Listen up! Your employees want you to hear this

"I'm listening" may have been the trademark words of Dr. Frasier Crane on the hit TV series "Frasier," but they may not always be the words that come out of a busy manager's mouth most days.

Most of us spend so much of the day trying to take care of the customer, order supplies, pay bills and develop our next marketing strategy that sometimes we wonder if we really communicated with anyone inside of our business.

Successful leadership can be measured in terms of effective communication. Whether through coaching, delegating, making decisions, hiring, counseling or building a team, effective communication is the essence of leadership.

Without good communication skills, managers often fail to gain commitment from employees, achieve business goals and develop rapport with the people on their team.

Managers can enhance their communication skills by committing to and practicing these five keys strategies.

Listening

Listening is especially important in three situations -- when emotions are high, in team situations and when employees are sharing ideas.

Extreme emotions, such as anger, excitement and resentment warrant attention for both personal and business reasons.

On a personal level, people feel acknowledged when others validate their feelings and from a business perspective, emotions can interfere with clear thinking.

Allowing the employee to be heard helps move them beyond the situation at hand and back to business.

Managers can develop stronger relationships with their employees by listening to their employees when emotions are high.

Listening is also important in team situations. These can involve multiple personalities, complex dynamics and competing agendas. Listening can help ensure that everyone is working toward the same goal, help to minimize conflicts and encourage employees to share their ideas.

Once a manager stops listening, employees stop being creative and managers may lose the employee's expertise within the workplace.

Facilitating

Facilitating goes beyond listening. You are actually leading the conversation.

Good facilitation consists of a continuous cycle of three steps:

1. Hearing what is said

2. Integrating it into the topic being discussed

3. Moving the conversation forward.

Good facilitation skills helps managers become leaders. They become able to gather everyone's comments but keep the group focused on the topic at hand.

Questioning

Questioning is how we get our information. There are different kinds of questions and they yield different kinds of results.

There are closed questions (yes/no answers) and open questions that elicit longer and more thoughtful responses.

Open questions give others the opportunity to provide information they have that helps leaders avoid making assumptions.

Personal questions have a special role in leadership. Appropriate personal questions can create a sense of camaraderie between employee and boss.

Discretion

Knowing when not to speak as a leader is just as important as speaking. Good leaders adopt a policy of discretion, if not confidentiality, with their employees.

Only after developing a sense of discretion will they develop the trust that is so vital to the productivity to the company.

To communicate that you can be trusted, tell employees you foster an open-door policy and live by it. Let them know they can come to you at any time and talk with you when needed. It reassures employees you will treat the conversation confidentially.

Employees doubt the discretion and leadership of any manager who talks behind employees' backs, gossips or shows favoritism. Those behaviors lead to a communication shutdown.

Directing

Directing is the last communication strategy and the one that should be used least often. Many managers use this technique because they feel it is the only way to get things done. It isn't.

The other techniques result in a spirit of cooperation and a friendlier environment. Directing does have its place, especially when setting broad strategic direction for the organization, in times of confusion or when efficiency is the most important goal.

Best companies encourage regular open communication with employees. Effective communication must be combined with fair policies, systems and management behavior to establish positive employee-organization relationships.

Ultimately, everything a company does communicates a message to its employees.

Mila Stahl is vice president and principal of the Human Resources Group, a Madison human resources consulting and recruiting firm.