What are some effective listening skills for team collaboration?

It is incredibly important to create dialogue as part of active listening. In practice, this may be best applied through direct questions that can help both the presenter of information and the recipient expand their mutual understanding of a certain topic or specific area of inquiry. For instance, if I presenter is talking about the general process for recruiting personnel and starts talking about criteria that hiring managers should look for, an active listener may ask about specific scenarios that they know of and try to do a litmus test of whether this scenario in the outcome is consistent with what the presenter is trying to achieve.

Critical listening is an important skill since there is an abundant amount of information that people share in presentations through verbal means supported by other mediums such as slide shows. The art of learning how to critically apply the ability to listen is fundamental and it goes beyond just trying to discern what is relevant or not, rather, it is about mentally structuring oneself in a way that enables us as the recipients of information to understand what our objective is by being present in the moment that somebody is sharing information, and what we hope to get out of it.

As part of becoming a great listener that is effective in taking information shared and applying it to a set of activities with intention of delivering a valuable outcome, is based on the preparation that the listener can muster prior to any information session. Preparation does not necessarily mean spending hours or days researching a topic, but rather gathering enough information that would enable the recipient of information to understand some basic concepts that can later be expanded on as the presentation evolves. Preparation is of course fundamental in any engagement, especially when the topic and hand is specialized or new to the recipient of information.