The Listening Tour

We intuitively know the power of listening. We can probably all be better at it.

When I’m joining an existing team at a new job, my favorite way to start is with a listening tour. I don’t always call it a listening tour, but in my mind, that’s precisely what I’m doing: I’m meeting with folks throughout the organization to get their take on … everything.

I want to know what their role is, what their team does, and their view on the company. I want to know what’s working for them. And I want to know what — in the most politically-savvy framing — they see as opportunities for their team and the company at large. (In other words, I want to know what’s broken.)

Most of us are well aware that listening is an important skill. It’s also one that’s hard to master.

Obviously in any listening tour — whether with new colleagues, new teams, or even new friends — the most talkative among us need to resist the urge to talk ourselves. When we hear things that trigger our own insights (which we may well be confident are brilliant, of course!), we want to share them. Right away. At least, I do.

But that’s an urge worth resisting. When you’re first hearing about a challenge or opportunity, you absolutely do have an outsider’s perspective, and you may well have smart ideas to share. The listening tour isn’t when you share those ideas, though. The listening tour is where you — surprise! — listen.

Another challenge with listening — besides shutting up — is, well, the listening. There’s a trap that’s too darn easy to fall into, and it’s simply waiting for your turn to talk again. Once you’re attuned to this weakness, you’ll see and hear it a lot. Too often. And oh man, it is infuriating to experience, even if you’re not quite sure how to label it.

I hear this problem crop up on some of my favorite conversational interview topics. The hosts have ideas of questions they want to ask. They ask one, and their guest answers — and then the hosts dive into the next question.

Did you catch the problem? The hosts didn’t actually listen to their answer, so they didn’t probe or follow up or dive deeper. They didn’t allow themselves to follow the tangents or the flow of where the conversation could take them. They were waiting for their turn to talk again, and then they asked the next question they had on their list.

I’m not suggesting you should treat every conversation — on your listening tour or elsewhere — as a journalistic endeavor. But my point is listening, really listening, is harder than we like to acknowledge sometimes.

I love taking notes. That’s a whole separate topic I’ll cover one day. But I find that the act of taking notes in my listening tour — typically after warning the other party that I’ll be doing so, so they know I’m not distracted when I’m furiously typing away — helps me with the practical side of paying attention, and not just waiting for my next question. I can in real time hit Command-B on my Mac to put important notes I’m taking in bold if I want to ask a follow-up questions.

We humans are flattered by follow-up questions, because it drives home pretty explicitly that the other person is listening, paying attention, and curious about what you’re saying.

Listening tours done well make people feel heard. Once you’ve gathered all the insights and information you can get from those conversations, that’s when you can allow yourself the opportunity to formulate whatever takeaways or recommendations all those conversations may lead to. But first, it’s important to zip it and really listen.