I originally wrote today’s post for MarTech. It appeared on their site on May 27, 2026.
Most executive or leadership listening tours fail for one simple reason: They were designed to (just) collect feedback instead of uncovering truth. Meetings get scheduled, leaders conduct town halls, surveys are sent, and themes are summarized. And then? Nothing fundamental changes.
What does happen is that employees and customers notice the gap between listening and action. Always. And credibility erodes just a little more because people aren’t asking whether leadership is listening but whether leadership is willing to confront reality.
There’s a difference.
A real listening tour isn’t a communications exercise, a morale campaign, a leadership visibility tour, or a “we value your feedback” checkbox activity. A real listening tour is an operational intelligence system.
When the tour is done well, it reveals where friction lives, trust breaks down, strategy disconnects from execution, employees are compensating for broken systems, and customers are carrying the burden of organizational complexity. Most importantly, it reveals what leadership can’t see from their conference rooms, reports, or dashboards.
Why This Matters
These listening tours matter not because organizations are suffering from a lack of data but because they are suffering from a lack of unfiltered understanding. The further leadership gets from frontline reality, the more dangerous their assumptions become. (The Iceberg of Ignorance is real.)
That only gets worse when metrics replace conversations, reporting layers sanitize truth, and teams learn how to present “green status” updates while operational drag compounds underneath.
Meanwhile, employees normalize workarounds, customers normalize frustration, and leaders normalize distance until dysfunction starts to look like business as usual.
Listening tours matter because they reconnect leadership to lived experience. In today’s environment, that matters more than ever because while AI can summarize sentiment and dashboards can track trends and analytics can measure outcomes, none of that can fully replace human understanding.
The brands that win over the next decade won’t simply be the most data-driven but the most fact-driven.
Practical Framework for Your Listening Tour
Want to ensure your listening tours drive the change you expect? Follow the practical framework below to set a course for success. But first, a couple of basics:
- Who leads the sessions? Executives/business leaders lead the sessions, and they must listen more than they talk. To help with that, they need to bring a notetaker.
- What’s the format? Small groups or roundtables are ideal. You know the group rule and at what size people are inhibited to speak.
OK, let’s start from the beginning.
Step 1: Define the Purpose
Most listening tours start vague and stay vague, so like any other part of your VoC and VoE programs, you have to start with an objective. It can’t just be, “We want feedback.”
That sounds encouraging, but it’s also strategically weak. A listening tour should have a clear purpose tied to business reality, such as, “We are conducting these tours to…”
- identify operational friction
- understand where trust breaks down
- uncover employee pain points
- uncover what drives customer effort
- evaluate cultural alignment
- assess leadership effectiveness
- discover barriers to execution
- understand why initiatives stall
- identify where complexity is hurting performance
Without a clear purpose, listening tours drift into random conversations that produce interesting anecdotes but little actionable insight. The best listening tours are designed around discovery, not validation.
If leaders enter conversations trying to confirm (or defend) what they already believe, employees and customers will sense that immediately. Curiosity creates openness, while defensiveness shuts it down.
Step 2: Listen to Both Employees and Customers
This is where a lot of organizations miss the bigger picture. Employee listening and customer listening are often treated as separate initiatives run by separate teams, but they’re deeply connected.
Employees see customer problems long before leadership does, and customers experience the downstream effects of employee effort. Just a couple of examples:
- You’ve got confusing policies that frustrate employees first, then customers.
- Your broken systems create internal workarounds that eventually damage the customer experience
- Leadership misalignment creates employee confusion and inconsistent customer interactions.
- Operational complexities become employee and, hence, customer complexities.
The smartest organizations connect all of these instead of treating them independently because employee listening reveals internal complexities, while customer listening reveals external impact. And together, they tell the real story.
Step 3: Ask Questions That Reveal Reality
Generic questions will produce generic answers. Don’t ask questions like:
- Any feedback for leadership?
- What could we do better?
- How satisfied are you?
These questions rarely uncover meaningful information because they invite surface-level responses. Strong, successful listening tours ask questions that expose friction, emotion, inconsistency, and workarounds. Dig deeper; here are some examples.
Questions for Employees
Meaningful and actionable questions to ask employees include:
- What makes it difficult to do great work here?
- Do you have the tools, training, and resources to do your job (well)?
- Where do processes slow you down most?
- What problems have become “normal” that shouldn’t be normal?
- What workarounds have you and your team created?
- Where does communication break down?
- What creates the most rework?
- Where does leadership unintentionally create complexity?
Pay attention to hesitation, recurring themes, and body language, i.e., what people say indirectly. The most important signals are often buried inside stories, frustration, or silence.
Questions for Customers
Customer listening should also go far beyond satisfaction scoring.
- What feels harder to do than it should?
- What nearly caused you to leave?
- What do you dread doing or dealing with?
- Where do our promises fail to match what we say/do?
- What issue takes too long to resolve?
- What makes working with us easy?
- What creates confusion or inconsistency?
- What would make you trust us more?
- Do our products and services deliver the value you expect?
Customers are often remarkably clear about unnecessary effort when organizations are willing to hear it without becoming defensive.
Remember that not all listening happens through questions, though. Some of the most valuable insights emerge through observation, i.e., watching where employees struggle, where customers hesitate, where workarounds appear, and where processes create unnecessary effort.
Step 4: Listen for Patterns, Not Just for Complaints
Unsuccessful listening tours simply collect comments, while successful ones identify systems problems. If leaders only hear isolated complaints, they tend to dismiss issues as one-off situations, but when patterns emerge across teams, customers, functions, or channels, deeper organizational issues become visible.
