Continuing our conversation around building rapport, improving your rapport-building skills provides an opportunity to build on your leadership skills.
Building rapport, which is really building a level of understanding and influence with other people, places you in the intersection between relationships and communication. Do not confuse building rapport with telling someone else all about you. Rapport is about finding connection. Connection requires both give and take, both sharing and listening.
That’s where empathic listening comes into play.
Empathic or Active listening drives better rapport. It focuses on a key rapport tenant – developing mutual trust. It leads others to release their emotions in a healthy way while encouraging new information to surface. And, it is conducive to sharing information and finding similarities and areas for collaboration.
Empathic Listening focuses on the receiving end of rapport building. It focuses on listening in a way that shows others they can trust you and they can respect you.
Empathic Listening: listening with empathy. Listening offers the ability to inject yourself into the personality of another person. It says, “I understand AND am not judging you”.
Here are four steps to learning empathic listening to include it in your leadership toolkit.
Don’t Interrupt.
Make space for them to talk, to delve, to access, and to release. Most people need a few minutes to warm up to the idea of sharing more deeply. Give them the time to work through the layers of memory and feeling, uninterrupted.
Ask Open-Ended questions.
Find natural breaks or ends of an idea, then, dig deeper into the experience with questions like: How did that happen? How did that feel? Tell me more.
Acknowledge the speaker.
Offer the speaker good Aizuchi. Aizuchi, a Japanese word, are interjections during a conversation that indicate to the speaker that the listener is paying attention or understands the speaker. Aizuchi are meant to reassure the speaker and show the listener’s active participation in a conversation or discussion for example: nodding along or softly expressing “Yeah, yeah”, “Yeah, ok”, “Got it”, “Yep”, “Uhuh”, or “Go on”.
Do not Judge.
Make them feel important and that you are not judging them. Create the feeling that you are moving forward together, side by side. Adjacent to and not across from is where understanding comes in and blossoms. Fight the urge to coach or to correct. Focus on absorbing and knowing that building rapport will augment influence and behavior change down the road.
Remember, when people can shed their emotions with an empathic listener, they often can also let up on their own need to be right! Remember, empathic listening is a learnable skill. With practice, you will feel the benefits of the increased influence that you demonstrate.
