Not the Listener You Think You Are: Ep.71

“74.9% of people think they’re great listeners. Only 12.8% of people feel truly heard. Someone’s lying—and it might be you.”

That gap is costing you trust, performance, innovation, and talent. In this powerful episode of No Limits Leadership, Sean Patton sits down with global listening expert and author of How to Listen, Oscar Trimboli, to uncover why most leaders are failing at one of the most essential leadership skills: deep listening.

Whether you’re a seasoned executive or a team leader, this conversation will challenge your assumptions, reveal your personal “listening villain,” and show you how to become the kind of leader who inspires loyalty, drives clarity, and unlocks the potential of your people—just by listening better.

🎯 In this episode, you’ll learn:

• (00:49) The Listening Quiz and Sean’s self-discovery as an “interrupting listener”
• (02:24) Why most people overestimate their listening skills
• (04:00) The 4 Listening Villains: Dramatic, Interrupting, Lost, and Shrewd
• (10:00) Simple language cues to better understand how others think
• (17:53) How age, seniority, and background influence listening patterns
• (22:00) Why nonverbal listening matters more than we realize
• (24:45) Why listening is the most overlooked leadership skill
• (25:20) The $1 million mistake a pharmaceutical company made by not listening to a frontline worker
• (31:21) Sean shares a combat story of how not listening nearly led to mission failure
• (33:39) A “purple smoke” moment—how deep listening on a Green Beret team sparked tactical innovation
• (39:13) How technology is changing the way we listen (and how to use it wisely)
• (44:31) How to take the Listening Quiz and get your custom report

🔗 Resources & Links

• Take the Listening Quiz: https://www.listeningquiz.com
• Learn more about Oscar Trimboli: https://www.oscartrimboli.com
• Subscribe to the No Limits Leadership Newsletter: https://nolimitsleadership.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Transcript

Sean Patton (00:15)
Welcome to the No Limits Leadership podcast. I am your host, Sean Patton, and I am so excited to be with Oscar Trimboli right now. He is the author of How to Listen. He's a global speaker. He's an expert on improving leadership through deep listening. And I've thoroughly enjoyed going through his content and learning more about my listening, myself as a listener in preparation for this. So thank you for being here, Oscar. is awesome.

Oscar Trimboli (00:38)
Thanks for discovering a little bit more about your listening. I'm looking forward to hearing your questions today. And one of my first questions is what did you discover about your listening already?

Sean Patton (00:49)
I would say I discovered that think it reaffirmed what I sort of knew about my tendencies as a listener. And I'm even looking at my whole chart right here. But what I really loved about what your, when I did the assessment, which remind me that the assessment is it just, is it called deep listening? Is that the name of the assessment on your website or how to listen?

Oscar Trimboli (01:13)
www.listeningquiz.com

Sean Patton (01:15)
listeningquiz.com. So go on there and do it well worth it. And where are the tips at the end? Like, you know, I knew that I, I was, my primary was a, interrupting listener and, and what I, I want you to go in and kind of tell people what that is, but the, the tips in terms of, you know, I talked about, take a deep breath, counting. and I'd say also,

notice how me focusing on how someone says something, not just the content is so powerful, especially in, my coaching, because I will say I went through formal coaching training two years ago. did a year program, graduate certificate program, got certified as an ICF certified coach, and it made me so much more aware of my tendencies as listener, as my back channel communication.

And so that's been a really powerful self-development tool for me. how common is the interrupting listener?

Oscar Trimboli (02:24)
Well, the first thing is most people think they're better listeners than what they are. Right. And so we have surveyed over 35,000 people now with this listening assessment and 74.9 % of people when you ask them to write themselves on a scale of

well below average, below average average, above average, well above average 74.9 % rate themselves in those top two boxes above average or well above average. When we ask the opposite question, when you're speaking, how well do you think people listen? 12 % of people get rated in the top box, 12.8 % actually. So the first challenge we have as listeners is that

we think we're much better than we are. Same with driving a car. We think we're much better than we are. And back in 2018, we started the process of coding how people listen. And to do that, we had to discover what gets in their way. So one of the questions we asked them when you did the assessment, what's your biggest struggle when it comes to listening in the workplace, we

