What Happens When We Listen Before, During, And After

“Oscar Trimboli: Because in care, you're signaling I've heard this. Is there anything else? That gives and creates a space for everybody, the speaker and the listener, to just pause and take the moment to do that.”

[INTRODUCTION]

Alex Cullimore: Welcome to Uncover the Human, where every conversation revolves around enhancing all the connections in our lives.

Cristina Amigoni: Whether that’s with our families, co-workers, or even ourselves.

Alex Cullimore: When we can be our authentic selves, magic happens.

Cristina Amigoni: This is Cristina Amigoni.

Alex Cullimore: And this is Alex Cullimore.

HOSTS: Let's dive in.

Authenticity means freedom.

Authenticity means going with your gut.

Authenticity is bringing 100% of yourself. Not just the parts you think people want to see, but all of you.

Being authentic means that you have integrity to yourself.

It's the way our intuition is whispering something deep-rooted and true.

Authenticity is when you truly know yourself. You remember and connect to who you were before others told you who you should be.

It's transparency, relatability, no frills, no makeup, just being.

[EPISODE]

Alex Cullimore: Welcome back to this episode of Uncover the Human. Today, Cristina and I are joined by our guest. We're very excited for Oscar Trimboli. Welcome to the podcast, Oscar.

Oscar Trimboli: G'day, Alex. Really looking forward to listening to yours and Cristina's questions today.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. Welcome, Oscar. We know how we found you, but tell us about yourself.

Oscar Trimboli: Look, to understand me, you probably have to jump into a boardroom budget setting meeting between Sydney, Seattle, and Singapore back in April, 2008. I remember distinctly, because there'd been bushfires in the area we were in and the smoke was still stuck in the air conditioning system. At this meeting, 18 people in total, and we're setting the annual budget for the financial year. 20 minutes into this discussion, I'm sitting in the boardroom in Sydney with my vice president, Tracy. She looks me straight in the eye and she says, “Oscar, we need to speak immediately after this meeting.”

All I could think about is, I'm getting fired. How many weeks of salary have I got left? Who are the five people I need to call? Honestly, I did not listen for the rest of the meeting, which became quite costly for me. The meeting finished a little bit early and Tracy asked me to close the door as everybody left. As I started walking back towards the seat, Tracy said, “You have no idea what you did at the 20-minute mark, do you?” I thought, “Great, I'm getting fired and I don't even know why.” I sat down. Tracy looked me straight in the eye and said, “If you could code how you listen, you could change the world.” Yup, what I heard was, “Woo-hoo. I've still got a job. What's this listening stuff all about?”

Anyway, since then, I've been coding not how I listen, but how the best listeners in the world listen in the workplace. I've been fortunate enough that over 35,000 people have shared their listening struggles in a database we have to understand what really are the barriers to people's listening as leaders, as individuals, in team contexts, in project contexts and the like. That's where we got started on it.

Cristina Amigoni: That's incredible. I love how you can pinpoint exactly when all of this started, and how listening was a huge part of that, in all sense. You stopped listening, you had your own story and it was all about listening.

Oscar Trimboli: Yeah. I think for leaders listening right now, and I think a leader is anybody who influences anybody else. It’s not necessarily a title. What you say and what they hear are two completely different things. What techniques have you got in place to sense to check where they're at. What are they hearing when you say something, whether that's in a one-on-one conversation in that example, we're in group settings, or in organizational contexts, where you may need to use listening tools, or surveys to get there as well.

What I said, or displayed to Tracy in that moment, I'd done many times in many contexts. It was Tracy's very insightful listening that picked it up and put a mirror to me and showed me the value of how I could change the perspective and the minds of the people in the room, who were basically in oppositional corners going, “No, it needs to be high. No, it needs to be lower.” It's like, okay. I'm very grateful to Tracy.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. I love the origin story of listening, that has to do with tuning out, losing the thread for it. For those who haven't done such fervent research, what do you mean when you say, I've worked on coding listening? What does that mean for people?

Oscar Trimboli: Yeah. When it comes to listening, we started a research project in 2008. It just started with a very simple question, which I asked a very close group of people, which was, what do you struggle with when it comes to listening at work? I was very lucky, I was working with a great market research company. They said, “Look, this is a long-term project, a decade-long quest,” basically, because along the way, we've collected a group of people, just like you, Alex and Christina, that are what I call deep listening ambassadors. You're happy to spread the message of the impact of listening.

From that origin question, we had about 100 people. It wasn't what you would call a normalized set. It was people who knew me. But what we realized very quickly, there were patents in the data and the research company then worked with me to expand that into 20 questions. These 20 questions want to understand how do you listen before, during and after a conversation, what gets in your way across different modalities, so team meetings versus one-on-one meetings, face-to-face meetings versus video conference meetings.

