Verbal and Listening Skills

If you have to break bad news to your team, use this checklist to ensure that you communicate sensitively and effectively.

Successful leaders tend to have excellent verbal communication skills and can converse well with people in any situation. Use this simple diagnostic to assess your proficiency in this area.

This activity encourages participants to explore how much they rely on verbal and visual communication. It takes 30 minutes to complete.

This exercise introduces the topic of personal communication and allows participants to assess their own communication skills. Allow 30 minutes for completion.

This simple game is a fun way for participants to share feedback on each other’s performance at the end of a training session. Allow 15-20 minutes for completion. No separate task sheet is required.

A straightforward question and answer exercise designed to help participants improve their active listening skills. Allow 20 minutes for completion.

An exercise helping participants to demonstrate active listening and appropriate body language. It takes around 30 minutes to complete. No separate task sheet is necessary.

In this exercise, participants listen to pre-prepared texts and practise attentive listening for maximum information retention. Allow 30 minutes for completion.

Listening skills are a vital part of the communication process. Attentive listening is especially important when the communication involves a number of people and complex information. This lively exercise encourages participants to listen carefully in order to retain lots of information. Allow around 10 minutes for completion.

This exercise explores how participants’ perceptions are influenced by vocal tone and pitch. Allow 40 minutes for completion.

This exercise enables participants to work on their listening skills without any visual distractions. Allow 20 minutes for completion.

This exercise will help participants gain an understanding of the five components of active listening and begin demonstrating these. Allow 20 minutes for completion.

This straightforward listening exercise for groups of three takes around 45 minutes to complete.

This exercise will get you thinking about how you can rephrase statements so that they don’t sound judgemental, in order that you can begin to offer constructive criticism without hurting anyone’s feelings. You can do this exercise individually, or as part of a team session. Allow around 30 minutes for completion.