hand coded or I hand coded with a market research company, each of those responses for the first two and a half thousand and then we kind of put it into some software and automated it now that we're up to 35,000. People tend to fall into four primary barriers that get in their way. And like you, once they're conscious of them, listening moves from difficult and draining and

de-energizing to something that's light and easy and something that you are being rather than something that you're doing. So the four primary villains, that's the label the research group came up with. like a lot of people saying, you know, the villain that always shows up in my head is dramatic, interrupting, lost or shrewd. They're the four listening types. And if it's helpful, Sean.

I'm happy to spend a little bit of time on each one. So if we do, we can help people kind of understand really quickly where they might sit or even better, where might someone else sit that they talk to on a regular basis.

Sean Patton (04:54)
Yeah, absolutely. Let's go through those. You said the first one was dramatic, which is a funny name. I heard that dramatic listening. wonder, I'm curious. That's a great name for that by the way. It's like, so I'm excited to learn about it.

Oscar Trimboli (04:58)
Yeah, so...

Yeah. So before we think about each of the labels, I invite all of us listening. want you to think about the worst listener, you know, they're terrible. They, you just don't look forward to a conversation because they don't listen well. I want you to think of that person. Don't say their name out loud. You might be listening somewhere in the workplace. So I want you to think of them because it'd be easy for you to figure out which one they are.

And in the process, you may figure out which one you are as well. Now bear in mind that each of these archetypes, each of these villains, imagine a compass setting. Some sit diagonally opposite each other and some are like kissing cousins. They're right next to each other as well. So we'll go in alphabetical order, dramatic, interrupting, lost and shrewd.

Dramatic sounds like this. This is what the research says I'm telling them a story about the worst boss I've ever had the worst merger I've ever been a part of I'm really struggling with managing my time and They jump in and go. you think you've got a bad manager. Let me tell you about the worst manager I've ever had now. They're not doing this from a bad place What the dramatic? listening villain loves the most

is connection. They feel if they can tell a story, they can connect with the other person and they value relationship really highly. When I'm the speaker, the research group says to us, all they're doing is moving the spotlight off me and onto them. That's how they experience the dramatic listener. So they're very dialed into emotion. They're great storytellers and they just need to

be conscious when the spotlight's moving onto their story because they're trying to form a connection and stories are a great way to do that. Just let that person finish their story and then the connection may be relevant. But quite often people feel like, hmm, it's all about them. So for those of you can't see Sean's face, he's nodding like he can visualize someone when I said that.

I'm not going to ask him to say who that is. Interrupting, back to your original question, I haven't forgotten it, I just wanted to bring it up here. It's about 24.8 % of the database is sitting at interrupting. Interrupting increases with age and it increases with seniority. So those numbers get higher, the older you are, and the more senior you are.

Sean Patton (07:23)
Hehehe.

Oscar Trimboli (07:51)
Interrupting shows up more. Now, interrupting, dramatic values, relationship, interrupting values, time, they're all about productivity. They're very quick to anticipate and pattern match. And they're like a quiz contestant on Jeopardy. They press the buzzer before the host has finished the question. And more often than not, they're answering the wrong question. So,

For the interrupter, they're so conscious of time that they don't mind reducing the relationship by interrupting. But in reducing relationship, trust goes down. The likelihood that employees speak up is lower. Likelihood you have safety issues or quality issues, project completion, product launch issues is higher if you're not letting that person.

not only say what they think, but say what they mean as well. Because when people say what they mean, you'll get discretionary effort from them because they go, wow, that person trusts me enough. you know, as you mentioned earlier on, there's three tips when you take the listening quiz tailored to your primary and secondary listening barriers. And you'd agree they're pretty practical. They're not.

fancy pants or anything like that, you can go and apply them straight away. Which one have you enjoyed applying the most from your report so far, Sean?