Along the way, we expanded the people we went out to and then the market research company had its own normalized data set, meaning it's representative of the working population, rather than representative of the people who know Oscar. There were amazing patents that emerged, and we were lucky enough that these early 100 people, there was a subset of about 30 people who were really curious, wanted to help in the journey. At that stage, we didn't have a quest for 100 million deep listeners in the world. We just had a genuine curiosity, what would emerge.

What we discovered in the data, there was all distinct cohorts of listening barriers. These eventually become the four villains of listening. These are what gets in your way. Do you connect emotionally? Therefore, you move the center of listening gravity away from them to you, because you're emotionally telling a story, or something like that. Are you an interrupter? Are you somebody who's lost, or vague, or distracted? Then finally, are you shrewd? Are you a problem-solving machine? The cogs are going on in your head, and the speaker can see that, and the speakers in the research said, “I know they're not listening, because they're trying to fix me.” They're not even saying they're trying to fix the problem, they're trying to fix me.

These four villains helped us to understand the barriers. We could go, okay, for this group, here's three simple things that we know in the research that works. For these three group, here's a slightly different group of these. We ended up automating that into the listening quiz that is just right around the English-speaking world that we just had a lot of requests to translate into other languages, that we can nerd out on the science behind at another time.

Coding how to listen has evolved from that as well. We now can ingest transcripts from team meetings or one-on-ones that will automatically tell the person who's requested the report. What's the curiosity index in the meeting? Meaning, how many people are not asking questions, but how many people are actually asking clarifying questions? Because when people respond to questions, what we've found is that at least a third of them are not answering the question that the person asked.

The data pointed out to us that higher performing teams have a high use of clarifying questions. Some people translate it into a challenge, but it's just a simple question. You said this, did you mean this, or did you mean? We're actually talking about the real issues. We also code what percent of the people in the meeting are creating 80% of the words. This is for one of a better worded diversity index to understand how widely are people engaging in the dialogue. Higher numbers, again, are correlating with high-performing team, lower numbers correlating with leaders who are getting pretty bad engagement scores as an example from their team.

We also code question impact, question length, question distance, question depth. People are not even conscious of their questions. A lot of people are taught, or believe that why matters most when you're asking questions. That's true in some domains, but it's not true in most dialogues, or balanced use of how, what, who, how, when questions are just as important. We've coded that as well, so that people can input the transcript and get the anonymized results out at a data level.

The reason I feel it's impactful is because a lot of clients and coaches and consultants we work with, once the client saw the data, it made much more sense to them, as opposed to just a dialogic coaching approach there. That's what coding means today, Alex. I wonder what coding means for you, Alex, when you think about listening.

Cristina Amigoni: He is a data developer, so –

Oscar Trimboli: Yeah, yeah. That's why I was curious.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah, I was going through all of the different little pieces of, I believe it was called stemming and in the natural language processing world, to try and get to what do people mean when they're asking questions. I was fascinated by how you could, because I – that's more on the actual processing of language that's been used. But I like the idea of coding how listening is happening, as well as, it sounds like you've broken down these really great ways to measure, and you have mentioned it, measure engagement.

I mean, that's such a general mystery for people. They just send out surveys and the people seem disengaged, but there's generally a giant gap between that and understanding why they're disengaged, as well as what they might be able to do about that. I really love that breakdown, because that really helps identify what engagement looks like from a data point of view. We can all feel that. At least I was feeling it when you were describing it. I can feel those times where it's been like, yeah, there's one voice in the room that says 80% of the talking or, wow, yes, this is entirely distracted. I love that idea that the clarifying question is so important, because that's a team that's safe enough to be able to just communicate, and they're just finding clarity, rather than, yeah, I guess it can definitely feel like a challenge occasionally for people. That makes sense, just anecdotally, that that would tie so well to things like, psychological safety and the engagement of a team.

Oscar Trimboli: Yeah. I got brought to life with me when one of my clients went on holiday, and we were tracking, eventually, eight team meetings. This engagement score, or share of voices, we call it in the data. She was hosting six to eight people in this team meeting, depending on who was on leave etc. The scores were 23, 22, 21. Then all of a sudden, a week came in and the group was sitting at 78%. 78% of people were making the contribution. Then it went back 23. I said to them, what happened on this week? She said, “Oh, I went on leave.” It's like, oh, okay. Oh, no.

I simply invited her to explore, although she's the leader, does she need to host the meeting? Straight away, the light bulb went on and she said, “Well, obviously, not.” That group made a decision together that one person will host the meeting for three months, and then they rotate, but they choose the person who's the next person, when they choose the current person, because the person who's doing month three, four and five will listen very differently if they know they're up to bat, so to speak. They also have to be the substitute in case something happens to that host.

It's an obvious invitation for leaders in a team meeting context, or even project managers in their project meeting context. What are you not listening to by being the meeting host? What assumptions are you making that may be holding back the team performance there, because if you're sitting as a participant, you will hear, see and sense very different things in the team meeting, if you're not in that role as the host. It's like Cristina nodding furiously.

