Influence Through the Art of Observational Listening - Part 2: Emotions – the Link to Excellent Communication
by Markus van Alphen
This is part two of a series of three books on excellent leadership.
The Excellent Leader, the first part, is about why observational listening is an excellent way to understand the people you lead. Also why you might want to understand them better (the short answer: so you can influence) and, above all, how to listen with this methodology. The Excellent Leader contains chapters 1 to 6.
The More Excellent Leader (this second part) goes even deeper into emotions and how to recognize and use them in your leadership. It takes observational listening a level deeper. So this book gives you more tools to make your leadership even more effective.
The third part, The Most Excellent Leader, completes your knowledge and skills by focusing on specific types of conversation (chapters 14 to 20).
The More Excellent Leader
In The More Excellent Leader, Markus starts with a Dynamic Triangle Model - Situation-Emotion-Behavior, which shows how emotions, thoughts, and behaviors influence each other. Emotions generally lead people in making decisions and in their behavior, not knowledge. An external event triggers a bodily reaction via the senses in an interaction with memory, causing the individual to experience an emotion, the brain processes that emotion, and then the individual acts according to the interpretation of that emotion. Based on this model, leaders who want to intervene to influence their employees can either change the situation or influence the employee’s behavior by considering their emotions. In other words, this book teaches its readers emotional intelligence.
In The More Excellent Leader, Markus addresses how excellent leaders keep a close eye on the theme of avoidance and fear to ensure that the other person addresses important issues correctly. The excellent leader also distinguishes between shame and guilt and responds correctly and recognizes the defense mechanisms: attack the other person, attack oneself, remove oneself, or avoid interactions with and between employees. They provide insights on how and why territory and fear lead to anger and how the more vulnerable the area where someone feels threatened, the more intense the reaction a leader may expect.
The More Excellent Leader covers burnout, engagement, workaholism, and the impact of good leadership, which ensures the right level of work demands and sufficient energy resources which is conducive to enlarging the psychological capital of the employee. Markus shares how leaders can retain engaged employees.
Conversational skills play a critical role in shaping good leadership. Markus helps leaders use their knowledge of emotion to effectively handle more difficult discussions. He provides insights on how to make employees’ perceptions discussable, respectfully combat their quirks, and deal with less functional communication patterns. He explains the sources of resistance and aggressive behavior and provides the knowledge and skills to leaders to effectively deal with them.
The More Excellent Leader teaches leaders how to empower employees so that they can take charge of their own work lives. Markus shares how empathy is the foundation for observational listening and teaches leaders how to increase their empathic ability. He highlights that to build credibility with employees, the most important element for a leader is their attitude. Leaders can use employees’ perceptions for influence.
The More Excellent Leader is a must-read for leaders wanting a deeper look at observational listening and how to recognize team members’ emotions. It deepens leaders’ understanding of what drives behavior and makes others tick, and helps them know how to motivate and further influence others effortlessly, whether it be an individual or a team.
Books on how to become an ever more excellent leader
Renowned leadership psychologist and author of more than 15 books in Dutch and English, Markus van Alphen developed the Observational Listening concept in 2014. Observational Listening goes a step further than active listening in understanding what an individual has to say. By observing them, and understanding what emotions are going on inside and using your empathic capabilities, you come to a deeper understanding. If a leader is attentive to the story and the underlying emotions, the other feels heard, seen, acknowledged and psychologically safe, resulting in increased happiness, motivation, and success. For his firm, The Excellent Organization, Markus helps leaders and individuals worldwide increase workplace and personal relationship effectiveness, transform their environments, and succeed. As a restorative practitioner, he also is called in to resolve incidents and initiate the process of conflict resolution, as well as train others to implement the restorative approach. In addition, Markus is a trainer, lecturer, and curriculum developer for undergraduate and postgraduate psychology and counseling students at various colleges and universities across the Netherlands. Markus began his career as an engineer for utilities providers and software companies. After two decades in the field, he realized the impact individual characteristics and interpersonal interactions have on people's work and lives, which led him to pursue psychology. He holds a master’s degree in psychology from the University of Amsterdam and a degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering that he received from the University of Cape Town.
