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Why Listening Matters Right Now

right, everybody. This is episode two of our coaching skills series that's going to run every other week until the end of the year. So if you missed the first episode, episode 126, about the difference between acknowledgement and compliments and why one works and one doesn't, go back and listen to it. And then again, hit the follow or subscribe button to make sure that you're getting these straight to your phone when they drop. You don't need to listen to the first episode to follow along today. And same will be true with the rest of the series. So quick reminder as to why we're doing this. The next few weeks are the hardest stretch of the year in this business, right? Again, stress is so high. People spending time with their friends or their family or not being able to. Maybe they've lost a loved one. Maybe money is really tight, right? Money's tight for you. Money's tight for the staff. And the guest expectations are higher than they've ever been. You're not going to get through that by talking louder or working longer hours. You get through it by leading better. And that starts with how you listen. So here's the uncomfortable truth. You may think you're a good listener. I thought I was. I've been told years ago I was. Most people do. And most people, including most coaches, are listening at level one, which means they're hearing the words through the filter of their own head, mostly waiting for their turn to talk. So here's what you're going to walk away with today. One, the three levels of listening and a gut check on which one you're probably stuck in. Two, what level two and level three pickup that level one completely misses. And three, one simple move to catch yourself drifting back into level one in the middle of a conversation. Let's get started.

Who We Coach And How

Welcome to the Restaurant Leadership Podcast, where we coach independent multi-unit restaurant operators to build systems that drive profitability and reclaim time so they can scale with confidence and spend their time and energy where they want to, not where they have to. I'm your host, Kristen Marvin, restaurant coach and author of Multi-unit Mastery. If you are an independent restaurant owner managing multiple locations, you know the chaos that comes with growth. Inconsistent execution across your restaurants. Managers who won't take ownership. Constantly answering questions your team should already know the answers to. You're stuck in your current role when you want to be playing a bigger strategic role as you scale. You don't have the right leaders in place or you keep losing them. And you're not sure how to find great people and actually keep them around. We work with passionate independent restaurant owners who found success with their first few locations and are ready to scale strategically. Our clients aren't looking to just survive expansion. They want to thrive through it. They're committed to developing strong leaders and creating exceptional guest experiences. Through the independent restaurant framework that we teach in multi-unit mastery, we coach independent restaurant groups to move from chaos to confidence by focusing on three pillars people, process, and profit. You can grab a gifted copy of the book at irfbook.com. On this show, we bring you real coaching conversations, leadership strategies, and the frameworks that you need to lead like a CEO instead of operating like a worn-out manager. And here's the thing: coaching has changed our clients' businesses and can change yours too. If you've never experienced what it's like to have someone in your corner who actually gets the restaurant world, we'd love to connect. We offer one-on-one and group coaching. Head to kristinmarvin.com slash contact for a complimentary coaching session and let's talk about what's possible for your restaurant group.

The Three Levels Of Listening

Okay, if you're like me, you had no idea that there were three levels of listening or what they were. I'd never even heard of this before until I started taking coaching courses. So they this concept comes out of the book Coactive Coaching, which is the program I took my courses through. If you want to learn more about it. So level one is internal listening. You hear what the other person says, but you filter all of it through your own thoughts, your own experience, and what you plan to say next. Someone starts telling you about a staffing problem and you're already thinking, I dealt with that in 2015. Here's what I'd do. That's level one. And it's the default setting for almost everybody, right? I think this is pretty natural because a lot of us want to jump in and relate or um solve a problem for somebody. Level two is focused listening. So you're fully present with the other person. Not just their words, but their tone, their energy, their emotion. You notice the word they keep repeating. You notice that their voice dropped when they mentioned a certain person, or their pitch changed when they got really excited about something that they were talking about. So level three is more global listening, sometimes called environmental. So now you're listening to the whole picture. What's in the room or who's in the room, what's not being said, what the body language is telling you, how the energy just shifted. When someone says it's fine, and every cell in their body says it's not, that's level three. I do this all the time. When clients come on and I say, How are you? And they go, I'm good. I'm all right. We immediately dive into that because there's something that's not being said, right? Same thing with your staff. When you're in your when you're in the middle of service and somebody comes in and clocks in for their shift, and you're walking past them on the floor and you're like, Hey Sarah, what's going on? How are you? I'm good. Stop right there. That person is not good. Something's going on and they might need a minute. Either outside, they might need a minute in the office, they might need to just tell you what's going on for a second and process. That's how females process stuff, right? We just got to get it out for a second. They might need something bigger than that, but pay attention there.