Cristina Amigoni: I have so many thoughts and questions, I'm trying –

Oscar Trimboli: Well, please share.

Cristina Amigoni: Well, what's come to mind is a couple of things in the story you shared. It's not very surprising. It's probably fairly common that the leader does the majority of the speaking in most meetings, and engagement goes up and down depending on the safety of the team and all of that. The trend was pretty clear in your example that when the leader is not hosting the meeting, the engagement goes up significantly. At the same time, knowing that in the norm, a lot of leaders feel like that's their job is to host the meeting and to do most of the talking. You go to town halls, and especially large audience meetings, but you go to town halls, or large department meetings and it's one voice. Because it's like, well, it's a one-way thing. I have things to say and I have a chance for people to hear it.

We know that they may not be here. They may hear it, but may not be listening to it, or vice versa. Then, how do we illuminate to leaders that maybe their role is not just to be the main speaker in all meetings?

 Oscar Trimboli: Yeah. I think particularly in the town hall context that you mentioned is a really good example. The group will engage differently if they feel hurt. Most people don't realize that listening happens before, during and after the conversation. Just a small investment before the conversation in listening in that town hall context as an example will have a tremendous impact. It's very different to say, we're making enormous progress on the change in our three key KPIs. We've got green, green and yellow, as opposed to – I asked each of you to ask any questions at the top of mind. On key KPI one, I got a great question from Mary and she's given me permission to share it. The question is this. They expand on the question and then they give their perspective. Straight away, they’re signaling many things to the audience. One, you matter. Two, I hear you. Three, bring Mary's voice to the stage and we all know Mary, or we know of Mary, or we know of Mary's department. I can talk as if I'm speaking directly to Mary. But in doing that, the audience is listening completely differently.

I think this is a big miss for leaders, where they believe listening is the process in that moment, as opposed to thinking about listening before, during and after the dialogue. A lot of people say to me, well, how do you listen after the dialogue? Well, the difference between hearing and listening is action. A simple example, if you do an employee engagement survey every year and you don't do anything with the survey feedback, is a really good example of not listening. You're signaling to the people who've taken the time to fill in the survey.

Yeah, that was very perfunctory and I'm glad you've done it, because I've ticked my KPI. But if I get around to it, I do. If I don't, I don't. Again, we know that high-performing teams correlate with massive and continuous adjustments as a result of these key inputs. Cristina, one of the things I invited you and Alex to do was to explore the context of listening before this conversation. I'm curious to see where you've landed with that.

 Cristina Amigoni: We've done our homework, which was actually extremely interesting, because we had never done that before for any podcast episode, which was to ask some of our contacts, clients, LinkedIn contacts, our team, friends. I've even asked a few friends to share either stories about listening when they struggled, or when they felt heard, and also any questions. We told them like, hey, we're going to have a podcast with a listening expert. What questions about listening would you like us to highlight?

We did that and we did it for a couple of weeks, two or three weeks in different ways. A couple of things were interesting to me. One was how we received fewer responses than we expected. I do wonder if it was because we didn't have this in a conversation. It was just a written request that was sent out. The listening part wasn't actively there. It was almost like, we ask a question, you reflect, we receive it, but there's no connection in that. Not a connection in the same way as a conversation. Two, how similar the responses were, or the questions about listening were, even though the stories and the way that they were asked were different.

Oscar Trimboli: And for you, Alex, what did the process illuminate for you of exploring listening before this conversation with this group of people?

Alex Cullimore: Actually, Cristina brings up a really good point that we would have been probably nicer to be able to directly find a couple of people. We wanted to try and cast a wide net, and so we sent this to larger lists. We posted this in areas to try and get a wider perspective. I think that if we had had it, maybe as an invite for a 15-minute conversation, we could have had a good pickup and could have directly found exactly where people are.

I agree, there's a lot of themes of how do I do this better? Here's the things that I get distracted by that we – I could see how you might have ended up in your four villains of listening, because even with the responses we got, you start to see the patterns emerge. That was interesting, because everybody has such a different way of approaching it and how they say it, and there's still something similar in it.

Oscar Trimboli: Yeah. I think as an approach, because it was the first time in a low-context conversation modality, meaning it was an email, or some social media post, the richness that you both value isn't maybe necessarily there, like a 15-minute conversation that you mentioned there. But as a technique, it's a very simple thing that leaders can do for team meetings, for town halls, for one-on-ones to simply ask, well, what will make this a good conversation for a one-on-one, as an example. Play that back to your directs, or your peers. When you go to the one-on-one, “Hey, great. Thanks. You said this would make it a good conversation. Is that still the case?”

