Team Communication: 20 Essential Aids

Be an Active Listener

The most effective communicators possess two key skills:

1. They ask good, open-ended questions.

2. They practice active listening.

We will get to open-ended questions in the next section. Here we will discuss how to be an active listener. As an active listener, you are fully engaged in the conversation with a teammate. Your goal is to understand the other person’s message in exactly the same way that they intended it. For team members, this is extremely important. If, for example, another member of the team is reporting on one of the project’s software vendors, you want to be sure to clearly understand the nature of the problem. It is very important to know if the problem is with the software itself or with our ability ...