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.
As an ECHO Certified Practitioner, I teach more than “active” listening. 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, the ECHO Listening Assessment, a scientifically validated tool, 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 organization.
The ECHO Listening Profile is a proprietary, scientifically validated cognitive assessment that measures what leaders and managers listen to and for, as well as what they might be unconsciously filtering out. It is the first listening assessment developed for business contexts that provides tangible, measurable, and actionable insights that can be implemented immediately for strengthened leadership and team productivity.
Poor communication costs small-to-medium sized businesses $420,000 per year, and large companies an estimated $62.4 million annually in miscommunication, rework, missed deadlines, and stalled productivity.
ECHO has undergone rigorous scientific research in content validity, criterion-oriented validity, and construct validity. The research is peer-reviewed and published in the scientific journal, The International Journal of Listening.
Results are presented in a simple, straightforward, intuitive layout, even though its insights are no less profound. Our clients love ECHO’s ease of implementation and delivery, and many have chosen ECHO over other assessments for this reason.
ECHO’s unique question format gathers in 10 questions the same amount of information other assessments gather in 60 questions, thus saving valuable time for test-takers.
ECHO is the only assessment that measures the type of information managers and teams are listening to and for, as well as what is being habitually missed, so they can make the adjustments needed to elevate collaboration and productivity for optimal team performance.
Armed with ECHO’s Listening Intelligence, organizations can:
- Hire more effectively
- Enhance individual performance
- Elevate team performance
Additionally, when teams take the assessment together, they can better harness the listening strengths of each individual to ensure the team as a whole becomes exponentially smarter and more productive than the sum of its parts.
As a result, our clients report a significant impact on team collaboration, operations and organizational bottom lines, building toward a healthier, happier workplace culture.
Let's Talk About What ECHO Can Do for You!
During coaching sessions of a 32-year old Capital Markets VP at a Commercial Finance company. Samuel kept complaining consistently that his boss would not talk with him. He had asked for several meetings and his boss would simply ignore his requests. Jared, his boss, was a highly regarded manager. It didn’t make sense that a boss would ignore an employee. I recommended that they both take the ECHO Listening profile. Which they both willingly agreed wholeheartedly. Jared shared privately that he liked Samuel and wanted to work with him.
Samuel’s ECHO profile was the Scrutinizer, meaning that he listened for data, facts and concrete information that would lead him to the right answer. Jared’s ECHO Profile was a Collaborator. His listening preference for analytical data was his lowest score even though he was in a highly analytical data driven industry.
After debriefing the ECHO profile with both at the same time, Samuel learned that he was simply boring Jared to death with his consistent requests for meetings that would drag on and on and on. They were both transparent about their needs. They agreed to weekly meetings and to have a format of the meetings with an agenda, a time frame and very specific topics to cover.
One year post-ECHO Profile session, Samuel said that his 2021 was his most successful years. He said that his relationship with Jared had improved immensely after the listening debrief and conversation. He went on to say that if it wasn’t for the ECHO profile conversation and the coaching guidance, he wouldn’t have been able to stay at the company.