You're doing two things. You're saying, “I heard you, I'm listening, and I'm also flexible and curious enough to know that something might have changed since we spoke.” I think in starting a conversation like that, it's very different to, “Right, well, typically we have three things on the one-on-one. Over to you.” I think this mindset shift that listening happens before, during, and after any conversation, whether it's one-on-one, teams, projects, town halls, listening tours, will shift the kinds of responses you get initially from them, and it will shift the quality of your presence in the dialogue, because you're inside a container now that has some boundaries, as opposed to one without boundaries. Sometimes boundaries are appropriate. Sometimes they're not. You've got very different engagement and buy-in from the person who responded there.

Now, you can use this technique if you've forgotten to do it before the meeting. You can just use it at the beginning of the meeting. Cristina, what will make this a good conversation? It's really important in that example not to say, “Hey, Cristina. What will make this a good conversation for you?” It's a really important distinction.

Cristina Amigoni: Interesting.

Oscar Trimboli: In a one-on-one conversation, there are three distinct entities, a speaker, the listener, and the conversation. Great listeners orientate themselves around the progress of the conversation, not the participants in the dialogue. They're sitting slightly above it. They're using that question as a compass setting for the dialogue. 10 minutes in, I would say, “Hey, Cristina. At the beginning of the conversation, you said this will make it a good conversation. How are we tracking?” All of a sudden, I can get three different responses. Yeah, we're off track. We're on track. Or, hey, let's move on to the next thing, or let's shorten the meeting. By using this process tool of what makes a good conversation and playing it back, all of a sudden, you're signaling, I heard what you said at the beginning. I heard what you said since then, and I invite you in the conversation to go, okay, let's negotiate where we go, because it also gives you the opportunity to go, “I don't think we're fully explored it. When you mentioned this, I think we need to actually go and talk about this other department that I've just had visibility on, or a competitor, or regulator, or all these things there.”

Listening in this context is a really powerful signal to shorten meetings. Because if you do that, often, people will go, “Oh, yeah. Okay. Well, we've covered off what we need.” You can do this in the back half of the meeting as well, if you've forgotten to check in 10, 15 minutes in. Look, we've got about 20 minutes remaining, so don't do this in the last two minutes. But we've got 20 minutes remaining, we've got the ability to course correct. Alex, we've got 20 minutes left, is there anything we haven't covered that you'd like to focus on? Or is there anything you'd like to deep dive more on and all of that?

This is independent of whatever content is being discussed in the meeting, because again, you're signaling, “I've heard this. Is there anything else?” That gives and creates a space for everybody, the speaker and the listener, to just pause and take the moment to do that. Listening before, during, and after the dialogue, what's that got you thinking now, Alex?

Alex Cullimore: Well, first, I really appreciate your examples, both at the town hall level and at the meeting level. The town hall one really struck me, because I've seen so many town halls where they open up a Q&A in the last 15 minutes. They've already got a scripted thing. You mentioned the idea of a container. In my head, all I could see was the container of the four people that were allowed to be on screen and to have their cameras on, and then everybody else on the outside in this invisible space that's trying to just peer in. Then for a brief window where like, “Oh, yeah. You can ask anything you want.” Everybody's tired, waiting to go to lunch, whatever it is. There's barely that many questions that get passed over.

Maybe there's some freedom in, some benefit in them not having the time to prepare some of that answer, just so you can maybe get a genuine response. But that then implies that you're not trusting the genuine, the more scripted responses. I kept thinking about the ways you were suggesting to open containers and open space in the town hall meeting, and how easy it would be to do that and how often I see that missed, because of good ways of putting it.

Oscar Trimboli: A really poor Q&A is actually at the end. I'll explain what I mean by that, is we have tools today that you can have continuous Q&A going on using tools like Mentimeter and Slido, all these tools allow you not only to vote on the question that they think is important, it also allows to provide real-time Q&A commentary and the most important thing. I'm just going to pause there before I tell you what it is, because good leaders get everybody to listen to them. Great leaders get everybody to listen to each other.

The really important technique in all those tools is you have the ability for the audience to like, or vote on the question they want answered, not the question the leader feels most comfortable in answering. Because they're going to have some moderator function and they've probably taken some time to go queue point 1, 2, and 3. Then somebody's got a question that says, we're getting consistent quality failures on production line four, and it's causing a lot of rework and increased costs. Now, that's not a question the leader may be familiar with, but it's got the most votes from the audience, because we are great leaders and we're listening to it. The audience gets the audiences listening to each other, and we address that question.

It's a very different leader who's courageous enough to skate out on the thin ice and go out there. Yet, the impact for the group is, if the leader just says, “Look, I'm not even aware that we've got a quality issue on production line four. I'm really grateful to Thomas who asked that question. I could give you a very superficial response right now, and I don't think I would all know the question. What I'm going to do is I'm going to connect with Thomas directly, and then come back to all of you and tell you about the action plan.” You don't have to answer the question. It can be just as impactful and vulnerable and courageous to say, you don't know.

