Scan your environment

- To begin acting and thinking like a digital leader, one of the ways to practice listening at scale is to do what I call scanning the environment. A great example of this is David Thoday. He's a former CEO of Telstra, the largest telecom company in Australia. Now he's an early riser, and what he would do is grab his coffee in one hand, and his tablet in the other hand, and sit down with his internal social network that he'd use at the company. And he would scroll through, and just see what the activity was, what were people talking about, what was getting traction, what was accelerating, and he would make note of that. And when you walked into the office every day, he would bring it up in his executive sessions. For example he would say "Hey have you seen the conversation "that's happened in the Perth office? "There seems to be something going on there. "We should take a closer look. "And what's happening?" And what this did was by actively scanning through activities on that internal social network he had a good feel for what everything was happening inside the company. Now, be very clear about this, this is not about reading everything. He was not reading every post, he was doing a quick scan. And so I encourage you to think about how you can think about ways of building and scanning your environment into your everyday routine. This is about getting a taste, a flavor for what's happening out there a couple of times a day. So think about where you can build in that routine, where you can go into a tool like Hootsuite, where you build all that content and do a quick scan. I'll give you an example of how I do this. I have Hootsuite and some other tools that I use, but I often times would just open up Twitter on my phone. Go in there, and just see all of the notifications and mentions that somebody has, and I'll just scan through and see if anybody's written me a personal note. And I'll scan through and see what other people are writing about inside of my feed. Now this is not about reading everything. It's a quick look, a quick taste, something that I can do while walking from one part of the office to the other. And it's a great way again, to listen at scale, and a way to become that digital leader that you want to be.