Listening is bright, preference is dark. An excellent leader must be a leader who is good at listening and asking questions. When subordinates report to you, the first thing you should do is to listen carefully. After listening, you need to ask questions about some incomplete details, and then listen and ask again until you understand the ins and outs of the matter. This is the most basic, common and effective communication skill, and it is also the key point in communication, because only by listening and asking questions can you understand why things happen. What is the reason for this result? So as to make corresponding decisions.

Classic case:

Kurt is the chairman and CEO of an international hotel group. He likes to walk around and often cruise his hotel, hoping to solve some grassroots problems.

On this day, he came to a branch and saw from the customer rating table that the waiter's service rating was not very high, so he found the manager of the hotel and asked where the problem was. The manager said, "We train waiters every month, but the turnover of waiters is too large to improve the service ..." Kurt listened patiently to the manager tell him some grievances and problems, and told each other in body language from time to time that he was very interested in his statement. After listening to the manager's statement, Kurt asked, "How much is the waiter's salary?" After getting the manager's answer, Kurt then asked, "Why is their treatment lower than the market standard?" The manager said, "It should be decided by the head office to give employees a raise …" After listening to the hotel manager's statement and his own questions, Kurt found three problems:

1. The manager didn't dare to ask his superiors for a raise, which shows that his superiors are not good at listening and asking questions.

2. The leader of the head office only saw the profit of this hotel, and found no problems, indicating that there is a lack of good communication between the head office and this hotel.

Kurt learned about the hotel's problems in a short time, made a decision immediately after returning to the head office, and soon the hotel's problems were solved.

In this case, we notice that Kurt is a leader who is very good at listening and asking questions. When the manager reported to him, he didn't interrupt the manager's narrative, but listened carefully, because he knew that if a leader interrupted his subordinates' narrative impatiently, it would definitely cause psychological panic to the other party, so that what the other party wanted to say didn't come out, resulting in incomplete information transmission. After listening to the manager's narrative, Kurt asked the manager some questions according to the content of the narrative. These problems are the key to solving the existing problems, because an excellent leader will always find out the direction from which the problems come, then ask questions and analyze the real causes of the problems.

It is in this cycle of listening and asking questions that Kurt found the problem and made the corresponding decision to solve the hotel problem. On the surface, Kurt just solved the existing problems. From a deeper perspective, he also solved many problems, such as telling the other party that as a leader, he is very willing to listen to the statement of his own problems, so that employees will be brave enough to make statements to the leaders, and tell the leaders within the organization when they find problems. Listening and asking questions is the fundamental way to solve the problems. Obviously, as a leader, Kurt has completely mastered the main points of communication, which is one of the factors that make him an excellent leader.