Sean Patton (09:22)
I think, like I said, so my tip number two was notice what they say and how they said it. And in coach speak, it was, you know, the thing behind, we're always looking for like the thing behind the thing. And I've noticed I need to really be intentional about focusing on that because it's not my natural inclination.

so much more focused on content, I think. And it's not a natural, it's a skill that is not natural for me either. Like it's something that I think I have to continue to work on, that I've noticed others, I've just noticed others do it better than me. I can just know, I can see other people.

You didn't realize that they were, they had this emotion behind what they were saying. And I'm like, I totally missed it. It was over my head.

Oscar Trimboli (10:19)
Yes. And when you started your work in the military, I'm sure you felt like that when you started off, but when you finished, it's just a completely different place of competency. So cut yourself some slack, buddy, and submit to the process, you know, because, you know, when you think about how we're going to listen, a few simple hacks, how do they talk about time? So they talk about the past, the present or the future.

How do they talk about the issue? Do they talk about problem or they talk about solution? When they talk about the issue, are they talking about it from their perspective or an external perspective? You know, me or the team, me or the department, me or the organization? Are they talking about it in a concept of time horizons that are narrow, like minutes, hours, days, or are they talking about

quarters, years and decades. So when we think about how there's some really simple ways for people, you can hear in the way they use language, how they see the world. So for many of us, go, how they are listening, that's really difficult to do. But if you just think about how do they process time, is it backwards or forwards? That's a simple way to think about it.

Do they talk about themselves all the time or they talk about their impact on the group? Are they talking about it inside the organization or outside the organization? Are they talking about it through the lens of long-term industry trends or short-term ones or inside the organization or outside? And then problem versus solution. A lot of time that people are talking about the problem is because they don't feel they've been heard.

describing the problem, they'll keep repeating it until they believe someone's heard them because a lot of leaders and managers are in such a rush to get to the future, to the change, to the implementation, to the bright shining thing. But I won't trust you in going to your future until you acknowledge my contribution that brought you from the past to today. So you could build a platform on your change. I often joke there's not enough corporate funerals.

and too many corporate birthday parties, right? And by corporate funerals, I mean, let's acknowledge that there are things from the past we want to bring forward and celebrate. And there's things from the past we might want to burn and leave behind. But as leaders, it's not our job to decide that, it's the groups. So that's kind of how people process listening. Let's finish up with the last two villains. The first one was dramatic, second one interrupting, third one lost.

Equally, they value the relationship too, but they're super polite. Rather than bring up conflict, they'll sit in a meeting they've been invited to just because they want to be polite. But they're not sure why they're there. Their contribution to the meeting is vague at best. They may come across as distracted or disorientated or not contributing or worse. They know why they're at the meeting.

but they're multitasking and they're doing something else. So they're lost in whatever moment they're at. And for them, just ask the host or some other participant at the meeting, what role do you want me to play in this conversation? If you're not sure, better, if you get invited to a meeting, you're not sure, ask the person who invited you and just say, what role do you want me to play?

nine times out of 10, it's like, it's just an FYI. Well, that's great. Give me the three bullet points summary or we have technology that does that today. Or in the meeting, you may say, look, I'm not clear on my role. We have a lot of perspectives about the manufacturing process. I'll just put the customer hat on or I'll put the quality hat on or I'll put the finance hat on and listen from that perspective. So it gives them a focus in that.

conversation. And the final one is the shrewd listening villain, very much a kissing cousin to the interrupting listening villain. Although they're a little bit more skillful, you'll talk to them and they'll give you great face. And they'll be nodding sagely that if you had closed captioning of what's going on in their brain, this is what it sounds like. my God, I can't believe this is an issue. This is so boring. Simple. I know the answer.

I got the solution. Can they hurry up and finish? they haven't even thought about this context. So they've got two other solutions. I've got three other solutions. What the speaker says about the shrewd listening villain. is disproportionately represented in experts, finance, human resources, legal engineering.

They have very good problem solvers. Unfortunately, what the speaker says about them is they're trying to fix me as opposed to they're trying to fix the issue. So they reduce the relationship and trust with that person. So again, they're not going to speak up as much. Now this is a curse of expertise because you can pattern match really quickly, but you're much more polite than interrupting. You'll wait for them to finish and then you'll

magically use your magician and bring out the answer to that question. But you'll miss the nuance. You'll miss the nuance of how they've said it. So you're probably solving 80 % of the issue really well, but you're missing the context that's unique to the way they're interacting in that department with that. dramatic, all about them interrupting all about time.

