- What can you learn
from over 33,000 workplace listeners?
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Back in June, 2018, I logged into a survey tool.
I started to explore how to construct questions
that would help people understand
what gets in their way when it comes to listening.
These were the questions I asked,
what frustrates you the most
when someone isn't listening to you?
What do you struggle with the most
when it comes to listening to somebody else?
And if you could improve
just one thing about your listening,
what would you like to make progress on?
Well, 200 people responded to the survey,
a little bit more than the 50 that I'd actually anticipated,
and I soon learned that I was completely outta my depth
when it comes to constructing research, making a survey,
analyzing the data, creating insights,
and actionable next steps.
Just because I could collect the survey results,
it didn't mean I understood how to make an impact with it.
I decided to ask my network
if they knew anyone who could assist.
Eventually, I was introduced to four different people,
and two of those conversations were really good examples
of how the other person wasn't listening to me.
One of those meetings was professionally cut short
because they realized very quickly
they couldn't assist with my requirements,
they couldn't help, and they said so,
and they said so quickly and within 15 minutes.
I'm very grateful for that.
The fourth discussion took place
on the 11th of September with Heidi Martin.
Heidi and I discussed if listening barriers could be coded
and grouped into uniform cohorts of respondents.
The meeting lasted about 50 minutes,
and Heidi asked lots of probing questions,
and skillfully on her part,
she didn't promise anything other than
I need to take a fortnight to reflect
on what might be the most effective questions,
survey design,
and potential outputs to inform the listening quiz
and its accompanying report.
What struck me about the conversation with Heidi
was she wasn't looking to discover anything,
she was exploring along with me,
and we were figuring out what we knew
and what we didn't know.
Heidi was a really good example of somebody
who was helping to explore not just what I was saying,
she was also exploring what I wasn't saying.
She was a ninja in level four listening, the unsaid.
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Wind the clock forward about 12 months
and multiple iterations, revisions, and insights from Heidi,
she presented to me her insights from over 500 respondents.
There were some homogenous groups, uniform groups,
some groups that had a lot in common,
and these were the foundations
of what was to become the villains of listening.
The villains emerge from word clouds.
These were software that highlighted
what the common phrases were
that people were using in their free text responses.
These free text responses or 500 were coded,
meaning I looked at them, Heidi looked at them.
We had a few other people, in fact, 12 other people.
Three lots of four,
all representing one of the different villain groups
to look at the information within their cohort
to see if that made sense.
Did that sound right?
Did it feel right?
The feedback was pretty consistent,
"You've kind of got it Oscar,"
this sounds like what I struggle with
when it comes to listening.
They were responding to 14 questions,
and as a result, we were starting to get some
very consistent results
that we predicted before people took the assessments.
I learned a valuable lesson about playing to my strengths.
Strategy is one of my key strengths,
details and maths is not.
By bringing on experts who could provide
insights into their field, I got a much better result.
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The next step in the journey was March, 2020,
and the listening quiz became available
for anyone to complete.
14 questions, one, free text response
and a tailored report highlighting their primary
and secondary listening barrier, as well as three practical
and pragmatic tips for them based on their input.
It's now 2024 and 33,519 people
have now taken the quiz.
Between 2020 and 2024,
the Listening Quiz software has been updated four times.
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Our 2024 release is by far the most comprehensive release,
including extra functionality and reporting.
The first one is you are able to aggregate reports
based on groups of 10 or more respondents
if you are part of an organization,
you may be in training, learning and development,
organizational development, leadership.
So if you'd like to understand how a group of 10
or more people listen as an aggregate profile,
we have ways to describe that at a team level,
a department level, maybe a project team level,
even an organization level.
We're able to also do cross industry comparison,
so you can compare yourself to a peer in your industry,
that might be in your industry, in your geography,
or it may be overseas.
The third level of reporting is reporting
to allow the administrators of the projects
to see the progress that people are making.
Once they've been invited to complete the quiz,
we'll be able to tell you then
how many people you've invited,
how many people have commenced the quiz,
and how many people have completed the quiz.
