Practice : Listening Tours and Skip-Level Conversations
Purpose and Strategic Importance
Listening Tours and Skip-Level Conversations are practices through which leaders go directly to people at various levels of the organisation to hear their perspective — beyond what is filtered through management layers. As organisations scale, leaders receive increasingly curated information. Skip-levels and listening tours are one of the few mechanisms that interrupt that curation.
These practices signal respect for everyone's perspective and create the conditions for leaders to hear what is actually happening, not just what their direct reports believe they want to hear. Leaders who are genuinely curious rather than performatively listening transform what these conversations surface.
Description of the Practice
- Leaders schedule regular skip-level conversations with individuals two or more levels below them.
- Listening tours involve broader outreach: a series of structured conversations with a diverse cross-section of the organisation.
- The purpose is explicitly listening and learning — not evaluating, instructing, or managing.
- Themes from these conversations are synthesised and acted on visibly.
- Leaders share back what they heard and what they are doing with it.
How to Practise It (Playbook)
1. Getting Started
- Schedule 4–6 skip-level conversations per quarter, across different functions and levels.
- Open with: "I'm here to listen and understand what it's like to work here from your perspective. What would you want me to know that you don't think I currently know?"
- Take notes on themes, not attribution — protect the individual's candour.
- After the listening tour, synthesise themes and share them back: "Here's what I heard. Here's what I'm going to do with it."
2. Scaling and Maturing
- Build structured listening into major transitions: new strategy, significant change, post-incident recovery.
- Use anonymous pulse surveys to complement conversations — they reach people who would not speak directly.
- Create visible feedback loops: share what you heard in all-hands sessions and follow up on what you committed to change.
- Coach other leaders to run their own skip-levels — scale the listening practice across the organisation.
3. Team Behaviours to Encourage
- People speak honestly in skip-level conversations because they trust the leader is genuinely listening.
- Leaders resist the impulse to defend, explain, or challenge what they hear — the purpose is to understand.
- Middle managers are not threatened by skip-levels; they see them as valuable signal, not surveillance.
- Action follows listening — people see that what they said led to something.
4. Watch Out For…
- Skip-levels that feel like performance reviews or assessments of the person's manager.
- Leaders who listen but visibly do nothing with what they heard.
- Conversations so structured that they prevent genuine candour.
- Patterns of concern that are heard, acknowledged, and then quietly ignored.
5. Signals of Success
- Leaders discover things they genuinely did not know — the conversations are producing signal.
- People describe skip-level conversations as useful and worth having.
- Leaders can identify specific changes they made because of what they heard.
- Middle managers see skip-levels as a useful input to their own leadership, not as a bypass of their authority.
- Organisational issues surface earlier because there are more channels for honest communication.