Alex Cullimore: That feels like it actually does answer the question. Because it is the answer to the question. What are we going to do about that? I don't know. I haven't heard of this decision yet. Let's figure it out.

Oscar Trimboli: Yeah. If the leader role models that in the system and the people managers role model that in the system, then all of a sudden, the agency, or frontline staff goes up, and they feel like, “Ah, okay. If I said that, there's no – our data doesn't tell us there's any production quality issues on line four, right?” Because maybe they're not collecting this specific issue. That's actually a real boiled example with the client I was working with in pharmaceuticals, where they were completely ignoring the production team, with anecdotal feedback about production line quality.

As leaders out there, is your orientation to get people to listen to you, or the active speaker, or are you putting systems, processes and tools in place to ensure that the teams are listening to each other?

Alex Cullimore: I really, really appreciate that one too, because this is one of the questions we got a lot was, how do I make sure I'm staying in the deep listening, active listening space? One of those, one of the things people want to know. Because it's a very common experience to drift out of that space, or to lose your focus, or whatever it is. But the refocusing of it, it's not just me listening to you, it's all of us listening to each other is a great reminder, so that it's not just like, oh, my intensity is in my getting into the active listening space. No, your intensity is in making sure there's space for active listening for everybody. That's a different focus that opens up a lot more doors than just, again, taking the responsibility as a leader either of hosting the meeting, or being the only person that's doing active listening. If you can open it, so everybody's listening to each other, what else can you find out?

Oscar Trimboli: Yeah. In a team meeting context, a lot of leaders say to me, “Well, I can't. Obviously, I can't ask that. We’ll make it a good conversation in my team meeting.” I said, no. That is the point. You need to ask that to everybody at the beginning, not because you know the answer, but because they don't know everybody else's answer. It gives them an extra hook to stay present in the meeting, where Alex says, this was a good meeting, because he wants to pick up on Thomas's quality issue and all of a sudden, we've got Simone in the meeting who goes, “Oh, well. I have to deal with Thomas. I'm going to listen differently when Alex speaks.” 

But if we're not thinking about that listening and communications container as leaders, we don't provide permission for people to say things like, “Simone, earlier on, you mentioned that quality was something you wanted to explore. We haven't actually discussed it. It doesn't require the leader to ask that question, because we've had the conversation. It can be organic from the team.” That's the power of the connections across the group, not hierarchical, because hierarchical is fragile. Whereas, network in this context is quite impactful, sustainable, it's organic, requires less energy for everybody. You can focus on fewer, more impactful things. I suspect we have to acknowledge a few of the people who've asked us questions and maybe explore their questions. What do you think, Cristina?

Cristina Amigoni: It reminds me of the end of our – when we do workshops, or leadership events, leadership training events, and with asking everybody, and the request is everybody voice counts. We openly say like, we're going to go around the room and everybody's going to answer this. We ask them to share what their biggest takeaway was from the session and what they will do, and what their action is going to be doing with the knowledge that they've acquired. I know for myself, that is my favorite part of the entire – whether it's a three-day event, or a half-hour event, or a four-hour event, because it gives me the knowledge, the understanding of what people have experienced and listening to every single one of them.

Then, I also see those light bulbs of those connections, those network possibilities happening when everybody's listening to each other and getting to know each other much deeper, because now they hear what mattered to each person more and what each person is wanting to do with the information and how somebody in the room could help them, or ask them deeper questions and connect with them on that

What was fascinating is that I do think that most of the time, the audience also finds that powerful as much as we do. Yet, once we did this, and there were about 50 people or so in the room, and a group of them were the leaders of everybody else. While we noticed that everybody else, and we asked to answer in short one sentence, few words, and some people would take 10 minutes to answer those questions. But we gave them the space that they wanted to take. They had the space, they took it. It was fascinating to see how the connections were made between the peers of like, “Oh, now, I understand somebody a little bit more, and I can collaborate with them.” The leader's feedback was like, “Oh, that was so long. Why do we have to hear from everybody?”

Oscar Trimboli: I'd love to be playful with that, with you as well. I'm curious as a build, so yes, and imagine if people could write their response, either instead of, or as well as, thermalizing their response. I'm curious what that prompts for you if people got the chance to write it as well as say it.

Alex Cullimore: That is one thing we have done with a lot of the other leadership courses. We have the ability like, “Hey, share your takeaways from the day,” and then everybody hears that out loud, but then they'd have the feedback session where they could actually just submit online. We would get some similar themes that we'd heard in some of the listening tours, but we would get a chance to get a lot more in depth. That was where if people were feeling like the group was moving one way or another of things they were interested in, we would get a little bit more interesting information, because they'd say something that they might not have been willing to say that the group seemed to be moving away from, or moving towards. Yeah. That's definitely been a helpful tool. How we get the senior group of leaders to say like, we'd listen to people. That was a different challenge.

