What makes a great company culture?

What is the most important inter-relational skill? Listening.

Listening creates the psychological safety people in any kind of relationship need to feel safe to speak up, including at work.

What are the best ways to put this into practice? Here are some practices you can use at any time within your organisation, to make sure you listen to your people’s invaluable input.

Practice listening with circle meetings

Circle meetings are great to gather ideas around a topic or problem your team needs to solve or make decisions on.

Instead of just asking into the round if anyone has any ideas, give everyone a couple of minutes to talk about what they are thinking. This way you avoid having the same people talk all the time and gather everyone’s input.

To make this really successful, there are some ground rules. Go around in a circle, only one person speaks at a time. Be respectful, honest, compassionate, empathise, don’t rant or judge, and remember time is limited. Create that psychologically safe space for your people to share how they would improve things for your organisation to become even better at what you do.

People can pass their talking time to the next person if they can’t think of anything, pause to just have silent time to think or participate and tell everyone about their ideas.

Circle meetings are useful when…

Making sense of a complex, difficult, or painful situation and laying the ground to be able to move on.
Generating new ideas and momentum for innovation.
Building a shared understanding of how people develop different perspectives and ideas.
Avoiding arguments based on lack of understanding.
Building trust, reducing fear, and relieving strong or repressed emotions.
Helping participants appreciate that conversations involve talking and listening.

Example: There might be a complaint in your organisation about too many meetings. You can ask your team how that is affecting their daily work and how they feel things could be done differently.

Practice listening with the consent process

Once you collected your ideas in the circle meeting, you can start on a proposal for a solution. A proposal to solve the issue about too many meetings affecting people’s productivity could look like this:

‘Some of you mentioned that we could try to communicate in different ways such as using Slack more often for immediate questions. This would help us cut down on meeting time. Others suggested that meeting agendas are submitted and drafted at least a couple of days before each meeting so everyone can prepare and make sure meetings don’t overrun. I propose to try both options for the next three months and then review how it’s going.’

Then, similar to the circle meeting process, give everyone the opportunity to speak. First, ask if they have any clarifying questions about the proposal. For example, who is responsible for the meeting agendas, who can submit items, or if you can use a different messaging tool to Slack.

Once everyone had a chance to ask questions, ask for any further input and suggestions to these questions. Same as before, everyone gets a chance to speak. Adjust the proposal as needed:

‘I propose that we use Slack to communicate on a more frequent basis. We will set up relevant channels and everyone will get access and training on how to use Slack. Whoever sets up a meeting is responsible to ask all attendees to submit agenda items and the approximate time it will take to discuss these at least three days before the meeting. They will then send the agenda to all attendees two days before the meeting. We will review both processes in three months’ time.’

Good enough for now and safe enough to try

Only when no one has any more questions or suggestions, you can check for consent: ‘Is the proposal good enough for now and safe enough to try?’

Everyone then get a chance to either consent to the decision, abstain or object. However, objections are only valid if the proposal could do harm to the team or company. So maybe you actually can’t use Slack for data protection reasons. ‘I have a better idea.’ or ‘I don’t like it.’ are not valid objections.

Everyone had a chance to contribute to and shape the proposal. If they consent to it, they cannot complain about it further down the line. This is also why it is important to include a trial phase for new processes, so they can be changed and refined if they are not working as intended.

The consent process is useful when…

You need to make a decision relatively fast and need input from the people involved. Consent decisions will be much more robust and accepted than decisions made by an individual for others.
Everyone is empowered with the right to amend or object.
Making decisions for new policies, processes, or procedures.
You can include limited time frames and regular review periods to make a decision ‘good enough for now and safe enough to try’.

Great leaders listen and create solutions together

Ask your team what they love about working for you and what gets in the way of them being able to do their best work.
Write down everything they say. Together, pick the smallest barrier and work with your team to discuss changes to improve it. You could use the circle meeting and/or consent process for this step.
Then, have your team implement these changes without asking you for permission!

This process is useful to…

Engage every individual in searching for answers.
Create safe spaces and open spaces for new possibilities.
Enrich the quality of observations and insights before expressing them.
Build naturally toward consensus or shared understanding.
Help guide scaling up and spreading innovations.
Simplify strategy in fast moving markets.

Practice listening by starting with the why

In pairs, have your people answer the question ‘Why’? at least 9 times. For example: ‘Why is it important to you that this project succeeds?’ At the end, collect the answer to the last why from each person.

This is useful to…

Discover what is truly important for your team members.
Generate a small number of clear answers to help you move forward faster.
Generate criteria for deciding who will be included.
Create a shared purpose and responsibility.
Lay the foundation for spreading and scaling innovations.

Find out more how we can help you implement these and other practices.