The 3 Levels of Awareness

When you communicate a message to someone, three levels of awareness are at play at the same time:

• objective reality - what the person actually sees and hears happening
• interpretation - how they make sense of what they hear and see
• the individual - how they react to what they see and hear

Getting the message across depends on the level of awareness you have while you are in conversation.

Podio collaborative work platform reaches 200,000

Podio Reaches 200,000 Organisations

 
 

Collaborative work platform, Podio, empowers teams to get real work done on any device, from anywhere; New Podio Share feature promotes easier content sharing

Citrix, the new owners of Podio, announced more than 200,000 organisations globally have adopted Podio, a powerful collaboration platform that enables people to work the way they want to, cut down on email and free themselves from content chaos. Podio can be accessed on the web, iPad, iPhone and Android devices, providing organizations with greater flexibility and transparency than ever before.
Podio by the numbers

• Today, more than 2.5 million Podio apps from the podio App Market have been installed in Podio workspaces. Podio workspaces have reached 700,000.
• More than 300,000 Podio apps have been created from scratch or modified by Podio users using the simple Podio App Builder, representing as many unique ways of getting work done.
• Almost 50 percent of Podio workspaces are 'open' instead of 'private', meaning any employee within an organization can participate. The large numbers of open Podio workspaces validates the growing industry trend towards sharing and increasing transparency in the workplace via social technology.
• Podio users have created 80 percent more status messages in workspace activity streams than private messages, and 50 percent more openly shared tasks than private ones. The way Podio users collaborate and communicate using Podio aligns with the workshifting trend of collaborating through social business tools and moving away from traditional communication silos, such as email or privately delegated tasks.

Podio Share

Citrix also announced today an innovative new Podio feature enabling users to share content, app data and tasks from Podio with teammates, partners or customers outside a private Podio workspace. The Podio Share feature also enables sharing of select content with recipients that are not in the Podio environment without compromising content privacy. Podio Share extends the collaborative power of Podio to anyone, but lets teams stay in control of the content they share.

The 4 Principles of Good Listening

There are four underlying principles upon which good listening is based.  If these principles are adopted we immediately become better listeners.

Commitment
If we are committed to communication then the effectiveness of our listening increases.  A speaker may not have his/her thoughts properly ordered.  The committed listener uses techniques such as 'Summarising' to ensure clear communication. We must 'want' to listen and hear what is being communicated to us.

Interest
When we are interested in a person or subject, we listen closely.  The converse is also true.  A good listener is interested in the speaker and what they have to say. Show that you are listening.

Values
Personal values have direct impact on Listening. Do you believe people have a right to a different view?  Do you believe people have a right to be heard?  If the answer to both questions is 'Yes', you are more inclined to listen.  If the answer to either is 'No', then you are likely to interrupt or be distracted.

Confidence
Listening requires confidence because we feel the other person has control. We should feel confident when listening and show it in our responses.

Are you confident, interested, committed and believe in other people's right to be heard? If you are, you will continually improve as a listener.  Listening techniques are hollow and unconvincing if you have not adopted the underlying principles.