Listening Assessment

Listening from all leadership capacities is most underrated. It’s at the source of all great leadership. Often, at the source of leadership failure is a lack of listening. So, it’s an important skill for leadership and all means of professional mastery, as well as our personal lives.

Practice engaging in deep listening over time. Tracking your listening on a daily basis is one of the key tools to help you increase your capacity to listen at different levels as appropriate to the situation in which you find yourself. 

Once a day, at the end of the day, take some time to reflect on your quality of listening during the day. Use the sliding bars below to indicate the percent of time you felt engaged in each level of listening. The total should equal 100%. This assessment can only be completed one time per day.

You can track your listening levels in your personal digital journal provided in this u-school program, or in other way that suits you; the power of the practice comes from reflecting on your listening on a regular basis, regardless of how you track it.

After completing this daily assessment, you’ll be able to see a visual overview of your levels of listening over time. 

Please note that you need to be logged in to u-school to be able to open this too (otherwise the button won't work). 

In this video, Otto Scharmer explains which levels of listening there are and how we can practice these different listening skills.

Levels of Listening

This Learning Module covers key areas that will help you develop individual, team, and organizational capacity to deepen your quality of listening.

This Learning Module contains:

• Introduction by Otto Scharmer to the Four Levels of Listening
• Context on Otto's own listening journey
• Conditions for listening
• Applications of listening
• Origins of this work
• An accompanying workbook with additional reflection practices