Lost all about being polite and then shrewd all about being a great problem solver. Now you'll listen differently to a manager than you will to a customer. You'll listen differently to a peer than you will to a supplier. So you're listening shape changes depending on the context you're in. So listening is situational, relational.

and situational. So you'll listen differently in all those contexts. So your listening villains are not fixed. That's why we show you your primary and secondary. So you're conscious of both because they will show up there as well. So have fun with them. They were designed to be playful figures. We've actually got some figurines made up.

A friend of mine saw what we were doing and they had a 3D printer. So they had some fun and they made characters out of these villains. So that we've had fun with that as well. But just have fun with your listening. If you don't take it too seriously, but you just commit to making a little bit of improvement, you'll get a disproportional impact in profitability, on time delivery, quality.

employee relationships, the good ones will stay longer, they'll recruit other people into your organization because they feel like, and customers become the unsung salesforce for you because they'll start to refer because you listen and maybe the competition doesn't even though you may sell near identical products. Now, Sean's really leaning in here. He's got a very pensive look on his face. He's very thoughtful. So I'm curious what's coming up next.

Sean Patton (17:53)
Well, you had mentioned with a couple of those villains that they're more prevalent with more senior people or older or in certain industries. What about gender or socioeconomic backgrounds? Do you see tendencies there as well?

Oscar Trimboli (18:10)
I would have thought there was by gender some kind of differential. It's not material, which I feel comfortable about because when I reviewed academic literature that had research gender based listening, there isn't a material difference in the literature either. If you want it to use a really broad generalization, women listen to feel and men listen to fix.

That that that when I say that in an audience of hundreds of people you can literally see the room nodding in unison And I think that's more true in home personal relationships, which we haven't Them workplace ones because I don't think good or bad bosses Are gendered I've had a really awesome managers and leaders

who are female and I've had really good, awesome managers that are male and equally I've had the opposite. So I think when it comes to listening, we just need to be conscious that there's no evidence that there's a material difference there. It's difficult to collect primary research where people are disclosing their social economic backgrounds. So, you know, for someone like me,

son of two first generation migrants. I know I listened differently because I went to a school with 23 nationalities.

So for me, how did that show up? It's going to sound really weird. It showed up in the card game we played. So at our school, you could play sport, you could go to the library, or could play cards. That's kind of how the groups divided themselves up. And the card game that we played was called briscola. It's an Italian card game, but every nationality wanted to play. You play in pairs diagonally opposite each other as a team.

and I couldn't speak any language other than English. when like, so the Polish team would play in Polish, they would literally talk in Polish to each other. The Brazilian team would speak Portuguese, the Argentinian team would speak Spanish, the Italians would speak Italian, the Cypriots would speak Greek. We had so many nationalities, the Vietnamese, the Loatians.

and the Indonesian. So we had all these amazing cultures. I was the pickup player. So if somebody didn't have their team buddy, they'd go, Hey, Oscar, you want to make up the group? So I'd play with someone who I couldn't speak their language, which gave an overconfidence to let's pick on the Polish team for a moment. It's the Polish team. They talk in Polish, but they didn't realize I'm watching their eyes.

I'm watching their fingers on the cars. I'm listening to the inclination in their voice and they're giving away so much information because they believe I can't listen to what they're saying. Now, can I listen to every scrap of thing they're saying in Polish? Absolutely not. But I learned really quickly because of this background and it didn't matter what language, human voicing inclination.

where they put their fingers on the cards, where their eyes went, they just gave away so much information. And people did not understand why when I turned up and played with my pickup player, we would win in most cases, even though we never play together. I had no signal for them. I couldn't speak their home language, but the other team was giving away so much information if you just listened for it. Now, if I went to a school that was all white,

with an English background, Anglo-Saxon as there are in Australia, I would never have learned any of that. So I'm sure your background influences how you listen because for me, that was a superpower brought into the workplace as well.

