Want to boost the effectiveness of your virtual communications? In episode 28 of our Virtual Leadership Development series - How to leverage Interpersonal Skills, we do a deep dive into the interpersonal skills we can leverage to achieve this. 

We are big fans of Human Synergistics’ Survival Simulation - Team Building series. One of the models used in the series Problem Solving is excellent for building problem-solving skills in Teams. However, working again with this recently, we discovered that the Interpersonal Skills defined in this model become even more relevant in helping us improve how we communicate and collaborate in virtual sessions. In short, the model focuses on four critical interpersonal skills: Listening, Supporting, Differing and Participating, to create greater acceptance.

We have already spoken at length about what we defined as Conscious Listening, and in this episode, we thought it worthwhile to take another look at it from the model's perspective. In this and the next three episodes in this series, we explore each skill from 2 perspectives, firstly the behaviour we observe in how we show up using the skill and secondly, the process we use in applying the skill. To make it even more practical, we also distinguish the behaviours in terms of what we want to see and what we would not like to see. As an example of the latter, we don’t like seeing people interrupting each other and having more than one conversation at a time, which online leads nowhere very fast.