The Case for Listening Leadership to Empower Enterprise Collaboration and Engagement

Mentimeter is a Business Reporter client.

How everyday engagement and collective-intelligence decision-making improves business performance.

A key challenge for leaders seeking to improve business performance is making the right decisions quickly, but many businesses struggle to meet this challenge. The annual impact of inefficient collaboration and poor decision-making is huge, with billions wasted on salaries spent on meetings, and decisions that affect everyday operations being made without taking important information into account.

To meet this challenge, enterprises need to optimize collaboration and boost engagement to empower leaders to make better business decisions through joint decision-making. To achieve this, it’s key to utilize the power of anonymity, convert passive audiences into active contributors and create engagement moments in our everyday work. These are the three tenets of what’s called “listening leadership.”

Collaboration for high-impact decision-making

The way for businesses and leaders to make the most impactful and insightful decisions is through collaboration. Leveraging the collective intelligence of your organization is the key to good decision-making. But collaboration is the great unperfected skill of the workplace.  

Most teams make use of messaging software to manage daily communication and task management. These familiar tools tend to work well in facilitating collaboration, whether team members are based on-site or remotely.  

However, problems tend to arise when teams collaborate in ways that are more occasional and time-constrained. In workshops and brainstorming sessions, we usually have the ability and the tools to reach the divergent stage, where the goal is to get ideas on the table, bounce suggestions off one another and expand the number of options. But this is where a lot of teams run into trouble.  

Collective intelligence and listening without bias

Where we often fail is in that final stage when decisions are made and the next steps are agreed upon. This crucial conclusion of any workshop or meeting often means the difference between a collaboration resulting in a high business impact or a low business impact. But it is this stage that we often get wrong.  

We often lack both the social and technical means to define an idea, action point or takeaway from a meeting. Instead, what frequently happens is that the person with the loudest voice forces their idea through, or a leader makes an executive decision outside of the meeting that doesn’t harness the collective intelligence of the group.  

Bad business decisions often occur because of biases that decision makers are unaware of. Research by McKinsey found that, left unchecked, unconscious biases undermine strategic decision-making and negatively impact business performance.

A simple, low-cost solution to this common problem is anonymity. When a contributor’s seniority, gender identity, race and ethnicity are hidden, unconscious or conscious bias is removed from the equation, leaving leaders and participants to assess their input on merit alone.

Businesses need a mechanism that ensures that everyone’s voice is heard, harnesses the collective intelligence of the group and secures the whole team’s buy-in through inclusive decision-making. Making this process anonymous allows team members to contribute honestly, freely and without bias—meaning that the best idea, rather than the loudest voice, wins out.  

Anonymity is key to this process, giving employees the opportunity to speak freely and honestly while knowing that their contribution will be seen and evaluated without any unconscious bias. We know that this method produces an atmosphere of inclusivity and transparency that is incredibly valuable in assuring employee engagement and trust.  

A crisis of meaningful engagement in business

Another pressing issue at many companies is the challenge of employee engagement, which is essential to improve business performance. Even with the best collaboration tools and practices, high business impact requires an engaged team.  

When we bring pre-pandemic ways of working to the post-pandemic present, the result is a cohort of under-engaged employees. Many workers go from meeting link to meeting link on mute, communicating only through facial expressions (if they aren’t a blank square on a screen) and going long periods of the day without expressing an opinion or idea.  

In this mode, employees often leave meetings feeling unproductive and unfulfilled by work they don’t see as meaningful. Workers are leaving jobs where they do not feel purposefully engaged, and they are in search of careers they can feel passionate about.  

Everyday engagement moments

The solution to this engagement crisis is not the virtual happy hours of the early days of the pandemic or intensive quarterly retreats with your team. We need to rethink the way we conduct meetings, and to design them around everyday engagement moments. 

Everyday engagement moments are moments of inclusivity where everybody gets to have their voice heard. On an organizational level, giving space to every voice, especially in large meetings, can be a real challenge. Speaking up in meetings of any size can be daunting for some people, and giving everyone time to have their individual say can be a lengthy and inefficient process. However, digital tools that visualize real-time interactions and input allow for quick, easy and efficient engagement. 

The case for listening leadership

Collaboration and engagement are cornerstones of strong business performance—and encouraging a culture of listening leadership is the key to unlocking their potential. 

By practicing inclusive, transparent, collaborative decision-making that harnesses the collective intelligence of the organization, and by making everyday engagement moments part of our daily routines, we can ensure that everyone feels included, valued and challenged. All this starts with a cultural shift toward talking less and listening more—and having the right listening tools. 

— Johnny Warström, Cofounder and CEO, Mentimeter

Image: Courtesy of Mentimeter