Active listening is a person’s willingness and ability to hear and understand. At its core, active listening is a state of mind that involves paying full and careful attention to the other person, avoiding premature judgment, reflecting understanding, clarifying information, summarizing, and sharing. By learning and committing to the skills and behaviors of active listening, leaders can become more effective listeners and, over time, improve their ability to lead.
Individual leaders can have a significant amount of influence over the development of organizational talent. One of the simplest yet most effective ways to develop others is the talent conversation - a way of building on relationships that are based on rapport, collaboration, and mutual commitment in order to help the individuals you lead improve performance, focus development, and reach positive outcomes. Learn how to prepare for and facilitate effective talent conversations by using the Center for Creative Leadership's development framework of assessment, challenge, and support.
In 2012 the Center for Land Use Interpretation acquired a set of seven rolodexes from the dispersed collection of former Los Alamos National Laboratory employee Ed Grothus, who operated a salvage company of lab cast-offs, known as The Black Hole. Now part of the Center's Radioactive Archive, the rolodexes contain thousands of business cards kept by some unknown office in the lab over the 1960s and 1970s--the peak of the arms race and its technological development. They are a physical record of everything from major military contractors to obscure high- and low-tech software widget suppliers-many of which are no longer extant, or have evolved. The selection of 150 cards may be viewed as a snapshot of synergies between the business community and America's atomic might. On the one hand, they are a direct indexical connection from the recent past to the sources of creating the most sophisticated and powerful national defense technologies in the world. On the other hand, they are obsolete information, relics of a former usefulness. As a specific printed historical record--superbly reproduced in full color--they are relevant to a potential understanding of the present; they are evocative evidence of the links that formed the secret technology of our nation.
