How To Listen Like A Leader

Entrepreneur, Coach and Mother, after nearly 2 decades of professional performance internationally, Emmanuella founded Find Your Voice; a company of Voice and Performance consultants who are also professional performers in the arts. She holds a Masters in Music Performance Teaching (University of Melbourne), Postgraduate Diploma in Psychology (UNE), Honors Bachelor of Music (Kingston University, London), Undergraduate studies in Music Theatre (Griffith University Brisbane). She has been engaged as a performance expert and vocal coach to high profile individuals in leadership worldwide and served on a number of boards including Australian Society of Performing Arts Healthcare (ASPAH).

- Emmanuella Grace

As a voice and performance coach, a large part of my job is training people to speak up, even in situations where they feel pressure, anxiety or fear. There is another part to that lesson which is helping people develop a sense of when they should not speak.

Knowledge is power. Insight gives us the ability to mitigate damaging outcomes. The more we listen to those around us, the more we are able to lead insightfully, managing situations diplomatically to the benefit of all involved.

People want to feel heard and when they feel heard, they feel understood; this builds strength and loyalty within a team. Even if we do not agree with or like what we hear, listening can help us navigate situations with a level of consideration that is not possible when we bulldoze from position A to position B right over the top of team members voicing their thoughts.

When I first started my voice training company, one of the coaches, despite being brilliant at training voices, was not rebooking clients and was struggling to implement cancellation policies.

Subsequently, schedules were affected to accommodate missed sessions, clients and coaches were inconvenienced, cash flow was interrupted, and revenue was lost. Concerned for the business, and the effect that this situation was having on the coach’s self esteem, we endeavoured to get the bottom of what was going on.

We discussed a client who’d indicated interest in ongoing training some months before, but had not rebooked. It was then that the coach told me the client had told him that he would not rebook as he was dissatisfied with our strict cancellation policy.