques makes for good working relationships and often keeps mistakes, misunderstandings, or missteps on a project to a minimum.

Read the rest of the post on the GP Strategies blog.

Creativity@Work: Idea Master Edward de Bono

“Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.” --Edward de Bono

Edward de Bono is one of the leading authorities in the field of lateral and creative thinking, treating thinking as a teachable skill to be enhanced and improved. de Bono has written over 70 books on the subject including Six Thinking Hats where he writes about the need to compartmentalize the various aspects of personality in order to analyze business problems and decisions. In the book, he separates these feelings into six thinking hats, allowing us to use each of the six areas to get a different perspective and to build more understanding of others’ perceptions.

Six hats are:

• White - considering purely what information is available, what are the facts?
• Red - instinctive gut reaction or statements of emotional feeling
• Black - logic applied to identifying problems or barriers, seeking mismatch
• Yellow - logic applied to identifying benefits, seeking harmony
• Green - statements of provocation and investigation, seeing where a thought goes
• Blue –the hat worn by those facilitating and directing the process

Six Thinking Hats provides a technique for looking at decision making from a number of different points of view, by allowing emotion and skepticism to be brought into purely rational decisions. This affords the opportunity for people to be more positive and creative.

Consider: how could putting on a different hat change your thinking?

For a good overview and examples of Six Thinking Hats in action, check out this post on MindTools.

Want more ideas to unleash Creativity@Work? For more information on how to get your copy of THE training guide to Creativity@Work, Growing Great Ideas: Unleashing More Creativity@Work, visit the E-book website. Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter or become a fan of my Facebook Creativity@Work page. I can also train you and your organization to be more creative and innovative at work. Email me for more information.

Go with the flow

Athletes and musicians know what the flow is. It is the point where you are absorbed totally in the moment, where your concentration on the task at hand is not only laser sharp but second nature, instinctual. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the father of positive psychology, studied the very nature of this experience, a depth of engagement and found it applied to across a spectrum of vocations.

As a trainer, I too have experienced being in that zone, in the flow state. When I am truly in the moment while I am teaching, I have what I can only describe as something akin to an out of body experience. My shoes no longer pinch my feet, my headache miraculously disappears, I am no longer hungry or tired… nothing matters except that point in time and my students.

Rapport is a many splendored thing

At a meeting yesterday, I was again struck by just how crucial it is to build a rapport with your training participants. Without that personal connection, a training session will often fall flat, no matter how high the level of expertise is on the part of the trainer, no matter how compelling the material.

Although most of my trainings are short, from a couple of hours to a day or two, one of my main objectives is to quickly build a personal connection with the people I train. How do I accomplish this so fast? One thing I do is to introduce myself on a first name basis as folks trickle in to the session. I also make myself a seating chart so I can connect a name and face easily (thank you, Dale Carnegie training). Third, I smile frequently and share some of my own foibles when working with the same subject matter we are currently learning.

I am asked at least once during a training how I am so good at remembering names and my answer is “its magic”. Then, since I am a trainer and teacher, I share my secrets.