And this is gonna be really helpful
if you're in human resources, people and culture,
learning and development.
Maybe you want to do an offsite for an executive team.
Equally, if you're an external consultant,
a trainer, a facilitator, a leadership expert,
and you want to administer the quiz
on behalf of your clients,
we have the functionality to do that as well.
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Next, we provide a summary, which is the percentage
of each listening barrier represented in the group.
And finally, we provide anonymized reporting
of each participant's most significant listening struggle
in aggregate report when there are 10 people or more.
In this release as well,
we'll be able to provide volume discounts
for organizations based on their operating model.
So there'll be different discounts for an organization
if it's a commercial organization versus an organization
that might be in the non-for-profit sector.
Similarly, if you're an external consultant trainer,
facilitator, leadership expert,
we can assist with discounts there for you as well.
If you are an organization
or an external consultant who works with organizations
and you're curious to discover a little bit more,
all this information is available at listeningquiz.com.
In summary, those five updates are,
number one, aggregate reporting for 10 people or more.
Number two, cross industry comparison.
Number three, reporting functionality
for progress and completion.
And number four and number five,
a variety of volume discounts,
whether you're an external consultant
or inside an organization.
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This is what I've discovered from 33,519 responses.
Yep, and I have read every single line on that spreadsheet,
in fact, twice.
Channeling my inner Hugh Forest from South by Southwest
who spend six weeks reading all their survey feedback
from people who attend their conference, like Hugh,
although there's 100s of pages of respondent data,
when you lay it all out from 33,519 participants,
distilling all of those into themes
is what I've spent most of my time doing.
And we've coded every response
to the villains of listening
and the five levels of listening as well.
And the most significant insight from that question,
what do you struggle with when it comes to listening?
Is this, 99.52% of participants
describe what they struggle with
at level one, two, or three.
Said another way, half of 1% of people
are struggling to listen at level four and at level five,
listening for the unsaid and listening for meaning.
And I hypothesize that people just aren't conscious
that that exists, that that's a possibility,
that's something worth reaching for.
The raw data is really simple,
level one, 64.5% of people
are stuck at listening to yourself.
31% of people are at level two, where they're struggling
with what's presented in the content,
and about 4% of people are at level three,
listening for the context.
So with all that in mind, that's why the content we create
is specifically focused on level one and two,
and a little bit of three.
Said another way,
two thirds of people say what's getting in the way is them.
It's not focusing on the speaker where they will improve,
they're listening, but becoming present to themselves.
This is the reason we dedicated two chapters
rather than one in our book, "how to listen".
Focusing on level one before, during, and after the meeting
will have the biggest impact
on the way you communicate in your workplace.
Now listening before the meeting takes many forms,
and a lot of people kind of scratch their head,
confused when I say, "You can listen before the meeting."
Well, if you're listening to yourself,
that's completely possible,
and I'll explain a way that you can listen to others
before the meeting as well.
When it comes to listening before the meeting,
let's just focus on listening to yourself
and thinking about creating space, time
and creating the energy that you need
to be present during a meeting.
Now before the meeting,
when you are trying to listen to them,
you can ask the other person
what will make this a good conversation.
Or if it's a group meeting,
possibly you'd ask a variation and say,
"What will make this a productive meeting for you?"
How much of your listening focus happens
before the meeting commences?
Well, as I went through those 33,519 rows,
that was another thing we coded into our responses.
16% of the people who are struggling at level one
are saying they're struggling
with something before the meeting commences,
whether it's remote meetings, their workload,
their lack of time,
the fact they say they have too many meetings,
each of these issues can be addressed by you
before the meeting commences.
This data made me very curious about
84% of people who identified in meeting barriers,
and they use terms like focus, distraction, attention.
And these represent about 58% of the immediate barriers,
which could be anticipated
even before the meeting commences.
Can you anticipate distractions during a meeting?
Before the meeting commences, you definitely can,
and you can anticipate how you can react as a result.
