Perhaps at no time in modern business history have excellent listening skills been more needed and the lack of them more costly.
Mandel Communications, the global leader in technology-driven communication skills training, is pleased to announce the launch of The Listening Edge™ workshop. This much-needed innovation is a neuroscience-based training solution, blended with a validated scientific personal listening assessment to expedite learning and skills application back on the job.
“Listening has long been recognized as a critically weak element in the human communication equation. Yet until now, business enterprises have not had a science-backed, effective solution for developing and scaling effective listening skills throughout their organizations. By default, business leaders have had to learn to live with the extraordinary costs of a huge error rate in their organizations’ human communications processes,” says Ed Musselwhite, Mandel’s CEO.
Business enterprises drain out massive amounts of money each year because of inadequate human-to-human communications. Using recognized estimates as low as $11,000 per employee per year, a mid-sized Fortune 1,000 company with 10,000 people loses $110,000,000 per year at least.
Though listening represents over half of the human communication equation, the vast majority of current communications training focuses only on the speaking activity. With the advent of Mandel’s The Listening Edge, business organizations now are able to improve both the input and output, i.e., both the give and the take, of human communications and eliminate remarkable amounts of wasted effort, time and money now caused by poor listening.
Through her research, Dana Dupuis, Mandel’s Executive Director of Research & Development, Listening Science, has emphasized the fact that listening is a brain-based function, rather than an ear function as so often envisioned.
“No two brains are alike—which means no two people hear things exactly the same way,” says Dupuis. “That’s why ten talented people can leave the same meeting with quite different perceptions and remembrances of what was communicated.
“Each of us has developed in our lives unique habits and preferences in our listening that allow some types of information to have quick and full access to our thinking, while we tend to naturally filter out or dim down other types of information that could be vital in that moment. Once we become aware of our own individually unique filters and listening gaps, we can learn to listen for, recognize and gain full value from an expanded range of input. Additionally, we can learn how to speak into other people’s listening preferences, increasing the chance that they will hear the full value of what we are trying to communicate to them.
“This ability to listen more fully and be heard more fully is what we call Listening Intelligence.” When carefully developed within an organization, employees learn to utilize and appreciate diverse thinking by calling upon the cognitive diversity of its members.
Mandel teaches people to strengthen their Listening Intelligence and use it every day at work and at home.
Integral to The Listening Edge training is an innovative cognitive-based personal listening assessment, which is scientifically grounded in research and validated, and is the first of its kind. This assessment is a powerful tool for building the foundation for Listening Intelligence skills.
These skills have extensive applications in developing leaders; training sales professionals; improving the interpersonal, collaborative and decision-making health of teams; and accelerating an organization’s cultural change by encouraging mutual understanding, inclusion and diversity.
Available as a virtual workshop, or as an in-person workshop experience, this training solution is designed to be delivered globally where needed.
With this major move into listening science, Mandel expands its expertise into the three essential communication capabilities: improving how people listen, think and speak.
This groundbreaking advancement for human communications training makes Mandel the only skills building provider to organizations with proven solutions to address the three most critical communication scenarios: presentation skills, conversation skills and listening skills.
Learn more in this introductory video, featuring Dana Dupuis, Mandel’s Executive Director, R&D, Listening Science.
