Hey Reader!
Last week I was on a mastermind retreat with a bunch of wonderful entrepreneurs and then went straight to Las Vegas to give a workshop to a group of founders on scaling your vision + building the team who can bring it to life.
This week I’m back with another great note from a founder, which is the basis for the newsletter. If you’re a founder or exec leading a company or team, hit reply and tell me about a challenging situation or exciting opportunity you’re facing. I might use it in an upcoming newsletter!
Let’s get to it.
Letter from a Founder
Hey B!
I attended your workshop at Craft and Commerce and loved it.
Afterwards, I listened to your podcast with Nathan about leading ConvertKit (soon to be Kit) and was inspired by the idea of sending people out to walk together with a question for bonding. I think you called the concept “listening walks”?
I’m facilitating an offsite for a remote team I support and plan to use this idea. Would you be able to share any of the questions that were the best for sharing and getting to know each other?
Thanks!
– Founder of a successful consulting company
Hey, Successful Consultant,
Love that you were at Craft + Commerce and thanks for listening to the podcast! That was five years of shared experience packed into two dense hours on leadership, remote teams, scaling growth, and more.
We do indeed call what you’re talking about “Listening Walks” and we got the concept from our friends at Reboot. Most people won’t have heard of the concept, so here’s a quick overview of why and how we do it:
Kim Scott has an excellent framework for maximizing performance at work called Radical Candor:
One of the dimensions of the framework is to “Care Personally.” In order to care about someone, you have to know them. When you get to know someone and show that you care, you build trust, and trust is the foundation for being able to say challenging things to one another.
Listening walks are a way to get to know each other and build trust within a team. Here’s how they work:
- Divide your team into pairs — people should pair up with someone they don’t know all that well or haven’t worked with closely before
- Give them a single question, which will be the basis for their conversation
- Each pair should go on a walk, side by side for a set period of time (20, 24, or 30 minutes all work well)
- They should divide the time in half, walking one direction for half of the time and then turning around at the halfway point to walk back
- For the first half of the walk, one person is designated the speaker and the other is designated the listener
- The listener has two jobs: 1) listen and 2) keep time. The listener shouldn’t say anything or react with verbal or non-verbal cues. They should simply listen.
- The speaker answers the question with whatever level of detail they prefer; if they finish before time is up, they can start over and say it all again until you hit the half way point (10, 12, or 15 minutes depending on the total time assigned).
- At the halfway point, turn around, and switch roles.
When you get back to the meeting point with the whole team, there is an excellent opportunity for a debrief. Have each pair ask each other whether it’s ok to share takeaways with the group. Everyone should feel empowered to say yes or no according to what they’re comfortable with.
Then facilitate a debrief with the group that starts with a simple question: what did you learn about your coworker through this exercise?
If you want you can follow up with additional questions (although I’ve found the discussion quickly becomes lively and everyone wants to share if the environment is safe + welcoming). A couple other questions for the debrief:
- What did you experience emotionally and in your body as the speaker? How about as the listener?
- What did you notice about the experience of listening intently for 10/12/15 minutes?
- When were you most uncomfortable?
- How do you feel about your teammate that you didn’t know all that well before this exercise?
You can set whatever time limit makes sense to allocate to the debrief. At ConvertKit, we found that the longer the debrief went, the more the team felt connected to one another up to the point where people got physically tired.
So, this is the context for the question you asked, Successful Consultant: “what questions are best for the walking portion of the exercise?”
Here are questions that can work well:
- What is your story?
- Who are you, really?
- What have been the key turning points in your life or career that led you to this company/role?
- What have you always wished your coworkers knew about you?
- What is most important to you / what do you most value in life?
- What have been your greatest triumphs? (Perhaps the ones that you rarely talk about for fear of sounding like you’re bragging)
- Who is the person or people who have most influenced the person or professional you are today?
- What is your vision for your life? How does this company or role fit into that vision?
Whenever a question *could* result in a deeply personal answer, we always try to give an option for a purely professional answer as well. For example, for the turning points question, we offer “in your life or career” so that people can choose to keep it purely career-oriented, or they can delve deeper into who they are outside of work.
If you decide to give this a try, drop me a note and let me know how it goes! I’d love to hear about it.
Much love and respect,
P.S. – Things to do next:
- Hit reply and write me a letter about a leadership challenge you’re facing. I might answer it in an upcoming newsletter.
- Listen to Josh Scott on how building community on YouTube became an incredible way to scale his company
- Forward this newsletter to a friend who would enjoy it
- Refer a founder friend to coaching and I’ll pay you $1,000 if we start working together