How to Get Better at Listening, with Bill Mayo

What It Covers

Plant foreman Bill Mayo describes how a structured 60-day listening commitment, undertaken through the Coaching for Leaders Academy, transformed his workplace relationships and family dynamics by replacing snap decisions with deliberate follow-up questioning techniques that consistently surfaced information his initial assessments missed entirely.

Key Questions Answered

• •Follow-up questioning cadence: Asking a second and third question after an initial response unlocks significantly deeper information than any single open-ended question. People instinctively give brief, transactional first answers, but interpret repeated questions as genuine interest, causing them to volunteer context, concerns, and details they would otherwise withhold entirely from the conversation.
• •"Tell me more" as a default prompt: The phrase "that's interesting, tell me more about that" functions as a low-stakes, universally applicable follow-up that requires no situational customization. Mayo adopted it across professional and personal conversations, using it to signal engagement and consistently prompt elaboration without requiring the listener to construct a precise or clever follow-up question.
• •Paraphrasing to verify understanding: Reflecting back what someone said — restating their key points before asking a follow-up — helps the listener categorize and label what is actually being communicated. This technique reduces misinterpretation and signals to the speaker that their words were processed, not merely heard, which encourages further disclosure and more precise explanation.
• •Snap decisions are wrong roughly half the time: Mayo found that by asking follow-up questions before acting, his initial read of a workplace situation turned out to be incorrect approximately 50% of the time. Withholding judgment for an additional three to five minutes of questioning consistently produced more accurate diagnoses and decisions that team members were more willing to act on with genuine engagement.
• •60-day structured commitment with a measurable signal: Improvement in listening requires a defined practice window and a concrete success indicator. Mayo's academy commitment specified daily intentional follow-up questioning and used team members' voluntary elaboration as the measurable signal that listening had improved — making an abstract skill trackable through observable behavioral changes in the people being listened to.