What Level One Misses

So, why does this matter? There's there's really three reasons here. So, one, people feel truly heard, often for the first time. I think that's one of the most powerful things about what we do with coaching. When somebody sits down for a first-time coaching experience, they often cry because people haven't asked them powerful questions before. And powerful questions is another great coaching skill that we're going to get into in future episodes, but they feel seen and it's uncomfortable and it makes them vulnerable and it puts them on display and uh it helps them work through and process things. So when somebody feels heard, they open up, right? And when they open up, you get the real problem instead of the polite version. God, I was so I just in my leadership career, everything I just move a mile, million miles an hour every time it asks me what's going on, what's going on? How are you? I'm good. What everything's good. Just trying to be, you know, positive as much as possible, but to a fault. So, two, you pick up what's not being said. And that's usually where the real coaching lives. The stated problem is never, ever, ever the actual problem. You got to ask why or what's going on five times, like a child, to get to the actual problem that this person is dealing with. Because they're going to say it's money and that's why they're quitting. It's never the money. There is something else going on in the organization. Maybe it's a problem with you, maybe it's a problem with the systems, maybe they're having conflict with another employee, but they're going to say it's something else. Three, it models the skill that you want your team to have, right? If you're a reactive, constantly interrupted operator, your managers are going to learn to talk at each other too. We see this all the time in manager meetings, and we have to design it into our group coaching sessions in the very beginning of we have to hold space for each other. We cannot interrupt and over talk. And we see this happen sometimes where a director of operations will speak up and say something, and the owner jumps in immediately to solve the problem. And we have to say, back up for a second. I almost use an F bomb, back up for a second, give them some time, let them come to their own conclusion here. Don't jump in and try to be the hero. That's not development for your team. You got to let them develop their strategic thinking skills and they've got to talk through things. And I know that that's really hard because we move so fast in this business. So for many operators, there's a cost to staying in level one. Think about every single time somebody on your team said, yeah, no problem, and then quietly resigned a month later, right? I've done that. I've been there for sure. So, how do you

A Simple Move To Refocus

do this? You can't force yourself into level two or level three in the middle of a rush, right? I completely understand that. You choose it before the conversation starts and you move between levels on purpose. So this is a very powerful skill to master. So before you walk into a conversation, set an intention. Literally say to yourself, I'm going to listen at level two. I do this with clients all the time. Phone face down. Or better yet, in your pocket, eyes up. Then notice when you slip. The telltale sign is that you start composing your answer while they're still talking. The second you catch those thoughts, that's your cue to drop back into their words, their tone, and their energy. And you might just need to take a deep breath when you notice that. Once you're at a solid level two, widen the lens. Ask yourself, what's the energy doing right now? What is this person across from me not saying? Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is just name it. Like, hey, I noticed your whole tone shifted when you mentioned that thing or that person. And sometimes it matches their energy. If someone is furious, I'll lean in and match it and tell them, I'm doing this to try to take some of that energy off of you. My coach does that to me all the time. If I have a complaint about a client or I feel like I'm not making an impact or whatever, he just gets right back in my face and takes that energy from me. And I and then I recognize what he's doing. And sometimes that's just enough to calm me down a little bit. So that's it. It's it's simple, but it is brutally hard to do consistently because you, again, you've got to have energy conserved to be able to recognize when you're present with somebody and when you're not. So quick pause here before I show you how this sounds in a real conversation. So

Book Gift And Free Coaching

listening at a level two on a quiet day is easy. Doing it in the middle of a Friday night rush when three people need you all at once is a different sport, right? And if you run more than one location, you're having these conversations in a hurry between buildings with people who need it a lot more from you than they're saying out loud. That's why I wrote multi-unit mastery for independent operators running more than one location. Go grab a copy of multi-unit mastery at irfbook.com. And this holiday season, here's my gift to you. Everybody who downloads a copy of the book gets a free coaching session with me on me. My calendar link is waiting for you at irfbook.com. Bring me a conversation that you wish you'd listened in better and let's replay it together. Or bring me your biggest vision for the next year and let's work through it. All right.

