USING THE ART OF LISTENING
TO TRANSFORM BUSINESS
"The leadership communication skills required to be an effective manager aren’t intuitive, but they can absolutely be learned."
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USING THE ART OF LISTENING
about echo listening intelligence
ECHO stands for Effective Communication for Healthy Organizations.
ECHO Listening Intelligence is out to change the way the corporate and sales world thinks about listening. People spend 70-80% of their workday engaged in some form of communication, and 55% of that time is devoted to listening. At the day-to-day level, effective listening can mean the difference between closing a sale that satisfies both parties or the sinking feeling that everything went flat. More broadly, effective listening can infuse an entire company’s culture, improving workplace communications, enhancing team collaboration and driving up employee engagement.
At ECHO, we teach more than “active” listening. We’re harnessing the latest scientific research that suggests that listening is a trainable skill with applications far beyond the old notion of simply paying better attention. Listening is a brain-based function, and no two brains are the same. Therefore, different people often hear things in different ways. This is why ten highly competent people can leave a meeting all with varying impressions about what they just heard.
In order to work effectively with this cognitive diversity, we developed the ECHO Listening Assessment, a scientifically validated tool that helps each person understand what kinds of information they listen “to” and “for,” and how they apply the information they hear. With an increased awareness of individual listening habits, managers and sales leaders can objectively observe their own management style, shift to increase effectiveness and address any areas to improve communication and the sharing of information throughout all levels of the company.
ECHO Listening Intelligence is out to change the way the corporate and sales world thinks about listening. People spend 70-80% of their workday engaged in some form of communication, and 55% of that time is devoted to listening. At the day-to-day level, effective listening can mean the difference between closing a sale that satisfies both parties or the sinking feeling that everything went flat. More broadly, effective listening can infuse an entire company’s culture, improving workplace communications, enhancing team collaboration and driving up employee engagement.
At ECHO, we teach more than “active” listening. We’re harnessing the latest scientific research that suggests that listening is a trainable skill with applications far beyond the old notion of simply paying better attention. Listening is a brain-based function, and no two brains are the same. Therefore, different people often hear things in different ways. This is why ten highly competent people can leave a meeting all with varying impressions about what they just heard.
In order to work effectively with this cognitive diversity, we developed the ECHO Listening Assessment, a scientifically validated tool that helps each person understand what kinds of information they listen “to” and “for,” and how they apply the information they hear. With an increased awareness of individual listening habits, managers and sales leaders can objectively observe their own management style, shift to increase effectiveness and address any areas to improve communication and the sharing of information throughout all levels of the company.
Letter from our founder
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My dream with ECHO is to change the way corporate communities value listening.
Many years ago, while working for a leadership communications firm, I realized the market was saturated with training modules that concentrated on speaking but very few focused on listening. Of the listening trainings that existed, all seemed to focus on paying attention, being present, and practicing active listening. But there seemed to be something missing. What about the different ways that people listen? At ECHO, we set out to explore this question. First, we deconstructed how listening occurs, which led us to learn that listening happens in our brains, not just our ears. This may seem obvious, but the implications are vast. The fact that every brain is unique is connected to the fact that we all listen “to” and “for” different information. So, maybe listening is a big part of why misunderstandings, miscommunication and misinformation is common in our corporate communities. We all listen differently and pick up information in a variety of ways. By studying the distinct ways that people listened, we were able to come up with four primary styles. From there, we began observing, predicting, and diagnosing how listening was influencing decision making, team competency, meeting efficiencies, and even an individual’s potential to manage others. In 2015 we began partnering with our clients to evaluate what kind of listening best suited the different jobs and responsibilities inside their organizations. We also studied team dynamics—in what ways could individuals with different listening styles be most successful together? We initiated team listening profiles so that a new member joining the team had a summary of the group’s listening preferences, and hiring managers could draw predictions about how the new hire would interact with the team, even before the individual joined the group. The listening profile, therefore, became an important part of the hiring process. In 2017, ECHO began certifying practitioners in order to spread this work much farther than we could on our own. These practitioners are bringing the insights of ECHO into a vast range of companies, from global Fortune 100s to SMBs, helping teams become smarter together and communicate more productively across a wide range of industries… the work which is fulfilling my dream… 
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