For a new manager, it can be tough to identify what changes your team would find most impactful. Engaging in a listening tour can help you find the right path!
Resource managers are integral to the success of service businesses. That can mean a lot of pressure to perform from the second you step in the door.
But before you begin stressing, we’re here to remind you that your first few weeks (ideally months) in any job are for learning.
One tool you can use to set yourself up for success as a new resource manager is the ‘listening tour.’
In this article, we're breaking down what a listening tour is, why it’s important, and how you can use this learning tool to optimize your approach to resource management.
A listening tour is a series of meetings used to collect unfiltered feedback from a business’s employees. It’s a pretty simple concept at its core but is overlooked by many.
The overarching goal is to gain a deeper understanding of employees’ experiences with a specific business function; in this article, we’re talking about building a strong resource management function.
Listening tours are particularly beneficial for managers joining a new team or business. As you adjust to your role, you’ll likely want to improve your team’s foundation and identify initiatives to focus on.
By gathering insights into the issues team members are experiencing with resourcing or their perception of the team, you can put measures in place to better support them.
Running a listening tour has many more benefits than simply gathering information. Here are three benefits you can expect to experience as a new manager.
If you want to improve your business’s approach to resource management, you need to understand how it currently works. That means looking outside your leadership bubble.
Talking to representatives from other teams whose day-to-day is affected by resourcing decisions is the fastest way to get a clear picture of what they think about the resourcing process, what they’re struggling with, and what they want to achieve.
Christine Robinson, former Managing Director of Resource Management at Baker Tilly, spoke on this specific benefit in a recent webinar:
I traveled around to the different offices and truly just listened. I asked questions around what people thought about resource management. It was eye-opening to hear from people what they think the (resourcing) process is about, what they think it should be, where improvements could be made, what the challenges were."
Listening tours provide an opportunity to drive real change by crowdsourcing ideas for innovation from across the business.
Exploring a wide range of future possibilities empowers you to make informed decisions around improving resource management processes. This ensures your proposed solutions will benefit everyone and fix real problems people are experiencing.
Finally, performing a listening tour isn’t only about information gathering; it’s also about building trust in the work community.
But why is this important? Engagement is one of the four currencies that dictate the success of resource management initiatives, meaning you need the workforce onboard with your proposed changes if you want them to be successful.
So, by seeking input from employees from across the business on what changes they’d like to see, you show that you value their opinions and experiences. This creates an environment where people feel comfortable sharing their views and is a great way to ensure your working relationships are built on a foundation of trust.
The ultimate goal of running a listening tour is to gain insights into what the workforce thinks about resource management. But let’s dig a little deeper. Here are the three main goals your listening tour should aim to achieve.
Listening is just half the equation. You also need to take the lead on planning and asking the questions.
As you want to invite meaningful conversation, we recommend asking open-ended questions. Open-ended questions encourage full answers, give people more room to elaborate on their thoughts, and avoid skewing the conversation.
For example, ‘What can leadership do better to support your team?’ is a much more productive question than ‘Do you agree leadership can do more to support your team?’
Here are some examples you can use to generate meaningful conversations and greater insights:
Ready to set yourself up for success with a listening tour? Here’s how to get started.
Transparency is the name of the game when it comes to running a listening tour. Before jumping in, communicate your plan with everyone it impacts, including key stakeholders and the teams you’ll interact with.
This will give everyone time to consider their thoughts and whether they want to participate in the initiative, ensuring their contributions are beneficial. And when in doubt, it's better to overcommunicate.
There are countless ways to host a listening tour; asking yourself these questions ahead of time will help you create an agenda:
We recommend meeting one person at a time. If participants would prefer to talk to you in groups, keep these as small as possible, as asking people to open up in a group environment can be intimidating.
Creating a psychologically safe environment for participants means ensuring that they feel comfortable speaking honestly — without fear of repercussions.
Firstly, you should leave any pre-held views about how things are or should be at the door. For this initiative to work, you must approach every conversation with an open mind, showing you are open to receiving feedback.
Next, help participants feel comfortable with an icebreaker question. For example, ask each employee a question about themselves before diving into their opinions on resource management.
Finally, keep all insights anonymous. If you are going to record your conversations, tell participants that you will be doing this first, but reassure them that you will anonymize their comments.
It is crucial to ensure that no comments are linked to individual employees when reporting back to key stakeholders: if participants fear that you will not respect their anonymity, they may feel unable to be entirely honest with you.
We shared a list of suggested questions above; however, you don’t need to ask all these questions to everyone.
Often, asking fewer questions is more beneficial as it allows team members to dive deeper into the key issues or challenges they face.
Your job now is to listen and note any recurring topics or trends. Common themes will likely emerge, helping you create a list of challenges you’ll want to address immediately.
Here’s how Laura Dean Smith, a resource management leader, described her experience with this process:
I asked them a lot of questions related to resourcing… I really wanted to understand the current state and the story that they had to tell. Through my listening tour, I identified some common themes where people were struggling, finding challenges, and experiencing overload in their work on a regular basis.
Based on this, I outlined all of the problems and challenges that I had heard from the different groups, and then I took those and created a proposal for how resource management could address each of these different areas.”
Here are our top tips for delivering a successful listening tour:
Listening is one of the most important leadership skills you can learn as a new manager. But it’s easier said than done!
You can make sure you prioritize listening by:
Listening tours shouldn’t happen in isolation. Ensure this initiative isn’t treated as a stand-alone event by integrating it with broader business strategies wherever possible and aligning with other teams' long-term goals.
Sharing your observations is key to effective stakeholder management, as it helps ensure everyone feels heard and considered.
Once your tour is over, it’s time to produce a report you can share with other stakeholders and your participants. This should include your key learnings and recurring themes to address.
There’s nothing worse than sharing your feedback with excited new managers and then... nothing changing. Cue tumbleweeds.
Nip this issue in the bud by becoming the people’s champion; share your proposed solutions to each of the identified problems and keep everyone the changes will impact up-to-date with developments.
Plus, by keeping employees engaged, you’ll increase your chances of winning buy-in for resource management initiatives in the future.