Sean Patton (22:19)
Wow.

And it just goes to show you, think, love that story, how much of listening is not necessarily just in the content of the words, like how much of listening is that, is the nonverbal. And so often when even when we have this conversation, we think, I'm gonna have this conversation with Oz about deep listening, I'm thinking listening to the content of the words, not, you know.

What is it? like, I don't know, I'm going to misquote it. 80 % of all communication or something is nonverbal. It's something like that, right? It's like the majority of what we say and communicate is nonverbal. So I think that's so, that's so empowering. It's an important lesson.

Oscar Trimboli (23:10)
And your ability to

read that increases with how long you've been in a relationship with them. I think a lot of people often misquote that because they may read non-verbals very differently. They're given, but are you reading them right? The longer with that person, the better you understand that. That's why I'm always conscious to speak to the audience about you as the host and what you're showing me. You know, I mentioned earlier on.

you've got your hand across your face, you've got a very quizzical look on your face, there was a depth of thinking about what you were going to ask next, which was very different to when we kicked off and asked the question about you discovering a little bit more about your listening. That was much more animated. Your word cadence was higher, meaning you were speaking a little faster.

And you were very energized by that topic. Now, it didn't mean you weren't energized by the second topic. It's just an insight you were super curious about. So you were thoughtful about how you pose the question. And then we think about everyone who's listening right now. If you think about how Oscar talks, notice he went to a backstory to make a point about socioeconomic. So that's past.

rather than present or future. So if you're thinking about how to listen across time, there's a practical example of how I was speaking that you can go, okay, that's how that works in that environment.

Sean Patton (24:45)
And you mentioned that you believe listening is the most overlooked leadership skill. Why do you think that?

Oscar Trimboli (24:53)
For most leaders, their workplace struggles in terms of performance all come back to something that has an absence of listening at its heart. Are you struggling to get new customers? Are you struggling to keep the customers you haven't got? Well, the likelihood is you're probably not listening. Or...

What you're listening to isn't what the customer thinks and means. I think for many of us, we don't realize when you listen to somebody and they feel heard, seen and valued, you'll get discretionary effort from them because listening is so rare. That's why I feel. So is your project off track? Is your product

release date slipping, engineering having problems with commissioning a new production line. All of these have at their center a lack of listening. I'm going back a while now. I was working with a pharmaceutical company and they were having issues with quality and an inconsistent impurity was showing up in their production.

It was a sterile manufacturing environment, so they had to make sure, and they couldn't ship product if a batch showed up any impurities in QA. Now, QA happened at the end rather than continuously along the way. So if a batch, approximately 10,000 vials of something, fails, they have to destroy it. That's about a million dollars a batch.

Now, what was happening was this impurity of showing up very irregularly. There wasn't a pattern and they had all these six sigma ninjas and quality experts and chemical engineers all looking at this. And they brought me in and we're working with 93 people managers in the room, which included people working on the manufacturing line and CEOs like, see if you can help us figure this out.

I know nothing about manufacturing. I know nothing about quality. I simply said turn to the person next to you and tell them who we're not listening to.

And there was this big pause in the room and then all of a sudden it explodes into conversation. about 20 minutes or so, okay, let's bring it back. Okay, so who are we not listening to? And basically the answer was the production line workers. They were listening to everything else. They were listening to SCADA systems, which are all these digital systems that tell you about the health of your production line.

I said, great, so we're going to stop the meeting. Please don't interrupt production, but can you all go out and talk to some production workers? And they all went out and they came back an hour later. And somebody raised the fact that a production worker, so they didn't talk to them, they looked at the daily control meetings, which is everybody's been on the production line said what went well and what didn't. And there was one guy, he was 63.

And for three weeks in a row, he'd been saying, there's a rusty pipe on my line, which was bringing him water. And they kept saying, no, we can't look at that because to shut down our production for just a pipe, we've to do it in plan maintenance, blah, blah, blah. So he was totally ignored. But every time he was on shift, he would put a card in for an error, but he was ignored because he was the old guy. He was, he was a Polynesian guy, actually.

