Effective listening to employees is undervalued, and a poorly understood and supported leadership discipline. Improving it will have significant benefits not only for employees but also for the performance and overall health of most organisations. These conclusions feature in the book I co-authored with Kevin Ruck and Howard Krais: Leading the Listening Organisation: Creating Organisations […]
The challenge Most organisations are grappling with digital transformation as they integrate artificial intelligence into workflows and create new working models. Listening to employees will be critical to lead this change and innovation. Many organisations focus their efforts on team leaders and middle managers. But good listening involves a significant re-think of both the processes […]
Leading the Listening Organisation was published in early 2024. It is the result of 5 years’ research and years of experience working within client organisations. We believe that listening is at the heart of effective communication and change. When clients want to communicate purpose or strategy, or lead changes in ways of working, effective implementation […]
Over the last four years I’ve written four reports on how organisations listen to their people with my colleagues Howard Krais and Dr. Kevin Ruck. They are all available to download for free here: Who’s Listening? – Small scale EMENA Research Project, December 2019 Who’s Listening? – Good Listening Practice, June 2020 Who’s Listening? – […]
No one argues that listening to employees is a bad idea. Yet the evidence is that listening remains one of the most difficult areas of communication to get right within organisations: 1. Virtually every major negative corporate event (safety incidents, reputational crises etc) cites a lack of effective listening to employee voices as a contributory […]
Leading the Listening Organisation, which I co-authored with Kevin Ruck and Howard Krais, will be published in early 2024 1. During our research for the book, we found lots of evidence that listening matters but that many organisations only pay lip service to it. In discussion groups and write in responses numerous communication and […]
I’ll be talking at the ODN Europe conference on Friday September 23 about Creating a Listening Organisation. We’ll be exploring: Why organisations that listen well to their people are critical for success in emerging hybrid organisations How difficult it is to achieve effective listening at an organisational level Key factors and strategies that can improve […]
People need clarity and certainty about their organisation’s strategy to share goals and build common purpose. But an understanding of strategic themes (e.g., digitisation, customer experience) will not bring strategy to life and provide “line of sight” – that key connection that explains “what it means for me”. Real understanding, and indeed the effective […]
Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash It is much harder to listen effectively than most of us realise, and we tend to think we listen well when perhaps we don’t. Effective listening is so important not only for personal relationships (who wants a friend who never listens) but also for building trust in healthy organisations. For example, […]
Have you ever experienced this: the team has gone away for a couple of days for a deep dive into their vision and plans for the future? They return full of enthusiasm and ready to brief their teams on the way forward. Only to find they are met with a host of reasons why […]
