ListenLeaders | Organizational diagnosis through professional listening

What you get

Real outcomes, starting with the one you can't afford to skip.

Diagnose before you reorg

Interrupt the reflex

Your engagement survey just came back and you know something is broken. Your leadership's reflex says to restructure your way out of the trouble. Wait! We might be able to show you new data and help you interrupt that reflex, because a reorg built on a misdiagnosis could cost you a year and your best people.

The film

Your organization, on screen

Our listening tours can end in a short, honest film: your people, in their own words, showing leadership what's really happening and where the energy wants to go. It's the most tangible diagnosis you'll ever hold, and it works as hard in an all-hands as it does in a boardroom.

The hope score

Numbers your board can follow

We measure hope in your organization before and after the work, using scales psychology has validated for decades. You get to watch trust, creativity, and momentum recover, in numbers instead of anecdotes.

The thesis

Measure what hope moves, and you can see its power.

We see hope as a signal. A hopeful employee is creativity waiting for an outlet. A hopeful team that is stuck behind a broken process will point you straight at the system that needs to be fixed. Hope shows up when people believe in a better future and keep reaching for it. So we listen for hope (and the absence of it), we measure it, and we help you harness it. Psychology has measured hope rigorously for decades; we bring that science inside organizations as a hope score. And because hope looks forward by nature, it feeds the capacities every leader gets judged on:

Creativity

More options when the pressure is on.

Innovation

Hope thrives in ambiguity. So do new ideas.

Resiliency

Faster recovery from setbacks.

Communication

The truth gets told sooner.

Strategy

You can't build a strategy without believing in a future.

We diagnose to optimize hope.

Why now

Everyone is selling a speculative future. Almost no one is ready to hear one.

We're in a strange moment. Things feel more uncertain than they have in decades, everyone is managing change fatigue, and burnout is everywhere. That's not a receptive field for leading a transformation. If you're driving innovation or growth, you're selling a future full of unknowns, and the questions get hard fast:

How do you present that future with clarity, confidence, and conviction?

How do you bring integrity to the process of speculation?

How do you reach an audience that has closed itself off to anything that challenges the status quo?

We take a behavioral science and strategy lens to exactly this problem. And we start by listening.

Proof

20+ years listening inside the biggest companies on the planet.

We started this work together at Southwest Airlines twenty years ago and never stopped. A few highlights, with the full stories one click away.

Microsoft

The org that came back from the bottom

One Microsoft org's employee Thrive scores sat near the bottom of the company, with burnout running wide. We built a participatory culture program: a volunteer Culture Crew, workshops for leadership and the full org, and goals that came from the ground up with sponsorship from the top down.

Thrive scores went from among Microsoft's lowest to #1 across Microsoft Cloud.

Ticketmaster

A $9 billion debut with no comms function

The company spun out to NASDAQ with zero communications infrastructure. We built the function from scratch, coached the entire C-suite, and repositioned the brand from ticketing company to your connection to live entertainment.

A smooth debut, five Silver Telly awards, and a brand identity still in use two decades later.

Southwest Airlines

Where the method started

Anthropologists and communicators working side by side on airport flow, frontline operations, messaging, and culture, because they all move together. We both grew up professionally inside that team.

It gave us the founding principle of every engagement since: people support what they help to create.

Google, Disney, PlayStation, Meta, TikTok

Twenty years inside the algorithm builders

Ethnographic research with the people building the systems that shape our lives, from Genentech to Shopify to Frito-Lay: leadership stakeholders, frontline stakeholders, and the validation loops between them.

It's the research discipline behind every ListenLeaders diagnosis.

Read the case studies

How we work

From one conversation to a full diagnosis.

Everything starts with listening, and every step earns the next one.

Step one

Strategy session

Complimentary. One hour with both principals. We spend most of it listening, and you'll leave with the issue underneath the issue named.

Step two

Listening Tour

Structured listening inside your organization: leadership, frontline, and the friction points between functions, with a validation loop back to the top. You'll get a clear diagnosis of your organizational health, a hope score, and recommendations you can act on. If you want the film, this is where we shoot it.

Step three

A menu, never a template

The tour's recommendations become your menu: a six-week diagnostic, a narrative strategy sprint, executive coaching, video ethnography, or an embedded engagement with us in the room while the change happens.

The approach

What you'll experience along the way.

We listen from every angle that matters: top-down and bottom-up, inside-out and outside-in, what people say and what they leave carefully unsaid. We measure the distance between leadership's story and the story rising from the floor, and we track how messages actually land through feedback loops most organizations never watch. No two organizations are the same, so the listening design flexes while the method stays rigorous. Three frequencies anchor it:

Operating

How work actually moves: decisions, priorities, and the systems people navigate every day.

Relational

How people treat each other: trust, candor, silence, and what happens when someone tells the truth.

Identity

Who the organization believes it has become, and whether the people inside still recognize it.

Through every frequency, one filter: where does hope concentrate, and where is it draining?

The principals

Her cultural anthropology. His sociology.

Danna Lloyd

Cultural anthropologist. Brand strategist.

Danna is a cultural anthropologist and brand strategist with 20+ years of experience helping global brands understand people, culture, and the forces that shape behavior. Her work spans technology, social platforms, entertainment, and consumer culture, bringing a human-centered lens to how people affiliate, trust, and make decisions. She has led end-to-end research and strategy engagements at Google, PlayStation, Disney, Genentech, Southwest Airlines, Shopify, Meta, Change.org, and Frito-Lay, translating human behavior into business direction by combining ethnographic research with large-scale data.

Dale Thomas Vaughn

Sociologist. Narrative strategist.

Dale is a sociologist and narrative strategist with 20+ years of experience building executive voice and organizational culture inside Microsoft, Google, SAP, Southwest Airlines, and Ticketmaster. He has led listening tours across five Microsoft organizations, built culture programs that took one org's Thrive scores from among the company's lowest to #1 across Microsoft Cloud, and coached leaders from first keynote to NASDAQ debut. He is the author of Birthright: Recall and Wine Snobs Are Boring.

We listen to leaders.

One hour with both principals. We do the listening; you'll leave with clarity, direction, and a credible reason for hope.

Thanks — we'll be in touch shortly to find a time.