Oscar Trimboli: Well, I might look back to that. I'm just curious if the group got to say the written responses in the example you talked to that Alex.

Cristina Amigoni: Oh, that's a good point.

Alex Cullimore: I think that we had themes that we ended up displaying to people. We captured them and said, “Here's the things that we heard.” Or if there were ones that we hadn't addressed, we definitely sent that to the group. No, we didn't give them. There’s the raw data, which might have been interesting, or at least some even more summarized version to make sure people could follow up with it. We got that to some of the groups, but that would be an interesting thing to add to the process, make it much more specific.

Oscar Trimboli: Yeah. Because where I'm going to take you, it might blow everyone's mind. But where you could take it is just display it real-time on a screen. The technologies can provide some fairly rudimentary thematic overlays as well. We can just click a button and it will do that. Again, it's back to the point, how does the group respond when they see he, in this case, everybody else's responses, whether that means there's a huge variation in the responses, whether that's by number of words, or topic types, or there's a tight alignment in the insights and the outputs and the actions. My speculation is the workshop began when that exercise finished, because now the group was ready to have that dialogue.

Cristina Amigoni: I would say, yes. Yes.

Oscar Trimboli: I wasn't in the room, but just my listening body sense would say, right, okay. We've done that three hours. Now we're ready. The second part of that is if you're doing multi-group examples of that, which I sense this one was, you can often start the meeting by saying, here's the thematic role responses from groups, other groups. What does that prompt for you? And invite them to reflect on that straight away. It's not going to be the same state they're at three hours in, but I think it might shortcut that as well.

One of the things that I say when it comes to technology, use the tools. Don't let the tools use you. If we can use those tools real-time in the 50 or more meetings, checking in with the group every 15 to 20 minutes to get a sense check of where they are. Give them a opportunity to self-direct where they want to go. It takes a really, really courageous leader to go where the groups are. Because oftentimes, when I've been working, either with leaders or consultants who are using these techniques, they go, the meeting went somewhere completely different. Yet, it was exactly where it needed to go. As opposed to, “Look, I've been contracted for this is the agenda that's been agreed with organizational development and the leaders side off on that.” Because, yeah, it's where the group is.

Again, are you listening to your agenda? Are you listening to where the group's at? Because you'll get much more energized and powerful groups if they feel you're listening to them continuously along the way. They're going to go in places where you never imagined, and that's okay, because if you don't, there's a gravitational pull on your change process that feels like you're weighed down by a huge anchor, and the reason your change initiatives aren't moving forward, the group believes you haven't acknowledged all the effort they've gone to to get to the present, so you can move into the future.

Too many future statements from leaders and not enough funerals in workplaces, if they embrace the ritual of funerals, and acknowledge the past and bring forward the things you want to honor and maybe burn, or bury the things you want to leave behind, you'll get much different change initiatives as well.

Cristina Amigoni: Absolutely.

 Alex Cullimore: That's a really good one.

 Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. What did you find interesting in the responses we received that we sent to you?

Oscar Trimboli: I always say, the difference between hearing and listening is action. I want to acknowledge Philip, who asked a question about ADHD and neurodiversity. It was a question I wasn't qualified to answer. What I did was I worked with my research company yesterday and said, this is a question I've been posed. I feel and sense that there are other people who may have wished to have asked this question, but maybe never had the platform to do it, so thank you to Cristina and Alex for providing the platform for this question.

We're going to add an additional question into our listening assessment for allow people to self-identify around neurodiversity, so I will have the data to be able to meaningfully respond. Maybe not necessarily answer Philip's really useful question about his frustration with the way people communicate to him, where their communication preference, long stories, doesn't fit his natural listening style as well. Philip just said, “I've got ADHD. I often have to drift away, because the people are just speaking too long.” Philip, thank you for your question.

In doing so, it also challenged my perception about labelling behaviors versus labelling people. I think labels are really good on food jars and pharmaceuticals and not necessarily on people. Labelling behavior. When I thought about your question just a little bit more deeply, what came to me was there's an opportunity for you to self-disclose, not necessarily I have ADHD, and therefore, I would prefer you to communicate to me this way. You can simply say, if you give me the key point first, I can understand how to stay in the conversation longer, and not disclose our preferred communication style. If you're a leader and you don't know the audience, it's always story first and statistic second. That's going to get most of the group.

Yet, if you're in a highly rational sequential system, think software engineering, construction, very rational systems, finance, actuarial, story first, stat second will make you feel flaky to the group. You've got to land with the statistic first and then you may come up with a story second. In one on ones with your leaders, self-disclose your preferred way to ingest, understand and sense make of information. So, “Hey, boss. I know you love to tell great stories, that by the third minute, I'm lost. If you can dial those stories back to three minutes, or 90 seconds, I can probably stay in them.” “Hey, boss. When you get up on the whiteboard and you put those formulas with great numbers and curly brackets, I'm lost. I'd love you to just give me a framework that I can make visual sense of before you go into the numbers. That way, I can make it a more meaningful contribution.”

