Impacting the #BottomLine through #Scaling #OrganizationalListening with Jim Macnamara

Do you feel heard by the organization you work for as an employee? Which companies do you feel listened to as a customer? What have you experienced to know whether your voice is being heard by politicians?

Do your employees, customers, and stakeholders feel heard…or not? How can we transform 100s, even 1000s of potential critics into super promoters by listening to their needs and responding accordingly? Are you aware of the value scaling listening can bring to your organization? And how to architect scaling listening?

We know listening is essential in interpersonal communication. Yet, how can we scale listening so that we can respond to hundreds of thousands of people and bring value to the organization at a larger scale?

Jim Macnamara is on a mission to spread the value and importance of listening, even more at a large scale.

He is a Distinguished Professor of Public Communication at the University of Technology in Sydney. Jim is internationally recognized for his research into the evaluation of public communication and for his work on organizational listening. 

In this episode, Jim shares his experiences and the lessons he learned from working in communications almost his whole life. He continues to promote the value of communication and listening in different settings, specifically in the business and political setting. He also explains how technology can be a big help in communicating and listening to what your stakeholders need so that you can respond by transforming organizational detractors into cheerleaders.

Enjoy listening in.

“Communications more about what arrives in the minds of people and what happens than it is about transmitting the information. Communication’s got to be a two-way process.”

– Jim Macnamara

Valuable Resource:

Be sure to check out Jim’s Book: Organizational Listening: The Missing Essential in Public Communication. 

Listen in Notes:

02:16 – How spending almost his whole life working in communications led him to discover the value of listening. Diving into communication-related works helped him see the mistakes made by companies when it comes to listening.

05:22 – How do you value your audience’s responses? How can you listen a large scale?

07:06 – Acknowledging their response and making use of the new technology we have- how gathering the information  from audience responses is now easier to analyze through the use of technology

08:47 – How do we respond to these data? How can we apply organizational listening?

09:56 – Jim shares how analyzing these data and responding in a way that your audience feels that they are listened to can help increase your sales and turn detractors into cheerleaders of your company

14:14 – The first steps in the architecture of listening. How you can take the step in listening to your own organization.

16:51 – How training your team of call center people can create a positive impact on your customers and the customer service team. Getting good feedback because is great for the morale of your employees.

18:01 – Internal communication is very important. Giving value to your audience’s response and training your team to listen can help improve your audience feedback and your company or organization as well

21:29 – How having proper policies for listening can lead to a better articulation and communication cycle with your customers and employees

23:59 – The issue of growth and scale in organizations and their effects on communication within the organization

26:41 – How technology nowadays can be used as a way to listen to your audience even on a wide scale. The impact of technology in listening and how it changed the way of responding to your audience’s concerns

28:48 – How can you respond to your audience in a way that you show them you are giving value to their concerns, comments, and responses? What do you do with the gathered data from the use of technology and how do you respond to those given data?

30:55 – Listening to a politician’s perspective and how they should listen to the voter’s concerns instead of persuading. How politicians construct their surveys with a fixed list of questions instead of listening to their voter’s concerns

33:25 – Communication is not a one-way transmission of information. What is the definition of true communication and how you should understand the value of it?

34:54 – Leaders should stop talking and start listening. How listening to concerns instead of constantly distributing information should be valued more by leaders

35:51 – If you don’t have communication, you don’t have society. How political leaders, especially in democratic countries, should listen and keep in touch with their citizens

39:04 – The importance of fact-checking in avoiding misinformation as a hazard in communication, especially in politics

Key Takeaways:

If you don’t have communication, you just don’t have society. And so that to me is very important. – Jim Macnamara

If you ask a question and don’t listen to the answers, then you actually do the opposite of what you’re trying to intend. – Jim Macnamara

“In simple terms, organizations need to shut up and start listening!”– Jim Macnamara

“An organization has got to believe that there is real value in listening.”– Jim Macnamara

“We’ve spent a lot of money on communication…but actually, the value of listening comes in far, far higher than the value of putting out information. Putting out information is very costly.”– Jim Macnamara

“In all listening, the first thing you do is acknowledge.”– Jim Macnamara

“So often when we say ‘communication,’ what we mean is distributing information. One way transmission of information is not communication…communication is more about what arrives in the minds of people and what happens after than it is about transmitting the information. If you’re working in communication, you should be spending half of your time, half of your budget, and half of your resources on listening, and the other half on speaking and distributing information. That would be true communication.”– Jim Macnamara

“What we do often decide what information we will send out, and we decide

what form we will send it in. We’ve already made all of those decisions, so why not stop

and ask a lot more questions, and then respond to what people need?”– Jim Macnamara

Resources Mentioned:

Connect with Jim Mcnamara:

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