So be sure to listen for recurring delays, policy confusion, duplicated work, emotional exhaustion, contradictory priorities, inconsistent leadership behaviors, lack of ownership, communication breakdowns, fear of escalation (or anything else), and inconsistencies.
Patterns matter more than volume. One frustrated employee or customer might not reveal much, but 50 employees or customers describing the same or similar pain points definitely reveals a structural issue.
One caveat here: Listening tours can’t become negativity hunts. Listening isn’t just about what’s going wrong; you’ve got to take time to capture what’s right and what’s going well, too. We often forget to celebrate the positive, but that’s so important.
Step 5: Don’t Defend the Company During the Conversation
This is where a lot of listening tours fail. Someone shares frustration, but leadership immediately explains why the process exists, why change is difficult, why another department owns the issue, or why the situation is more complicated than people realize.
Suddenly the moment and the conversation become unsafe. I’ve seen this all too often, and it’s not good.
Listening tours aren’t the time to justify the system. They’re the time to understand how the system is experienced. That doesn’t mean every criticism is correct, but it does mean that every experience contains information.
Defensiveness kills honesty faster than almost anything else. Seriously.
Step 6: Close the Loop
Nothing destroys trust faster than asking people to speak honestly and then disappearing afterward. Employees and customers don’t expect perfection, but they do expect acknowledgment, transparency, and, especially, visible follow-through.
That means that you’ve got to summarize what was said/heard, communicate themes honestly, explain priorities clearly, identify what will change, acknowledge what can’t change yet and why, and share progress continuously.
This is where listening turns into credibility. Without action, listening tours become organizational theater. (Sadly, too many are just that!) And people remember that.
So, let’s turn listening into true action loops as follows. Listen, identify themes, prioritize, assign ownership, act, communicate progress, and then re-validate.
Step 7: Make Listening Continuous, Not One-Off
One listening tour won’t fix organizational misalignment because your reality changes constantly, employee and customer expectations evolve, operational friction shifts, and culture drifts.
Listening just has to become part of how the organization operates, and that might include recurring listening sessions, leadership immersion programs, Gemba walks, customer journey observation, frontline shadowing, employee roundtables, cross-functional obstacles reviews, executive office hours, and closed-loop feedback systems.
The goal isn’t simply to gather more input but to stay closely connected to how work and experiences actually unfold. Too often, leaders are disconnected from the reality of the frontline (actually, all employees) and customers.
The Missing Piece in Listening Programs
Want to know the missing piece in most listening programs that causes most organizations to blow it, even if they do everything else right: governance. Many organizations treat listening tours as informal. (There’s mistake #1.) If listening is going to drive change, though, then it has to have governance. Here’s what that should include.
Clear Accountability: Who owns employee listening, customer listening, insight consolidation, action tracking, communication, and follow-through and follow-up? If ownership is unclear, momentum disappears.
Cross-Functional Visibility:Listening insights shouldn’t remain trapped inside HR, CX teams, customer support, operations, or isolated business units. The strongest organizations connect signals across the enterprise because friction rarely involves just one department.
Leadership Participation:Executives can’t outsource these listening tours. That just defeats the purpose. They absolutely need direct exposure to employees, customers, and partners, otherwise understanding becomes secondhand, which is often incomplete.
Defined Review Cadence:Organizations should establish recurring reviews focused on emerging indicators of process strain, recurring pain points, unresolved operational barriers, psychological safety, and systemic risks – not as compliance exercises but as strategic intelligence reviews.
Measurement Beyond Sentiment:Many organizations measure whether people felt heard, which is vital but incomplete because strong governance also measures friction reduction, issue resolution speed, reliability improvement, operational simplification, employee retention, customer loyalty, reduction in recurring complaints, and improvement in execution consistency.
Listening should truly influence outcomes, not just perception.
The Bigger Opportunity
Organizations that listen best aren’t necessarily the nicest organizations, but they’re often the clearest. That’s because they understand where excessive effort is happening, confidence is weakening, employees are compensating, customers are struggling, and leaders’ assumptions are wrong.
That clarity truly becomes a competitive advantage because organizations don’t improve based on what leaders hope is happening but based on what’s actually happening. After all, that’s the real purpose of a listening tour: not to make people feel heard for a moment but to help leaders understand well enough to make changes.
In Closing
The organizations that struggle most with listening are often those most convinced that they already understand what people need. But that confidence becomes dangerous because distance changes perspective.
The farther leaders move from the day-to-day operational experience, the easier it becomes to mistake reports for truth, metrics for understanding, and activity for alignment. That’s why companies need listening systems, not occasional listening exercises.
Those companies that listen best aren’t the ones with the most feedback but the ones that are most willing to confront what the feedback reveals – and disciplined enough to act on it.
Listen with curiosity. Speak with honesty. Act with integrity. The greatest problem with communication is we don’t listen to understand. We listen to reply. When we listen with curiosity, we don’t listen with the intent to reply. We listen for what’s behind the words.~ Roy T. Bennett
Want this thinking applied inside your organization?
ABOUT ANNETTE
Annette Franz is an internationally recognized employee and customer experience thought leader, coach, speaker, and author. In 2019, she published her first book, Customer Understanding: Three Ways to Put the “Customer” in Customer Experience (and at the Heart of Your Business); it’s available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle formats. In 2022, she published her second book, Built to Win: Designing a Customer-Centric Culture That Drives Value for Your Business [Advantage|ForbesBooks], which is available to purchase on Amazon, Books A Million!, Target, Barnes & Noble, and thousands of other outlets around the world! And, finally, Annette’s third book, Employee Understanding: A Three-Pillar Framework for Designing a Great Experience and Driving Business Success, is now available on Amazon! Sign up for our newsletter for updates, insights, and other great content that you can use to up your EX and CX game.
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