Although you may have a meeting in your schedule,
and that might be in your schedule from a week ago
or a day ago.
Right now, when you're having the meeting
or about to have the meeting, ask yourself this question,
is it still the right time?
Is this meeting the right format?
Is the location or the length of the meeting
appropriate to where me and others are at
who are gonna attend this meeting?
You can change any dimension of the meeting before it starts
to make sure your listening battery is charged
and ready for the conversation.
Maybe you need to reschedule the meeting,
maybe you need to move a video meeting to an audio only,
or you could shorten the meeting length,
or you could just adjust the meeting start time by
starting at five or 10 minutes after the hour.
Could you move a meeting
that's a seated meeting to a walking meeting?
Look, there are so many options
that we outline in these reports
to help you move forward with your listening.
When you take the quiz and get the report,
we'll outline
some of these really practical tips to help you,
particularly for those who are stuck at level one.
We want to get you up to level two as quickly as possible.
There's lots of options in your control.
Some you may need to negotiate
or renegotiate with other participants.
Yet, I speculate it's worth trying to adjust
before you commence a meeting
rather than creating an unproductive, draining,
or frustrating meeting for you and for the others.
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One of the most impactful things I get feedback about
is creating a pre-meeting ritual.
This could be something that we discuss during a workshop.
It could be something
that we discuss during a training course,
and some of the examples that have been really productive
for people is simply drinking a glass of water,
playing music for 90 seconds,
noticing the pattern of your breathing,
choosing to stand up
and walk for 90 seconds before the meeting commences.
All of these are signaling to your mind, your body, and you,
that this meeting requires you
to give and to pay attention
to maximize the time when you're communicating with others.
I'm very curious, do you have a ritual, a practice,
or a technique you use to prepare for a meeting?
Do you have a way to recharge your listening batteries?
Send me an email, podcast@oscartrimboli.com
with the subject lines "Before".
That's subject line before.
And for the first five people
who send me their pre-meeting rituals,
I'll send you a copy of the book, "Super Communicators",
"The Power of Conversation
and Hidden Language of Connection".
This book is a refreshing change for books on communication
because it does a great job of balancing the speaking
and the listening throughout its chapters on communication.
I especially like the difference, Charles,
the author calls out
between switching questions and supporting questions
when it comes to building rapport in first time meetings,
it's definitely a book I recommend.
What's the biggest insight
from listening to 33,519 respondents in the survey
is that two thirds of you are struggling at level one,
and you wanna make progress.
And I hope some of these tips will help.
I've created some additional resources
based not only on the survey feedback from the respondents,
also based on feedback
from the Deep Listening Ambassador community,
as well as listeners to this podcast,
I've created three additional resources
that I think can help you make a difference.
The first is I've set up a where to begin.
I got a lot of feedback about Oscar,
you know, with over 120 episodes of the podcast,
I'm not sure where to start.
We've broken them up into three, where to start,
the episodes of the podcast by the five levels of listening,
and broken up by competency.
30 competencies based on the Korn Ferry leadership model.
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Let's start at the beginning with where to start.
If you visit oscartrimboli.com/start,
we've curated all the episodes
and 15 other resources that are gonna help you
to improve the way you listen the fastest.
So these 15 resources on the start page
include the "how to listen" book , two guides,
a visual and video conferencing guide,
two courses, "The Fundamentals"
and the "Manager's Masterclass",
10 podcast episodes outlining the five levels of listening,
the four barriers of listening,
and an overview of the research
and methodology we're talking about.
Finally, this resource, listeningquiz.com
is the final resource we recommend about where to start.
I'm very confident that these resources are now sequenced
in a way that'll make the biggest and fastest impact
for the way you communicate at work.
So if you wanna start now,
visit oscartrimboli.com/start.
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Once you've completed everything on the start page,
you can move to how the episodes are organized,
and they're organized by the five levels of listening.
So if you visit oscartrimboli.com/levels,
you can find each of the episodes have been marked
with one or more of the five levels of listening.