Those simple nuggets, because listening is a simultaneous equation between the speaker and the listener. If we self-disclose our preference, it will help both of us. If you're a really great listener, you can pretty quickly diagnose their preference, because as the speaker you can notice how quickly they're checking in or out on that. So, thanks, Philip. You've completely changed my approach to the way we collect the data going forward.

Cristina Amigoni: That's very fascinating. Yeah, I never thought about the data first versus story first and vice versa, and how we all have our preferences on both ends in the listening and the speaking part of that.

Oscar Trimboli: Yeah. Again a good listener and a good communicator can either read the room, use the before technique to see where the room’s at, to understand what's going to be useful. Because the opposite is true, too. A lot of leaders think their job is to charge into the future, right. All they do, they talk about the future, the future, the future, the change we need to make, the future, the future and it's all going to be awesome. There are people still waiting to be acknowledged for their contribution in the past. As a leader, how carefully are you balancing the way you talk to time? Because again, if you're completely future orientated and you've got a group that's not necessarily that way, how do you bring them along? Otherwise, they'll just be left behind. You won't get contribution from them. You're listening to time.

The other thing is, are you listening internally, or externally? How much are you bringing the competition, the customer, the regulator, the adjacent industries into a dialogue, versus talking about department A versus department B, and the research we did was. Then there's problems versus solutions, and then there's negative versus positives. There is a whole spectrum of the way people use language that they are not conscious of, because they're in a pattern that's contained within their own world. They've only got one set of glasses with one prescription and they can only see what they can see. So, my invitation is just to notice how you do those things. Language matters.

Cristina Amigoni: It does. It definitely does. We could talk about this all day long. There's so much richness.

Oscar Trimboli: Happy to come back for more.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. We will have you on again.

Cristina Amigoni: I know. Five more layers –

Alex Cullimore: Can push your offer.

Cristina Amigoni: - on this. But we have a couple of last questions for you. One is, where can people find you? We know where we found you, but where can everybody else find you? Then, what does authenticity mean to you?

Oscar Trimboli: Back to something I mentioned earlier. I would rather you not find me. I would rather you found your own listening. My invitation is to explore your own listening first, and then if you want to contact me, you'll discover that through – you go to listeningquiz.com and take the 20-question assessment. I promise how quickly I can turn around Phillip’s edition, because developers freaked out. It's like, “Remind us.” How do people find their listening? Go to listeningquiz.com. You can take the seven-minute assessment and you'll get a five-page report, telling you about your primary and secondary listening barriers and you can go from there.

What does authenticity mean to me? The decision I made along with my dad to move into aged care recently was a very, very difficult decision. Yet, the choice to make about putting him close to me, literally 12 minutes’ walk, three minutes’ drive away from me, meant I went from resenting driving 90 minutes to see my dad, to joyfully stepping out into the sunshine every single day to have a meal with him.

The guilt I felt, how few times I would go and see my dad, and the decision we took to move him closer to me and having the conversation with him. What you don't know about my dad is he’s got a bit of very early dementia, so his ability to process things. I could have easily just moved him in and not had him as part of the discussion, but I didn't feel that was true to me, or true to him, and it was a difficult discussion. It was an emotional discussion. It was a discussion that took place over months, not minutes or days, and brought us closer together. Initially, I didn't think that was the case. For me, authenticity is the courage to have the conversations you need to have, rather than avoiding them.

Alex Cullimore: It’s an excellent definition.

Cristina Amigoni: Wow.

Alex Cullimore: Well, I think about every 30 seconds I've thought, “Hey, that's the clip we could use today. Oh, no. That's the clip that we could use for that. Oh, no, that's a good clip.” Thank you so much, Oscar, for joining us with so much – so many different negatives of wisdom and insight. There's a lot that could be pulled out of this. We're thrilled that you found us after we had found you, and we're really glad to have you on for this conversation, and many more in the future.

Oscar Trimboli: For those who've asked questions, I will individually record my response, and Cristina and Alex will get them directly back to you.

Cristina Amigoni: We definitely will. Thank you for that. We'll love to definitely have you back and figure out, how do we evolve our way of asking people to share their listening questions and thoughts before our next recording.

Oscar Trimboli: Yeah. Thanks for listening.

Cristina Amigoni: How do we listen better? Thank you so much.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

Cristina Amigoni: What did you think of our conversation?

Oscar Trimboli: I will answer that, but I sense a better question is, what do you think the audience would make of our conversation?

Cristina Amigoni: Okay. That is a better question.