And he was a lovely guy, but you know, he just, they brushed him aside. Guess what? That pipe was rusty. That pipe was inconsistently putting flecks of rust into the production line. And if they would have listened to the first time, the second time, the third time, the fifth time, the eighth time, that he'd put the issue on a daily control card.

rather than saying, it's too expensive. We have to wait for planned maintenance because I'm a chemical engineer and I'm looking at the profitability of the entire production run. Well, you're destroying a million dollar batch on a very infrequent basis. I'm sure fixing a pipe is something that you may think about differently. Now, the purpose behind that story is simply this.

Who are the voices you're ignoring as a leader in your workplace? They may be reception. They may be somebody who deals with supplies. They may be somebody in finance. If you allow those voices to be heard, profit, quality, on time delivery, a whole bunch of the metrics you care about as a leader will improve. And they will.

But for many of us, those voices come across as negative, contrarian, repetitive. It's like, Sean always says that we need to insert answer from management. Well, the reason Sean keeps saying it is simply this. You didn't listen to him the first time, the second time, and the third time, and it's important to him. So take the time to listen, acknowledge it.

So the Sean feels seen, and valued. And when you do, I speculate some of the error rates in your organization will decline, which means your costs go down, which means your speed of delivery goes up.

And whether you look at the BP Deepwater oil horizon, well, that blew up off the coast of Louisiana. That was a classic case of managers not listening to the workers. $63 billion and still counting is the cost of that not listening.

Sean Patton (30:50)
The, I see that so often, that we don't, we don't listen. And then what I've seen too, I'm sure this shows up is, you know, they were lucky that guy cared enough to keep saying it. Right. It's like, if, if you're not listening to me, if I'm not feeling heard the first sec or third time, more often than not, I'm going to stop saying anything if I see it, right. Cause no one's listening anyway. And,

You know, there's a...

Oscar Trimboli (31:17)
How

did they show up in the military? How did you see it when you were serving?

Sean Patton (31:21)
you would, we see that a lot where let's say the officers, maybe we're setting up fighting positions, right? Or we're setting up a battle position. And you know, we're looking at the map, we're making our map train, saying, well, the position needs to be here and that's going to cover this area. And this, these guys are going to be here. It's all straight. And then we practice it and we move our little army guys as we were rehearsing and everything looks great. But then.

you would get on the ground and for whatever reason, you know, the position was bad or someone couldn't, you know, what we thought was going to be there wasn't there. And, know, you'd have soldiers say, Hey, I need to move or I can't, I can't, I can't see what you me to see. Or I don't think it's a great position. You're like, well, I'll, I'll get to it. You know, like just stay there. We're working on bigger and better things. And then it comes time to, you know, execute.

And they can't provide a support by fire or they can't provide the over swatch or they can't provide the recon. And, know, if it's a bad leadership environment, which fortunately I wasn't around a lot, I was in great units. it would come up in our after action reviews and they'd say, well, why didn't, you couldn't see, you were supposed to be able to see from there. That was the intent. They're like, I told you, I couldn't see. And no one told me where to move and no one even gave me permission to move. Or they said to stay put.

And there wasn't that, listening down at the lowest, the lowest level. And it can, it can have catastrophic consequences obviously in that environment as well. and so it's just one of those things that all too often, people closest to the problem need to be the ones that we go to. And, because of some leadership, ideals or, you get too busy.

Often the people we overlook as in, you your example. And there's a great quote by General Colin Powell that says, you know, when your people stop bringing you their problems, you've lost them.

Oscar Trimboli (33:22)
Yeah. And, and the opposite. I was curious because I said, how did I show up in the military? And you went to kind of the negative problem one. What's the opposite? How's great listening played out for you when, when you were serving or have you got a good example of that?