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In our final update, we introduce a competencies framework
where we overlay the 120 podcast episodes
over the Korn Ferry Leadership Competency Model.
And we've mapped each episode of the podcast
to one or more of the competency frameworks
based at oscartrimboli.com/competencies.
And don't worry, you don't have to write them down
if you scroll through your podcast app,
you'll see them in the links in the show notes,
and that's oscartrimboli.com/competencies.
When I spoke to leadership consultants, trainers, coaches,
facilitators, or organizational leaders,
whether they're people and culture leaders,
executive leaders,
whether they're learning and development consultants
or in-house trainers, they wanted to match it
to something that was fairly well known in the market.
And the common feedback was
the Korn Ferry Leadership Architecture Competency Framework.
These competencies range from ensure accountability,
communicates effectively drive results,
creates effective teams
all the way to tech savvy and 25 others in total.
The Korn Ferry Leadership Architecture Competency Framework
is the most robust and globally orientated model.
Many of the clients I work with, more importantly,
many of the clients that leadership consultants
that I spoke to work with
have clients who use this framework.
They use this framework
to build their professional development plan,
they use the framework
if they're figuring out if they should move roles
or seeking a promotion internally within an organization
or being assessed to be ready
for the most senior roles in their organizations,
or even if you want to change organizations,
typical recruitment process
may require you to go through an assessment center
at an executive level,
and the Korn Ferry architecture is sitting behind that.
I wanted to share three really simple examples of that
so you can navigate the competencies against
the podcast episodes we've created.
The three I've selected communicates effectively,
manages complexity and tech savvy.
And for each of these,
I'm gonna start with the full Korn Ferry description,
and then we'll overlay some of the podcast episodes
so you can join the dots.
When we think about communicates effectively,
Korn Ferry describes communicates effectively as developing
and delivering multi-mode communications
that convey a clear understanding
of the unique needs of different audiences.
The questions they pose is,
is the communication you're using,
using a variety of one-to-one small, large group,
as well as diverse delivery styles?
Do you listen attentively?
Do you adjust to fit the audience?
Do you provide timely and helpful information
to others across your own organization?
And do you encourage the open expression of ideas
and opinions from others?
So as you can see,
it's a very extensive and thorough evaluation
of what does communicate effectively mean.
Some of the episodes that are mapped
to effective communication episode 89, with Danish,
who explains the what and the how
of effective speaking in the workplace
where he discusses speaking speed, the use of pause,
the use of emotion and executive presence.
As well as episode 92,
where retired Sergeant Kevin Briggs from San Francisco
explains how he helped to listen to people
when they were planning to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge.
Let's look at managing complexity.
Korn Ferry says, "Making sense of complex, high quantity
and sometimes contradictory information
to effectively solve problems."
They wonder, do you ask the right questions
to accurately analyze the situation?
Do you collect the right kind of data
from multiple and diverse sources to solve the problem?
Do you look at the root cause on difficult problems
rather than just the symptoms?
Are you clear on evaluating risks
and benefits of multiple solutions?
In episode 46,
a chief programming officer of South by Southwest,
Hugh Forest epitomizes not just managing complexity,
he explains how to lead through and towards complexity.
He's dealing with content that hasn't become mainstream.
He's looking at content for the next decade.
Look, Hugh does a great job of balancing the present
and the future, presenters, audiences,
the Austin community where the event is based,
the multiple stakeholders and the global audience.
Here's some numbers he needs to juggle,
74,000 attendees from over a 100 countries,
3000 media and press,
3000 speakers at the event,
over 1500 conference sessions.
And just one example of the economic impact
that Hugh and South by Southwest has made in Austin
is during the last event they booked 52,000
hotel nights in 68 hotels.
That is managing complexity.
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In the planning process, kicking off for the next year,
there's so many stakeholders that you need to think about.
There's the audience, there's speakers, there's sponsors,
there's staff, there's the Austin community,
there's the broader community across the United States,
and South by Southwest has a global impact.
