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Practice active listening to encourage the speaker to collaborate with you. This can foster a friendly attitude and promote discussions.
Active listening is fundamental for capturing business needs, requirements gathering, truly understanding stakeholder’s concerns (understanding what they truly need) and promotes easier collaboration.
Pay Close Attention
Non Verbal Cues That Show You Are Listening
Make sure to nod along, show that you are thinking about what is being talked about.
Withhold Judgment
First understand the problem and then make the right decision. Judgements not the way. Judgment only gets you so far in a professional setting, as conflicts will only damage your reputation.
Reflect
Reflect on what is said, write it down, criticize it and extract most important information.
Clarify
Try to ask questions regarding unknowns. It’s important that you understood the topic.
Any ambiguous statements amd decisions need to be ironed out.
Summarise
A summary at the end will not only solidify your information, but act as an informal approval that what you understood is correct.
Don’t worry if you don’t summarize it well, the other participants will jump in at this point and finish/correct for you.
Share
Coming back with Meeting Minutes is a great way to solidify in history any decisions made, any action points taken and all the information gathered.
Share with other participants, or even share with a bigger audience if your meeting minutes can be used as a training resource.
Some of the planned participants may not show up, so having a quick summary for them may end up being vital.