Listening With an Agenda That's Mostly About Them Instead of For You

To enter a coaching conversation you're recommended to go into it with an open mind. To "go in blank." Which is quite useful and a fast way to say de-center yourself and put this person you're here to listen to at the center of focus. Set aside your assumptions and guide the conversation mostly by asking questions while you deeply listen to the person you're with.

Listening in that coaching style is sometimes called "not having an agenda." I like a different way to clarify though. Sure it's open and not prescriptive. Yet you do have a point of view and purpose to be able to serve well as a coach. You're listening to help in a way that gets the person who chose you to clarify what's blocking them and what they'll be doing next about it.

In that way, listening like a coach is choosing an agenda and techniques to help others do self direction. Still though, it's an agenda.

Why do I care about noticing this gentle unassuming agenda?

I love both my analytical ways of thinking and my creative nonlinear playful thinking too. Noticing the patterns and why-this about a given approach feels instinctively useful to me.

Also it relates to past work culture experience. I feel affected by philosophies and work styles I've encountered that aren't open and welcoming to self discovery, learning, and applying that learning.

This is a tangent, hopefully with useful context.

An encounter with a counter-intuitive agenda.

What was expected.

Early in my career in tech, I encountered enough folks at different levels of the organization I was at who felt we could be fully impartial implementers of features. Listen for requirements, learn only literally and specifically about those stated requirements. That was expected.

What was unexpected and lead to conflicts: unstated needs, observed constraints, hypotheses to try and learn about in order to gain confidence recommending what to build next. I had a bias about learning more about all the people affected by and working with the system. Without that I felt wrong. Yet some feedback I received by some leaders was that I was adding my own point of view and these things weren't directly requested. Technologists in that group were expected to only do what they were told.

To only do what I'm told isn't a workable situation for me.

Choosing how to engage with what was expected.

As I continued to study and apply human centered design to my work, to do research, to present cases and recommendations I was able to find ways to do the work that includes people to be confident my teams were doing work that was meaningful, useful, and usable. This was through practicing the applied learning, inviting others to be part of it, and the storytelling to help all involved relate to the learning that made a given system, tool, or feature meaningful.

I had an agenda that started as a feeling and became a whole defining aspect of my career. I encountered an agenda that conflicted with applied learning and inquiry to learn more about who and why we were making systems.

In particular, the conflicting agenda that sticks with me: just build exactly what someone is asking for is the one I find to be a total myth because it dismisses everyone's humanity. Humans building things for humans requires communication and understanding to help and not harm. Nobody, not you, not I knows exactly what to build to solve a problem or if we're immediately framing the right problem to solve first. Actively avoiding the learning and listening to learn more about the humans along with the system is an agenda. What would be a useful name for this agenda? That could be a useful question for another time.

That's a quick general summary, not calling any person or company in particular.

Caring enough to see assumptions.

Caring enough to see assumptions and agendas is a useful practice that helps with building things and even with coaching conversations.

Willing to test assumptions means we need to be willing to see assumptions.

Coaching isn't directly the same as other kinds of listening. Listening to collaborate can take a variety of forms and I wrote about a few of them in a different post.

It isn't totally without an agenda. Taking note of that and being willing to explore the idea makes it a chance to learn.

Coaching's openness means it's not meant for all conversations.

One time when I performed a live version of the Listening Like a Coach workshop at an event a while back, one of the participants asked "How can I get people to do the right things by coaching them?". I pointed out that's a different part of leading, more about the leader and the organization. Coaching is about the person you're with.

Coaching isn't something you start doing to someone. Someone asks you to coach them. They invite you to be in the role of coach which is a kind of listening and facilitation that's the coach's way to serve.

It's open. It's about focusing on the other person. Listening and facilitating only to clarify and navigate a problem, concern, goal, something they want. Wanting to help in that way is itself an agenda. Useful to notice that to get past the assumption and do that useful work of listening and asking open questions.

And now, a segue to mention my workshop on this very topic.

Do you have folks who ask you to help them think through situations, challenges, creative and career stuff?

Do you find the listening and coaching topics interesting? Related to the coaching agenda. I have a self paced downloadable workshop with PDFs and videos I made for you:

Listening Like a Coach

• You'll learn that flow of conversation stages that helps you help someone else think through a problem and what to do next.
• Get to see a real coaching conversation to learn from both live and summarized with commentary.
• Get PDFs with listening tips and questions which are also taught in the video.
• You'll have some practice and not have to be empty handed going into a coaching conversation.

It's always a very fair price, though as of this writing I have a special offer. 25% discount off of any listening like a coach package for the next 2 weeks. Use discount code "listening21" at checkout. That makes the basic package regularly $19 only $14.25 USD.

Also one more special timing offer. For the first time I'm offering a rental option, instead of downloading your copy you can stream it once for only $5.00 USD.

These prices will change after the sale and the option to rent is temporary for July 2021.