Sean Patton (33:39)
I had, I would say, especially on the special forces teams and the green braid teams, it was such a collaborative environment. And I mean, I got the amount of times I got schooled by a Sergeant on, whether it was something tactical, mean, definitely anything technical. mean, there were technical experts way beyond me in what they did. And it's all right. So I'll come to a track to example, but this is just a funny story. I remember one of my soldiers, we were

we were in Lebanon, we're working with some local forces and we were doing some training, different things. And I was like, well, you know, they're having trouble in this area of the country because this group, you know, historically, has got, hasn't gotten along because it's a different sect of, you know, Islam, blah, blah. And, know, and my, youngest guy on my team, Scott's student. was, know, I think it was an E five at the, at the time, like a junior sergeant.

but super smart kids like actually sorry, that's wrong. He's like, Hey, it's not that group. It's actually, you know, in the, and he had all the numbers in the, the 1500s, that was true. But in the 1700s, the colonial came in, he just schooled me on like, you know, this historical background of this whole conflict. And, it really was an awesome time and a humbling time. But, I would,

Oscar Trimboli (34:59)
How did you

react to him doing that?

Sean Patton (35:03)
I thought it was awesome. I high fived him. Yeah. I I, I loved the fact that even though, whether I was in a rifle platoon, sniper platoon, or on my special forces team, was the commander on the ground. I was never the smartest guy in the room. I mean, you know, and I loved the fact that I had soldiers like that. love that the dynamics of having a team. And I think this is the high, well, higher performing.

highest performing teams I've ever been a part of. I see is when everyone is a leader and everyone feels empowered to speak up and everyone is valued in, in what we did. you know, I would say a specific example we had was we had this issue in Afghanistan where our very first patrol, we go out, we drive the Pakistan border, we drive back and we're driving, we get ambushed. And, you know, we, we get through it.

We, the guys fight great, take lessons learned. And one of the things that came up was we had a really hard time communicating to each other where enemy positions on the mountain was, right? Cause I mean, it's just arid, there's rocks and trees and it's just a big thing. And you know, it's not like the movies where you're like, that's where they are. You know, they're 800 meters away, hidden in a dirt hole somewhere. You're like, you have no idea where you're getting shot at from. And, and so would see it and they'd like, they're over there. They're, they're here.

But it's during the daytime at night, we have got lasers and stuff to communicate to each other of where positions are. And so I came up with some ideas, but as one of my soldiers, as we thought about it said,

you know, we need is colored smoke. And I was like, what? Cause so we'd end up doing was we ended up using, what was it? Was it green or purple? It was purple smoke. And so everyone started carrying purple, little smoke grenades on the grenade launchers. So that became the signal that once you identified, saw any position you'd fire your smoke and you'd say, all right, any position and you could just radio purple smoke, 50 meters.

You know, three o'clock, whatever. And it'd like, cool. And I'm like just and jet direct fires that way. But it was listening and the problem solving that came from, from that. But we had such a culture where everyone knew they could speak up. Everyone listened and valued their input, in that particular organization.

Oscar Trimboli (37:31)
Thanks for your service and thanks for sharing the stories.

Sean Patton (37:34)
Yeah, for sure. It was a lot of really great leadership lessons in a lot of ways. And I will say the special forces and special operations world is different, especially when it comes to senior leaders listening probably to junior soldiers than it is in sort of the regular military.

Oscar Trimboli (37:53)
Have you told the purple

smoke story to this group of people listening on your podcast before?

Sean Patton (37:58)
I don't think so.

Oscar Trimboli (37:59)
And as a leader, what you can do is you can shape the container in which people tell their stories. And notice how flex from problem negative to positive solution and how Sean gives you a range of things in his background. And I speculate he hasn't told the second story to you. And I hope you have a purple smoke moment because as leaders, if you're the smartest person in the room,

you're either got the wrong team or you're the wrong leader. So humble yourself and ask curious questions and you'll have your purple smoke moment.

Sean Patton (38:43)
love that. you know, communication, listening, even just interpersonal interactions, how I think have shifted and are shifting do a lot to technology. And have you seen the role, you've been doing this for years now. Have you seen the skillset or the, the abilities or the role of listening and leadership shift?

as with technology becoming more and more part of the way we communicate.

