The Impact Of Transformational Listening

According to a study from the University Of California, poor listening skills negatively impact 70% of all employees. This means frustrating misunderstandings, workplace errors, and eroded trust within teams. While developing active listening skills is a great start to combat this, it’s not enough to truly change how your business operates and impacts people.

Because there are so many communication channels today, communication is more challenging than ever. This has lead to misunderstandings and lost productivity in the business world.

At Ci2, we’ve invented a model called transformational listening that is designed to overcome the limitations of active listening and transform relationships. Let’s look into what goes into this approach and how you can implement it to create stronger connections with employees and clients.

Understanding Transformational Listening

Subconscious Mind Connection

Transformation listening was developed from our research on neuroscience and behavioral economics. About 80% of our thinking mind, is in our subconscious. It guides around 80% of our decisions. We believe that, if people don’t understand how the subconscious mind works their active listening skills will fall short.

One of the big ideas we found in our research was that our subconscious brain actually sabotages us when we’re trying to listen. This is because the subconscious brain is filled with all of your experiences, emotions, and events. It moves five to seven times faster than you can talk or hear.

Proponents of active listening often teach people to make eye contact, have good body language, and prepare a list of questions to ask so that the speaker feels heard. This approach falls short because as soon as you start thinking of what question to ask next, your subconscious mind takes over. The subconscious mind starts planning your response and you lose focus on what the speaker is saying. This approach actually makes your listening skills worse not better.

Contrary to the active listening model, we teach people to empty their minds and not think about the prepared questions they have. Instead of asking prepared questions, we teach people how to prompt the speaker in a way where they can tell you their story.

The Business Impact Of Transformational Listening

Transformational listening has produced real positive outcomes for our clients. One of our clients, a large consulting agency, was struggling to get their clients to listen to them.

This consulting company had a highly experienced team with an enormous amount of experience. The advice they were giving to their clients was sound so they were very confused and frustrated when their clients did not listen to them.

We when were hired to help them solve this issue, the first thing that we noticed is that they spent most of their meeting time with their clients telling them what to do instead of listening. Because of this, the customers did not feel as if they really understood their problems. By the time the consulting company was brought into a project their customer had been experiencing problems for months. There was a lot of history that they wanted to tell the consultants before they were ready to listen to the consultants advice.

It was only when the consulting firm adopted transformational listening that the problem was solved. We taught them to let the customer tell their entire story and get all of their emotions out. Its only when you have done this that you earn the right to offer advice.

This approach was so successful that the customer referred over $1 billion dollars in sales to the consulting company over a 7 year window. As you can see, developing active listening skills is just one part of the equation: the transformational approach is how you create continuous improvement for the entire business.

Transformational Listening For Teams.

So why does transformational listening matter for employees and teams in the workforce? According to a 2023 study by Grammarly, effective communication is the backbone of a successful business. 72% of leaders reported increased productivity, while 63% reported an increase in customer satisfaction.

The opposite is also true. A 2024 report by Project.co on communication in the workplace found poor communication caused 53% of people to experience fatigue, stress, and burnout. Another 36% experienced lost or missing files due to poor communication. Employees who are frustrated and stressed out are less likely to be engaged, having a profound impact on team morale and turnover rates.

Effective listening is the backbone of good communication. While improving communication is always an ongoing process, our model can help teams improve their listening skills quickly. You can even see this continuous improvement in all areas of an employees’ life.

Transformational Listening In Personal Relationships

Businesses are only as strong as the people who work there. Our model can also benefit your employees’ personal relationships and lives as a whole.

One of our students decided to try transformational listening in his personal life after learning about it in one of our workshops. He went home and tried what we taught him with his wife and children. When he came back the next day, he was in tears.

He said that he never had a conversation with his wife that was so deep, nor had he ever been able to connect with his child on the level he had when he used these transformational listening skills. He was not only grateful for the skills that he learned from a professional standpoint, but he was even more enamored with the amount of impact it had in his personal life.

What We Teach In Our Workshops

Most people think that they’re good listeners. Our workshops help people realize the holes in their listening skills. They realize that they sometimes ask leading questions or get too caught up in the story that they want to tell instead of listening to the story that the speaker wants to tell.

When we have moments like this, we teach our students a variety of tools they can use to get back on track. One example of this is something we call a ‘story listening prompt’. We use this tool to catapult conversation into something that leads to a deeper connection. This method nurtures trust and creates new possibilities to fully receive the speaker’s message.

When you use transformation listening and give people the opportunity to tell their story, you can learn so much about them both personally and professionally.

How Ci2 Advisors Can Help You Develop Effective Leadership

The results of effective listening can be measured. A business that implements transformational listening in their ethos will see improved client satisfaction, better team collaboration, and less time spent redoing because of miscommunications.

At Ci2, we’re committed to helping your executives and team members improve their listening skills. We offer a variety of solutions including coaching, consulting, and group learning sessions. We don’t just teach you transformational listening, we show you how to go out and apply that model in all aspects of your life.

It’s time to implement transformational listening in your business model so you can reap the financial and emotional benefits. If you would like to work with us, please contact us through our website and schedule a meeting.