The Steve Story And The Turn

Let me tell you about a session that I had that shows this a little bit better than how I can explain it. So a couple weeks ago, I had a session with a GM. I'll call him Steve. His independent restaurant is in the middle of a big staffing transition. We got on the call and I asked him, What do you need in this moment? You've got a lot going on. And he says, I didn't really bring anything. Now here's where level one gets you. A level one listener hears that and thinks, Great, I've got an agenda, so let's go through my list. Or cool, short call. Instead, I said, that's okay, and gave him some room. And then he just started talking. Talking about his inventory system, re-entering numbers, duplicate products, packets that take about an hour to an hour each to five to finalize. He had five to seven more hours of work ahead of him. He was exhausted. For that first stretch of the call, the conversation was all about data entry. He had a lot of things he needed to talk about. But tucked inside all of that, he mentioned that he'd worked between 60 and 70 hours the week before, and that he'd worked at least part of every single day. A little later, I asked him whether he could see the light at the end of the tunnel. And he said, and I'm gonna quote him here I feel like I can't see the light because there's just so much that still needs to be done. And right after that, he told me he just lost a bartender and he couldn't pull his servers to help him cover a manager shift because he needed them on the floor. I'll be honest, I didn't nail it the whole way through. I asked plenty of task questions in that first stretch. How long does each packet take? Are you making progress? Level one sneaks in even when you know better. But at some point, I stopped listening for the topics and started listening for him. And I said, You're really a one-man show right now in this restaurant. And he said, Yeah, I kind of am. And that's it. Three words, no big breakthrough, no tears. But look at what that sentence did. The whole call turned on it. And I asked, What do you need in order to protect yourself in this moment? And he said, I probably just need to get a day off here and there, probably a full day. Not a better process in this moment, something small. He needed a day off. I say small, it was huge to him. So we got really practical. When can you take one? Sunday, he thought. What has to happen for Sunday to be a real day off? He'd already scheduled some coverage, and someone had already agreed to cover Monday too. So he wasn't gonna hit eight days in a row. And then we talked about how to get him two days a week. So he told me he didn't bring anything to this to the session, but what he actually brought was an entire week on his back. And I only heard it because I quit listening to the words and I started listening to the person. This is what we do in coaching. We we coach the person, not the problem. Now think about your own people. How many of them have told you I'm fine or I don't really have anything when you sit down for a one-on-one or performance review? And you took that at face value. So here's your homework this week with this specific skill.

Homework For Your Next Shift

And like last time, I'm gonna get bossy because anybody that knows me knows I'm bossy. I want it done within the next 24 to 48 hours on your next shift. Pick one conversation that you've already that you have already on your calendar, a one-on-one, a pre-shift check-in, a call with a manager. If you don't have one on your calendar, find one. Step one, before it starts, set an intention. Say to yourself out loud if you have to. That's okay. I'm gonna listen at level two today. Put my phone face down, eyes directly on them. Put your back to the dining room, back to the staff. Um, eliminate those distractions and let the team know I'm having a conversation right now. Leave me the F alone. Step two, during the conversation, watch for the slip. The moment you catch yourself composing your answer while they're still talking. That's level one creeping in. Recognize it now. Don't beat yourself up. It's gonna happen because now you know about this and it's it's you're just gonna start to recognize it more. That's fine. It's like um seeing red cars everywhere on the street when you're shopping for a red car. There's not more red cars, they're you're just noticing them. So just drop back into their words, their tone, their energy. You gotta let ego go. And that's a really big part of this when you're trying to work yourself into level two. Step three, and this is the one that really makes it stick here, guys. Right after the conversation, spend three minutes writing down one thing you heard that you would have missed at level one. Maybe a shift in tone, maybe a word they kept repeating, maybe something underneath what they said, like Steve saying, I didn't bring anything. Then look at what you wrote and ask yourself, what would have happened if I would have missed that? That's your answer for why this skill matters. Okay, again, I want to know what you're doing. I want to know how this is working for you. Let's celebrate this. Come and tell me what you caught. I want to know the conversation, what you heard at level two that you would have missed, and what you did with it. I read every single email. So email me at Kristen at columbinehospitality.com. Again, my name is spelled C-H R I S T I N. And if you want to practice with a real example from your own restaurants, that's what the holiday gift is for. So again, go grab a copy of multi-unit mastery at irfbook.com. And everyone who gets a coaching session with me this season um as my gift also gets access to my personal calendar. So the calendar link is on the site where you download the book. Bring the conversation and let's listen together.

Fine Is Not Always Fine

Here's what I want to leave you with um for this episode. Over the next few weeks, somebody on your team is gonna tell you they're fine. I guarantee it. Some of some of them will be fine. A lot of them won't be. The only way you're gonna know the difference is if you're listening at level two. What does their body language say when they say that they're fine? Are they making eye contact with you? Are they looking at the floor? Do they feel uncomfortable? Pay attention to this stuff. This was episode two of six. So I'll see you in a couple weeks with the next skill. Until then, listen like it matters. Okay, thanks for being here and thanks what you do for the industry.