Oscar Trimboli (39:13)
Yes and no. So there's negative impacts of technology and there's positive impacts of technology. So a simple example of this is you use the technology, don't let the technology use you. What does that mean? If you're getting triggered by notifications on your device or taking calls or all of that, look, if you're an emergency respondent or you're on call for some reason because you're the...

production line, shift supervisor for that, you're going to have notifications on your device and all of that. That's completely understandable. But for the majority of people in a workplace, they do not have that challenge. And yet, know, Slack channels and team meetings and video conference and email, like you could use all of that as an excuse.

I'm overwhelmed. So, I'm for an apology. I worked at Microsoft for a decade selling that technology. Right. So, I also know the research that sits behind things like notifications. The research from notifications, the little red dots on your mobile phones, the flash on the screen when something arrives.

The base research was from the 1970s for slot machines in Las Vegas. And how do they trigger people to mindlessly stay and keep putting money in the slot machine? This is the base evidence that's used by the software industry in the 2010s and 2000s to keep people engaged. So first thing, just be conscious, use the technology, don't let the technology use you.

So there are positive elements of technology. So for example, you might be in an online meeting and today that meeting can do the following things. It can transcribe everything you say. It can categorize the actions immediately for you. It can give you sentiment of the language in the conversation, positive, negative and neutral. So how people are saying things or without you doing a thing as a leader.

So you can not be in the meeting. By the way, the meeting can be fully recorded. So there's all these upsides of technology. But the intersection of people and technology is where the problems emerge or the brilliance emerges. So let me tell you a simple example of technology. Employee engagement survey.

We survey the employees on a regular basis and some of these tools, you can literally do it minute by minute, but typically people do it annually. Now, if you do it well, you collect the information, you broadcast back to the people who gave you the information, you say, thank you for your feedback, we've analyzed it, there are three things that we're taking out, theme one, theme two, three, three.

For this quarter, we're working on theme one. For the next quarter, we're working on, et cetera. And we're going to give you updates as we go along. That is the top decile of performance for leadership. For 90 % of people who do employee engagement surveys, sound like this.

Next month we're doing the employee engagement survey. So get ready because it's going to be really exciting. We're to have balloons and cakes and all kinds of celebrations. And then they launch the survey and then they send a weekly email saying, we need more people to fill in the survey. Here's the reason why people are filling in your survey. Because when you get the results, you do absolutely nothing with it.

They don't trust that you're going to do anything with it. If you want to increase the number of people participants are going to complete your employee engagement survey through whatever technology you send to them.

Do what you said they asked for in the last survey. Do not send another survey out to action the last survey. Now, Sean, you talked about the debrief meeting at the end of the training battle, right? If you did not implement what you did from the debrief, people were going to die. There are consequences for it. In the workplace,

People aren't going to die, but your businesses, your employee morale is your profitability is if you don't take the action. So if you're using technology to collect employee engagement feedback, don't do another one till you've communicated the top three things from the last survey and your action plan and what help you need from the organization to do it. So technology can be a villain or it can be a superhero.

The difference is how you approach it as a human. We have choice. Use the technology, don't let the technology use you.

Sean Patton (44:15)
Yeah, so this has been fantastic. And when people, if they want to do the survey like I took to get the value and start to work on their own deep listening, I know you mentioned the website, is that what's the best way for them to learn more about you and your process for leader for, you know, how to listen and all that.

Oscar Trimboli (44:31)
I'd rather you learn to discover more about your listening than discover more about me. I'm all about you and your progress. And that's where your leader orientation should be and make others better. So if you visit listeningquiz.com and in the show notes, you'll have a little code that Sean will provide you to get some special bonuses. Visit listeningquiz.com.

takes between five and seven minutes. I'm sure it didn't take you long, Sean. There's only 20 questions. You get a five-page report that describes your primary and secondary villains, and then a tailored three practical tips that you can use. And if you're in an organization, we have an enterprise view of that, so we can benchmark you against your industry or org size, teams against teams within...

Sean Patton (45:03)
Yeah, really fast.

Oscar Trimboli (45:25)
your organization as well. listening quiz doc.

Sean Patton (45:28)
Fantastic. Oscar, thank you for the work you do and thank you for your time today. This has been awesome talking with you,

Oscar Trimboli (45:33)
Thanks for listening.