Talk us through how you prepare
and what some of the techniques you use to listen
to the audience for the current year, for example.
[Hugh Forrest] We spend a, what I'd like to say
is an inordinate amount of time
reading through user feedback from the previous year.
There are many good reasons for doing that.
You learn about the event
from a completely different perspective
than you had as an organizer.
There are often things that you learn that were great,
that you had no knowledge of.
There are often things that you learn that didn't go so well
that you had no knowledge of,
and that just reading this feedback
gives you a much better perspective
and much fuller perspective
and much more nuanced perspective
of what was good and what needs improvement.
I'll also say that that process of reading feedback,
of digesting feedback, of trying to understand feedback,
of listing what your users
and what your community is saying can be mentally,
emotionally, spiritually exhausting.
It's often not easy reading sharp criticisms
of what you've done, particularly if you think
you've done something incredibly great.
But I think you try to have
a generally positive attitude here
and understand it's all part of the learning and process
and helps you get better.
And throughout the most harsh criticisms
and throughout the highest phrase,
and the whatever objective truth is,
is somewhere in the middle,
but again, helps you do that by reading this feedback.
So we'll spend six weeks reading feedback,
trying to analyze that feedback,
try to put that into some general themes
and even more specific themes.
And then by about late May, early June,
we're beginning to plan for the next year,
and one of the big pieces
in terms of planning for the next year
is this South by Southwest panel picker interface
that we've been using for approximately a decade.
This is a interface where anyone in the community,
which basically means anyone with a web connection,
can enter a speaking proposal.
It allows us to listen to what the community wants,
to get new ideas and new speakers into the event.
But we'll get somewhere in the neighborhood
of 5,000 total ideas, speaking proposals
for South by Southwest,
of which probably about a 1,000 of those
will be accepted to the event.
The other 4,000 are also, again, very, very useful
in terms of trying to discern
what our community wants to hear,
what our community wants to learn about,
that in our community
is much more focused on learning the latest technologies
or the newest ideas about blockchain.
But again, this panel picker system is ultimately a way
for us to communicate with our audience,
for us to learn from our audience,
for us to listen to our audience.
And I think it's one of the many things
that has helped us continue to improve as an event.
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[Oscar Trimboli] Finally, let's look at tech savvy.
And tech savvy is described as
anticipating and adopting innovations in business building,
digital and other technologies.
You anticipate the impact
of emerging technologies and adjust.
You scan the environment for new technical skills,
knowledge and capabilities to benefit you or the business.
You don't focus so much on the fads
and you're happy to learn and adopt new technologies.
I was surprised when I categorized the episodes
because I thought I'd struggled
to find some relevant conversations.
Yet, there are five episodes discussing online,
Zoom fatigue, AI, to name a few.
Two episodes on listening and artificial intelligence,
one with Scott Sandland, where he's discussing
what age level of language does AI currently speak,
and would you allow this teenager to go
and have business discussions?
And Amy Brown, who discusses how artificial intelligence
and listening is helping the leader
she works with in healthcare
to extract and hear a lot of information
from contact centers
that they can build into action plans very quickly.
One of my surprising favorites was Dr. Alison Barker.
She used machine learning to discover the language
and dialect in laboratory rats
to help her speed up her learning,
as well as her ability to listen
to the language they were using
while she was undertaking experiments.
So you can see there's a very diverse perspective
on what it means to apply technology in over a 100 episodes.
If you would like to
look at your professional development plan
and listen to a couple of podcasts
aligned to a competency you'd like to improve,
visit oscartrimboli.com/competencies
And there you'll see 30 different competencies
mapped to each of the 120 plus episodes.
Now, whether you wanted to use a guided start
listening at the levels or explore by competency,
I'm certain that I'm bringing to you
the most comprehensive workplace
listening resources in the world.
And all of that has been created
because you've taken the time to listen to me.
I'm Oscar Trimboli,
and along with the Deep Listening Ambassador community,
we're on a quest to create
100 million deep listeners in the workplace.
Thanks for listening.
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