00:00 Oscar Trimboli

Today I’ll explore before, during, and after a workshop. This is a workshop I had with Sophie, who you’ll hear from shortly, and her peers. Then we did the same workshop with Sophie’s team. People regularly say, “Oscar, how can you listen after the conversation?” Look, this can take many forms. It could be right at the end of a workshop where you ask a question or a poll roughly in the last 15% of the workshop. You want to catch it in enough time that you can discuss it so you can hear what’s being heard by the participants. So if the workshop’s one hour, you should be asking this question between the 45-minute mark and the 50-minute mark. Here’s some of the questions I ask, what’s one thing that changed your mind about listening today, or what’s one thing you’ll implement based on what you heard today?

Now, that first question is typically in shorter workshops, and the second question is typically in longer workshops. Now, post-workshop, you can also run a survey or you can deconstruct the magical impact that a workshop has in a 25-minute debrief. I usually do this within 14 days of the workshop. Now, what you don’t know about me is I’m really disciplined and rigorous about post-workshop debriefs. In fact, I’m talking about that before people even book in a workshop. I’m signaling to them that there will be a debrief. I signal to them in the workshop, that is something we’ll discuss in the debrief. And this is crucial to create a space and place, to create a container where the host of the meeting, or a significant executive sponsor can unpack the learning that they had, that the group had.

So I’m always asking these kinds of questions. I want to ensure that the host reflects on their own experience in the workshop and not just the workshop itself. Post-workshop as well, what you’ll hear from Sophie shortly is her post-workshop experience and how ideas landed so powerfully because the workshop was so experiential, it was very hands-on. I want hosts also to reflect on the participant experience, individuals, as well as a group. I want to listen to what participants actually heard, rather than what I said. I want to listen to what participants didn’t hear, couldn’t hear, or I didn’t communicate effectively enough so it was useful for them.

Finally, I want to understand what was productive for the audience so I can distill that. I can crisp that up for next time to ensure that if it’s landed with one group, it’s highly likely to land with another group. This is part of the craft of facilitating a workshop from a listening orientation, you want to hear what the group heard, what’s landing, and what’s not. When you pick that up and use it next time, it’s like somebody who’s a woodworker, who’s moving from chisel to sandpaper to varnish. Sophie’s been very gracious, she’s allowed me to record this conversation to help you listen to what a debrief sounds like.

Here are some of the excerpts from the discussion with Sophie.

03:56 Sophie 
The fact that I still remember this exercise and we’re talking about six months after I actually took the Deep Listening Workshop speaks to the impact. I can still remember who I was with in my group. I can remember where we were sitting. I can remember exactly how it played out, and I can remember everything we did wrong. And I can remember the standing up at the end with a group of other people and talking about what I learned from the exercise. So for me, I had a real aha moment when we were debriefing, when you actually said, “How much time did you spend as a group communicating about how you were going to communicate on the task?”

And for me, that was a real light bulb moment. I had just started leading a new very important project, and it was with a fairly new agency group and things were a little bit bumpy. And what I did straight after I did that puzzle exercise was I had a two-hour session with the agency where we didn’t talk about the campaign, we just talked about how we’re going to communicate with each other. And so this is everything from how we shared presentations, how we gave each other feedback. And I felt that was a real step change in the way that we worked. It’s crazy how so many small things around how we communicate can have so much impact, and that for me is that aha moment I got from the puzzle exercise.

05:04 Oscar Trimboli
I’m curious, Sophie, what was the impact on the agency and your relationship with them?

05:09 Sophie
I think they would have felt relieved that it happened. I think they would have been feeling the tension too on their side and these small little things that build up to something big. I think they would have felt grateful that someone stopped and actually asked them, how do you want us to give you feedback? Telling them how we want to get presentations from them. I think they would’ve appreciated feeling heard, and yeah, they did. So I think the relationship has got so much better, things got faster.

05:40 Oscar Trimboli
You’ve heard me say it before, the deep listening shortens meetings and the meetings you have, there’ll be fewer of them because everybody feels heard, seen, valued, and listened to the first time. I love Sophie’s reflection. Things just got done faster.

Soph, what changed in the way you lead now?

06:01 Sophie
When we were debriefing on the puzzle exercise, Oscar asked, “Did anyone get up and go and stand behind the person actually making the puzzle?” So for me, one of the biggest learnings that I got and one of the biggest behavior changes that I saw in myself was around perspective. So my role is heavily cross-functional. Almost every project that I lead involves dozens of teams who actually aren’t in marketing. And I did one thing after I did that puzzle exercise, and that is I would book a meeting with myself before any important cross-functional meeting that I was involved in or leading. And I would spend time in that meeting with myself thinking about all the stakeholders and the relationships that had tension or where something felt confusing or something felt stuck. And I would 180 my perspective, and I would think about that person and I would think about their motivations or what might be hard for them to make a decision on a certain thing or what might be hard for them to say yes to a certain thing.

