297: Make People Feel Heard with Katie O’Malley
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https://youtu.be/vKFULhTQwg0
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Katie O’Malley, Founder of (en)Courage Coaching, is on a mission to create workplaces that do no harm by equipping leaders with the skills to prevent toxicity and foster cultural transformation.
We dive into Katie’s career path from political campaigns and higher education to leadership coaching, and explore her Power of Listening Framework—the AIR Methodology: Attention, Intention, and Recognition. Katie shares how listening well is one of the most powerful tools leaders have to build trust, increase engagement, and demonstrate respect. We also discuss how she uses LEGO Serious Play to unlock team vulnerability and build connection in a playful but profound way.
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Make People Feel Heard with Katie O’Malley
Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Katie O’Malley, the founder of (en)Courage Coaching. She has helped over 200 leaders and leadership teams prevent toxic workspace experiences and create cultural transformations across the US and the UK. Katie, welcome to the show.
Steve, thank you so much for having me. I’m delighted to be here and really eager for our conversation and to be helpful to your audience.
I’m sure you will be very helpful. You bring a different perspectives than what we had, the previous 300 guests, so definitely very interesting. But let’s start with my favorite question, which is, what is your personal “Why” and what are you doing to manifest it in your practice?
Absolutely. So my personal “Why” goes all the way back to when I was in college studying political science. I have always wanted to make a positive impact in the world, the communities that I’m a part of, the connections and the relationships that I have. And that thread has pulled throughout my entire career, whether it was working on political campaigns and nonprofit organizations or in higher education. And eventually what I realized is I had this kind of itch for small business ownership, entrepreneurship, having the agency and autonomy to work the way that I wanted to work and took that, combined it with my “Why” of really helping folks at the intersection of mental health and work.
It’s where we spend eight, 10, 12 hours of our day. And to think that it doesn’t have an impact on how we move through the world or our overall well-being is bonkers. And so
I spend my days really helping folks to align their strengths, talents, and values with the roles and organizations that they're pursuing.
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And also working on the other side of the equation, on the employer side of the equation, training up their leaders to do no harm to their teams and employees throughout the workday. And so, yeah, my “Why” is how do we help people have, at worst, a net neutral experience in their workday and at best, a workday that elevates their life outside of work.
Yeah, I mean, it’s a huge thing and a lot of companies don’t realize that they have these employees in the company and if they are happy, they’re going to be much more productive. They are going to project a much better impression of the company to the outside world. They are going to make their customers happier. So it’s really worth investing in improving the mental health and the happiness of the people in the company. That’s a big lever that you’re pulling there. So let’s take this as a good pivot point because we are podcasting on frameworks, as you know, and our listeners know. I’m always on the hunt for a good framework that someone has discovered. What you do definitely is an important topic. You talk about the empathy, you have background in counseling. So you came up with a framework called the Power of Listening Framework, and I would love it for you to explain why it’s important and how does it work with our listeners?
Yeah. So I call it the AIR Methodology. A stands for attention, I stands for intention, R stands for recognition. And this is actually the amalgamation of my training and education as a counselor, where I spent three years learning how to listen for a living. That was the entirety of the program. And one of the most brilliant books that I ever read was one called On Dialogue, and it was written by an astrophysicist, of all folks. His name is Dr. David Bohm, and essentially what he had come up with were the building blocks of dialogue. So how are we actually communicating with one another. And from there, I started to learn the entire listening skill set, which includes so many different practices that folks need to be engaging in to listen well.
But it can be really overwhelming for someone who is not in the field of counseling therapy, helping professionals, coaching, to say, all right, I’m going to spend all of this time, effort and energy learning this skillset that while is important for me as a leader actually is not what I specialize in cause I’m a website developer, I’m a software engineer. I am the chief financial officer of a company. That’s where my expertise lies. And so instead of making the attempt to educate and train folks up on the dozens of skills of listening, I’m really trying to distill them down into three main practices. So
the AIR Methodology, what I say is listening is a function of attention.
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And if we are unable to start by giving someone our full attention, we’re never gonna be able to actually listen to them, to be able to hear them. And it sounds simple. But there’s nothing easy about giving someone your attention these days. We’re living in a billion-dollar attention economy where our attention is being hijacked every few seconds with pings and emails and interruptions and to overlay that on a brain that constantly wants to be stimulated can be very difficult.
And so when we’re talking about intention and recognition, it’s not just about offering those pieces to the person that you are in conversation with or listening to or in dialogue with, but you’re also applying that methodology to yourself as well. How are you attending to the reaction that’s happening in your heart, your mind, your body? How are you intending to also understand what’s happening with you and recognize you are a human and not a robot? You’re going to have an emotional response, but how are you recognizing that simply by listening to what someone else has to share in their perspective, it doesn’t mean you’re rubber stamping it or agreeing with it. You’re just giving them the space to be seen and heard by you, which as humans, it’s the reason we’re here. It’s the reason that Homo sapiens are here and Neanderthals went by the wayside. We lived in community and supported each other in ways that they did not. And so, listening and attention is a big part of that.
Yeah. Just to add a remark here. So, when I was a Vistage facilitator, Vistage peer group company, and when I was a facilitator there, we had the saying there among these Vistage facilitators that listening is so close to love that you cannot say the difference. It was very interesting that people are hungry for being listened to and it’s very powerful. Sorry, I broke your train of thought. So attention. What about intention?
Yeah. So there’s attention and then intention.
I always say your intention is going to be the same for every conversation or dialogue you enter into.
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And the intention is simply to truly understand what the other person is trying to communicate to you. That’s it. You are not trying to respond. You’re not trying to agree or disagree. You’re not trying to find holes or points of connection. You are simply there to understand what it is they are trying to communicate. And we can do that by paraphrasing what we’re hearing, summarizing what they’ve said when they get to the end, asking clarifying questions, collecting observations about what it is you’re seeing from them. So even being able to say, oh my gosh, you seem to get really energized when you started talking about X. Can you tell me more about that? The intention is t
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