Manager Mentor
What does it really look like to listen to your team?
What does it really look like to listen to your team?
Summary: My research showed millennial and gen-z managers face a new reality: listening has replaced feedback as the defining management skill. AI is moving fast at the front line, and your best people already know what’s working and what’s not — they’re waiting for you to ask. Real-time listening builds trust, surfaces better ways of doing things, and tells your rising stars you know who they are. Four steps to start: set a cadence, walk in their shoes, commit to skip-levels, and redesign your virtual meetings for two-way conversation.
WHY is listening so important?
Studies show managers think they give feedback all the time.
Those same studies say employees don’t think managers are listening.
Boomers could get away with giving feedback all the time. In the hierarchical world of the boomer generation, seniority made you an “expert.” And, the corporate ladder actually institutionalized the idea of “giving feedback” as the predominant way managers communicated to their people.
It’s so weird as a boomer to think that’s the way it was — especially when I look at managing today. It doesn’t mean that feedback isn’t important; of course it is.
But I see feedback and listening as two ends of a see-saw. For most of the last 100 years, the see-saw has been largely tilted toward managers giving feedback.
In the age of AI, the see-saw has to tilt to listening. Big time. Too much is changing too fast.
The front-line is where the AI innovation is happening right now — as we heard that from Blake Wood at Salesforce. The first wave of AI agents are already sitting in meetings, and they are answering questions that boomers used to answer with “staff.” Where are my priorities? What clients need attention? How do my numbers look?
Your individual contributors are the actual front line — responsible for execution. I’m sure you remember being an individual contributor on the front-line. People in front-line roles worry about execution all the time, and know what’s working and what’s not. This is especially true for your best people looking for growth opportunities.
For this generation of talent, it’s one thing to make yourself available, it’s another thing to get your people to tell you what’s on their minds.
Want to know what keeps your best people up at night?
That you don’t know what’s keeping them awake.
WHAT Successful Listening Looks Like
Listening as a boomer manager was too often an “event” like a Q&A where the questions are pre-selected or screened; or a “site visit” where a traveling leader or manager plans weeks or months in advance for a carefully orchestrated town hall.
That’s why “no news is good news” was a boomer refrain.
Millennials and gen-z feel exactly the opposite.
Here is what successful listening looks like today: as team manager, you know the state of execution as close to real-time as possible.
Real-time listening has three goals:
You know what’s working and what’s not;
You learn how to do things better;
You know the first names of everyone on your team and can tell stories about them.
My research showed millennials and genz-z crave accountability — because of the recognition and rewards that come with exceeding expectations. They want to share ideas about how to do things better. And your best people and rising stars want you to know who they are.
When you commit to listening to your team, you’ll learn ways to improve performance and likely be exposed to better ways of doing things. When you take action on what you hear, it only motivates your people to believe you have their back.
You’ll also know better who your performers are. When you tell stories about your people and their execution results in your operations review, it will fill your team with pride and confidence that you care about connecting the dots to their success — which is exactly what the best of millennials and gen-z expect from their manager.
HOW: Four Steps to Listen Better
Your people are already talking among themselves about what’s working and what’s not on the team. They want you to tap into it and be as current as they are.
The “art of listening” is indeed a practiced art because it’s harder to listen than talk. Here are four steps to be good at it:
STEP 1: Set a cadence of different listening activities. Your people need to know you are committed to listening in a consistent way. Depending on the size and scope of your team, publish a calendar of activities you plan for each business year, calendar or fiscal. Try hard to identify locations beyond the home office, if possible. Experiment with different communication modalities to find what works best for your style, including a moderated fireside chat with question flow; an all-hands presentation from a stage; an open, unscripted Q&A with audience; a recorded video followed by Q&A; or small group discussions. Former Cisco CEO John Chambers hosted a monthly birthday breakfast where any employee could ask any question.
STEP 2: Walk in your people’s shoes. There’s no better way to listen than to meet your people where they are, in person. It shows you really care about them, that you know their names and what job roles they fulfill. Yes, tools like Slack are great for asynchronous workflows, but nothing replaces human interaction. When I visited one of the sales labs at Cisco I managed, I spent the first day in the lab long before the town hall, learning from the team what the heck a software-defined network was and how it was different from the past.
STEP 3: Commit to skip-level meetings.
The skip-level meeting is critical to listening as a manager. Knowing people layers below you gives your team confidence you have a full picture of the team’s performance in your mind — not just some spreadsheet in your hands.
STEP 4: Virtual Listening Practices
If you must use a virtual meeting platform for employee communications, set it up for listening and a two-way conversation, not talking. Make sure these conditions are in place:
Encourage open dialogue in the meeting chat room and openly ask people to express themselves — call out and recognize active participants.
Make it possible for teammates to ask anonymous questions in meetings — eliminate fear.
Prepare poll questions in advance that get at the heart of issues concerning employees — ask them what’s on their minds anonymously.
Publish answers in writing to all questions via employee communications — and ask for feedback.
Record and publish every meeting — ask for 100% participation.
Set expectations for follow-up conversations.
See where you stand as a manager.
How consistent are you as a manager? Take the Self-assessment.
How to be a Great First-time Manager: The Culture Platform
The only purpose-built learning and development system for first-time millennial and gen-z managers.
The corporate ladder has been dismantled rung by rung by AI. For millennials and gen-z, the predictable career path has vaporized — and most managers are navigating it alone, without any formal training.
I’ve managed about 5,000 people in my career, and was consistently ranked in the top quartile of all managers at Cisco, one of the world’s best places to work. I’ve walked in your shoes as a manager.
I left Cisco to answer one question with research and evidence: what does the manager of the future look like?
My research — conducted with thousands of young people at companies like Amazon, Google, Disney, and DoorDash — identified Six Drivers of Consistency that separate great managers from the rest, with a 95% confidence interval.
That research became The Culture Platform: a complete learning and development system — Framework, Feedback, and Tools — purpose-built for first-time managers who want to separate themselves and be a great manager of high-performance teams.
ManagerMentor • All Rights Reserved • The Culture Platform, Inc. • 2026
Everyone can benefit from being a better listener…your 4 steps are great. I might add to hear better these days you have to be more like a “scout” … proactively looking for people and insight that helps carve a new path.