And I would think about it from their perspective and then I would use that as a tool in the meeting in terms of how I framed what the potential solution could be. The impact of that in those cross-functional steering committee meetings, it actually unlocked certain situations where we were at an impasse. So there was one in particular that I can remember, we were working on a project and we just couldn’t get past this impasse. We’d had a couple of meetings and I went in with a fresh way to frame it, and it was really after I did that 180 on perspective and we were able to quickly within that same meeting where I use this technique and make a decision and move forward, and it felt quite straightforward and simple after we did that. The most surprising thing to me is when you listen, better meetings are consistently shorter.

07:48 Oscar Trimboli
What are the implications for people in human resources, people, and culture?

07:75 Sophie 
The deep listening puzzle is a revelation. It’s a group exercise that will help you see for yourself what the cost of not listening is and then how you can change that. I also think it’s fun. If you’re a people and culture leader, the Deep Listening Workshop is, and particularly the puzzle exercise is a mandatory for anyone who’s working in a company and especially any new hires, I would make that part of their onboarding. The Deep Listening Puzzles were a light bulb moment within the Deep Listening Workshop.

08:23 Oscar Trimboli 
Sophie, you experienced the workshop first, then you chose to run it for your team. Talk me through that.

08:30 Sophie
I had such a positive experience taking the training myself. I wanted to pay it forward and give that knowledge to my whole marketing team. No one was really asking for training on listening, but after they took it, they all realized how game-changing it could be. I actually remember I was standing in the micro kitchen in my office and someone in the team ran up to me after taking the training, and she said, “In the last decade, I’ve taken so many workshops on how to be a better speaker, and I’ve never been trained on how to be a good listener.” And I thought that summarized it really well. I also love walking around the office and hearing people use the language from the workshop. So using things like, “Sorry, I was being an interrupting listener.” Or for me, it’s being the dramatic listener, which I thought meant I was showing that I cared and showing I listened a lot, but I recognize that that is a listening style that is not a good listening style, so I changed that in myself as well.

09:22 Oscar Trimboli 
This workshop isn’t perfect all the time. It isn’t the wonderful cure-all ingredient for everything, Sophie. When is a good time to think about these workshops?

09:33 Sophie
This training is particularly impactful when it’s taken as a group with people that you work with the most. So this could be with your agencies, this could be with cross-functional teams in my case, or it could be with your core team. I think it’s also the perfect kickoff taken at the start of a broader course of training. So whether that’s a full day of training or offsite, I think having this Deep Listening Workshop at the start will then make all the rest of the content something that people actually remember because they’re listening to it in the right way.

10:04 Oscar Trimboli
How would you describe my presence in the workshop to people who weren’t there?
Sophie (10:08):
A colleague of mine who has also been trained by Oscar, we have this expression with each other, you’ve never really had a conversation until you’ve had a conversation with Oscar. He reads between the lines, these subtle silent moments that other people tend to try to gloss over. He is a ninja at getting to the heart of what you are you actually mean, but sometimes aren’t saying. And I also think just his experience, his incredible legacy of experience in the corporate world and the way he commands respect in a room, he’s a very compelling speaker. The way he delivers content is appropriate for a very senior audience all the way down through to more of a junior audience. Oscar’s style is profound. I feel like the way he delivers content in such a crisp way with impact, it feels like what you’re getting feels really profound and you’re discovering these things for yourself because of the way he asks questions.

I have taken a lot of trainings and workshops in my career, and for me, this is best in class in terms of learning that sticks. It’s a lot of learning by doing. I can still remember the flow of the workshop from the kickoff story that Oscar told his personal story of listening. I can still remember that story. The interactive exercises, the Post-It note one that we did up on the wall, the puzzle game, the frameworks that we got, the characters he was using to describe different styles of listening. And all of the extended learning the way that we were expertly done using QR codes to snap extended learnings and the takeaways that people got to sit on their desk.

I think it’s not just about the moment in that room, but how we’re also creating behavior change through extended learning. I felt like it’s best practice in terms of how to deliver a workshop. If you’re doing a company kickoff and offsite, if you are working with a new agency team, Oscar’s Deep Listening Workshop is so impactful. I took it over six months ago and I still remember almost every single part of it. I created immediate behavior change the next day, and I’m still making changes to the way I listen today. I think it’s very unlocking and it had an overwhelmingly positive response from everyone in my team.

I’m really grateful for Sophie for allowing me to record that, so you could sneak in and listen to what we talk about on the debrief. When you debrief consistently with your counterparts, whether that’s one-on-one conversations, whether that’s team meetings, whether that’s group facilitated workshops, and you debrief the how rather than the content, you’ll discover what lands, you’ll understand how to communicate in a crisp way with impact, maybe even profound. When you commit to listening after the discussion, amazing opportunities emerge, not just for you, more importantly for the speakers and the group participants as well.

If you want to learn more about workshops like these, you can visit https://www.oscartrimboli.com/workshop

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. And you’ve given us the greatest gift of all, you’ve listened to us.

Thanks for listening.