Group Listening Audit

In July, I participated in a three-day executive retreat with 6 participants.

I was in the workshop to help the group understand how they listen and communicate effectively. The team was well known to each other.

Individually, each is high-performing, yet the team is underperforming.

At each break, one or two participants would ask, “how are you listening to us?”

Rather than answer their immediate question, I invited them to notice, “how are you listening to each other?”

Often, they found it a helpful question.

Other times, they reacted, “Why are you avoiding my question?”

In my previous post, “Effective workplace listeners DON’T focus on the speaker“, rather than obsessing about how I was listening, I invited each of them to adopt another perspective – how did they listen to each other?

“All models are wrong, but some are useful” George Box – statistician.

I love this George Box quote because it helps me avoid many sticky situations in my client work with academics, accountants, actuaries, boards, chairs, engineers, market researchers, and software developers.

In these environments, the content of the conversation isn’t something I understand.

Rather than being stuck inside their mathematic or mental model, I bring an external perspective.

Exploring perspectives beyond their dogmatic model-bound approach, George Box invites us into a productive and valuable orientation.

If George and I were discussing a model for group listening, I would discuss the usefulness of this perspective –

“Good hosts get everyone to listen to the speaker, yet great hosts get everyone to listen to each other.”

As a practitioner, a model is only as valuable as the group, its environment and its developmental context.

Through the scars of failure, I understand the boundaries of this listening model. I will go ahead and expand on that soon.

Let’s get back to the three-day executive retreat.

When pressed to answer their direct question “how are you listening?”, I would share this diagram with them.

By itself, this diagram isn’t helpful because it;s a snap shot of the group at the end of the meeting rather than over the course of the meeting.

This is the menu rather than the recipe.

A menu is an elegant explanation of the finished output.

A recipe combines ingredients over time and requires adaption to the conditions and available ingredients.

Before I reveal the recipe, I’d like to explain the boundaries of this model.

The Do conditions are the environments where noticing how the group is listening in a meeting will be productive for the participants and the group.

The Do NOT conditions highlight contexts, environment and group developmental conditions where this approach to group listening will be UNPRODUCTIVE.

As with all models, participants and conditions, when you achieve proficiency in your approach, you can mix and match your recipe to suit the situation.

The recipe for listening in group meetings as a host

Below is a 7-minute video of how I listened to this team during a 30-minute discussion. It explains the ingredients and recipe of how I listened.