New leaders who spend their first weeks meeting people across levels, asking what works and what is broken, build later proposals on what the organization said, and those proposals carry its fingerprints.
An example
Eight hundred employees at a chemicals plant expected layoffs when a new general manager with a cost-cutting reputation arrived. For his first six weeks he proposed nothing. He met sixty people one at a time or in small groups, from shift operators to maintenance planners, and asked each the same three questions: what works here, what is broken, and what would you change if you ran the place. He kept notes, and in week seven he sent the whole plant a two-page summary of what he had heard, in their words, with no one identified. The top three complaints were maintenance backlogs, unclear shift handoffs, and a purchasing approval process that took weeks. His first plan, in week ten, addressed all three, and operators recognized their own complaints in it. The handoff redesign, which cut two contract roles, passed without a grievance.
Why it works
New leaders who propose early are judged as outsiders imposing a view, while those whose proposals rest on what people said can point to the organization's own diagnosis, which makes those proposals look better and easier to accept. People support plans they recognize as their own. The tour also gives the leader real information and early relationships across levels. It depends on the purpose being open, on the leader listening for real, and on the answers visibly shaping the plan.
The thinking behind it
Michael D. Watkins The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels (2003), a practitioner book for executives in transition, advises new leaders to accelerate their learning by talking with people across the organization before committing to a course of action. Sixty conversations before any proposal gave the new plant manager a diagnosis the plant recognized as its own.
John P. Kotter In The General Managers (1982), Kotter found that effective general managers set agendas early and built networks of cooperative relationships with the many people their agendas depended on, inside and outside the chain of command. A listening tour does both at once: it shapes the agenda from what people report, and it opens a relationship with each of them.
When it fits
Leaders new to a role, a unit, or a company, with a few weeks before they are expected to act, are the ones it serves. You need the time, the patience to hold back your own diagnosis, and the willingness to let what you hear change your plan.
How to use it well
Announce the tour and its purpose: you want to understand before you decide.
- Meet people across levels and functions, alone or in small groups, and ask everyone the same few questions.
- Listen more than you talk, take notes, and resist defending current plans in the meetings.
- Send a summary of what you heard back to everyone, in their language, without identifying individuals.
- Build your first proposals on that summary, and point to where each came from.
Set an end date. A tour that runs too long becomes a reason to wait.
What it costs and where it backfires
Weeks of listening delay action, and some will read it as indecision. Raising expectations and then ignoring what you heard costs more than never asking, and some of what you hear will conflict, so you will have to choose. Using the tour to collect the names of dissenters, or to look as if you are listening to a plan already made, is intelligence-gathering under a false purpose, the defend-tier Listening Session Intelligence.
When it is used on you
Tell a new leader who asks what is broken exactly that, with specifics. Then watch whether the plan reflects what was said. If the summary leaves out what many people raised, ask why in the next forum. A tour that changes nothing tells you what later consultation will be worth.