Hello and welcome back to Franklin Covey's on leadership series.

My name is Scott Miller and I serve as your host and interviewer each week.

Now most weeks were privileged to be interviewing an amazing best-selling author, business leader,

industry titan, some expert that has well-deserved insight on the topic of leadership,

both for your personal and professional lives.

And then occasionally the production crew invites me to share some of my own insights.

They call them Scott's thoughts, about once every six weeks or so.

So today is that day. I'm going to riff, if you will, on two topics

I'm passionate about. The first one is the role that listening plays in your leadership

skills. I believe passionately from my nearly 25 years of Franklin Covey that a key leadership

competency beyond being able to communicate effectively is being an empathic listener.

Secondly, I'm going to talk also about the power of understanding your strengths,

popularized by the Gallup Book Strings Finder,

originally known as Now Discover your Strengs,

and both as a business leader and as a spouse, uncle, cousin,

aunt, parent, how important it is for you to know how to identify strengths and other people.

Let's talk about the power of communication.

Now as leaders we've spent the majority of our education and our career focused on the importance

of being a persuasive, influential, strong communicator.

If you look back at your undergraduate and graduate school classes, probably most of you had

speech classes, presenting classes, facilitation classes, and I'll bet much of your professional development in your career has been centered around how to communicate persuasively.

You know, using software packages, PowerPoint, and Presi and others,

...