Oscar Trimboli: Therefore, my question back to you is, what do you think your audience, because I don't know them as well as you do, what do you think your audience, Cristina, and then Alex, will take away from that? What's one thing you'll think they take away from that?

Cristina Amigoni: Well, without being able to ask them right now before I answer this, my hope is that they will reflect on their experience with their own listening and also, start observing what happens when they are the speaker, when they set the stage of listening before, during, and after, and when they are in that act of listening, as well as what's happening when other people are listening to them.

Oscar Trimboli: And Alex?

Alex Cullimore: I think, there's a lot of takeaways I would love people to get from it, but one that I particularly appreciated and that I think people will enjoy, because it's a bit of a twist on what they might be thinking is the idea of leadership and leading conversations as helping other people find a space to listen to each other, and getting the chance to actually, not just the deep listening in one-on-one, but a lot of skills about deep listening and active listening to a group, to a large group, to even a very large format group like a town hall.

I think there's a lot of great tips that people will take away for their staff meetings, for their large department meetings, for their town halls, for when you actually want to engage a full group. It's made me think a lot about the different large format meetings that I've seen and there are some where there's just all kinds of engagement, people are having conversations in the chat and it's very open and freewheeling and they'll have questions throughout and there's the ones that are just so much more, for lack of a better term, stodgy and there's no movement. And so, I think there's a lot of great takeaways for how you listen to a group, to a large group. Over time, not just in a meeting. Although, there are plenty of those meeting interactions, too.

Oscar Trimboli: Yeah. I’m grateful for this conversation, because when we listen to the audience beforehand, the way I can provide responses that are more contextual to where the audience is at means I'm bringing much more specific, tangible, practical value in the responses I provide. That's because you created this container with us, the group beforehand. You're getting better and more impactful me, than if you just start with, what are the five levels of listening?

Cristina Amigoni: Indeed.

Oscar Trimboli: If we did one thing differently for next time, what would that one thing be? Whether that's process, dialogue, preparation, anything like that?

Cristina Amigoni: I would love to see if we could get somebody to come on the podcast and be part of the conversation and ask their questions and not just be on the receiving end of the recording.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. That makes me wish we were on a live radio show. We can have people call in and actually just ask, or just have a full audience ready to send them in.

Oscar Trimboli: Riverside has that feature.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. It does. Yes.

Oscar Trimboli: Alex, and that build on that?

Alex Cullimore: I think, the other thing I would do is follow up conversations with direct calls with the people who answered, to be able to get deeper into what they had said. I would just get them engaged in that, because there's a lot of great responses and it's not that they weren't understandable, but there's really, I think, more depth that we could find if we just engaged with the people that had already sent those questions, as well as maybe some follow up like, “Hey, here's themes that we're seeing. What else would you want to know?” Or even go deeper with the audience, again, based on the first few responses. I think I would engage more with that directly.

Oscar Trimboli: My curiosity is, how we'll use this meta technique for other guests?

Alex Cullimore: We know, Oscar, you've got so much research in listening, so we've got a specific topic we can hold on to. I think, some people we talk to, we get a lot of great conversation about their whole story. If we can get some idea of the things they specifically want to talk about and then do some of this understanding of what would you want to ask to somebody who, for example, one of our recent guests is a very purpose-driven coach. She likes to coach around what your internal compass is. So, get people to engage with what questions do you want to know, firstly, about a purpose coach. Here’s this topic. What do you want to know? What do we need?

Oscar Trimboli: Brilliant.

Cristina Amigoni: I would like to adopt more consciously, asking the questions ahead of time. Not just a podcast guest, but even in every meeting we have is what will make our conversation worthwhile.

Oscar Trimboli: Yes. I love that construction. That's a great sense.

Alex Cullimore: We often talk about this. We are trying to help leaders understand like, what your agenda was for the meeting might not be where the group needs to do, but we have not got – I really love that as a way to be much more deliberate about where this conversation needs to go right now. You can have whatever agenda in your head, but where does this conversation need to go and getting – we've been doing that by intuition and asking questions to see where people are at. If we can be much more deliberate right up front, I think we can – that's a huge game changer.

[OUTRO]

Alex Cullimore: Thanks so much for listening to Uncover the Human. We Are Siamo, that is the company that sponsors and created this podcast. If you’d like to reach out to us further, reach out with any questions, or to be on the podcast, please reach out to podcast@wearesiamo.com. Or you can find us on Instagram. Our handle is @wearesiamo, S-I-A-M-O. Or you can go to wearesiamo.com and check us out there. Or, I suppose, Cristina, you and I have LinkedIn as well. People could find us anywhere else.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, we do have LinkedIn. Yes. Yeah. We’d like to thank Abbay Robinson for producing our podcast and making sure that they actually reach all of you. And Rachel Sherwood for the wonderful score.

Alex Cullimore: Thank you guys so much for listening. Tune in next time.

Cristina Amigoni: Thank you. 

[END]