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Extending Your Influence: Listen at Scale, with Charlene Li, Founder and CEO, Altimeter Group, Author, The Engaged Leader
Listening at Scale
One of the first things you have to do as an engaged leader is to listen at scale. And I define that by not just listening on an annual basis or through a survey with your customers or employees, but listening to them all the time, constantly, and listening to the people and the audiences that are important to you in terms of you achieving your goals.
Choose your audience wisely
You can’t listen to everybody, so who will you decide to listen to? And that’s the art of listening. But then there’s also the science of listening where you’re actually using these tools to be able to listen to people specifically and to listen to them on a constant basis. What I encourage leaders to do is to think about the key people you want to listen to and then spend 15 minutes a day just listening to what they’re saying because, as a leader, the constant struggle that you have is trying to figure out what’s truth. What is the true meaning of what people are saying? What are employees saying? What are customers saying? And by listening at scale you’ll be able to understand what that truth is much better and faster than you could in the past.
When we talk about the art of listening this is really about saying what you will listen to and what you won’t. And it’s really identifying the key audiences. So for example, if you’re trying to reach a new customer base, where do they sit? Are they on certain social networks? Are they talking about certain topics? And being able to hone in on those specific conversations is the key. It may take a bit of trial and error, but over time you’ll be able to understand where they are and also what are they saying. And so being able to not necessarily expect that you can do this right from the very beginning. Like any art it takes a bit of practice. But honing that art, honing that practice to be able to listen to the key audiences over time is what the art of listening’s all about.
One of the best things that you can do is to selectively listen to people who are themselves filters. In other words, you trust them to be a good indicator of everything else that’s being said in the marketplace. You’d probably think of these people as connectors. They’re people who pull people together, who are mavens, or subject matter experts. Listen to them first because they’re a shortcut to understanding who else is out there, understanding what’s happening in the marketplace.
Lessons Learned at Red Robin
So here’s an example of listening at scale: Red Robin, the quick service restaurant chain, launched a new burger called the Pig Out Tavern Style Burger. And they suddenly realize that the launch was not going well. but they didn’t hear it from customers. They heard it through their employees, the people who are the restaurant servers. They had set up an enterprise social network that allowed the employees to put feedback on to there, and they started saying things like this burger is falling apart in people’s laps. There’s too much sauce. The bacon is soggy.
And people at headquarters, the top executives of the organization heard them, heard the front line employees, and said, “Let’s go down and really understand what was going on.” So on that enterprise social network they started communicating with those employees directly, planning out what exactly was wrong, getting more details. [They] took it back into that headquarters test kitchens, developed a solution, and had it back into the field, a new recipe, in just 30 days.
Now to give you an idea of how dramatic a change that was: it typically took Red Robin 12 to 18 months to make any changes to the menu. And they did this change in 30 days. What they did was they shortcut the development innovation process by being able to go straight to the front lines, understand what the problem was, come up with a fix and then implement it across all of their restaurants in 30 days. That’s a tremendous benefit again of listening at scale.