Maegan Stephens and Nicole Lowenbraun

Have you ever wanted to say to your boss, stop talking, you're not listening to me?

I've actually said that to her face.

Yep, I am her boss.

And obviously, I didn't fire her.

We were locked away in a rental house on a writing retreat, all out of snacks, behind on the deadline for our very first book about listening.

So, you know, super low stress situation.

I wanted us to make up time and try to hit the deadline.

And I wanted us to fix the section we had just written because it was not good enough.

But every time I brought it up, Megan rushed past it until finally I snapped.

Stop talking, you're not listening to me.

Okay, listen, I was listening, obviously.

I was not scrolling on my phone, and I wasn't multitasking.

But there was something else I wasn't doing.

And it took us three years of researching the way great leaders, managers, individual contributors listen to figure it out.

We asked the question, what makes someone a great listener at work?

Across dozens of interviews, we heard things like, my manager is a great listener because she gets just as excited about my big wins as I do.

My work wife is a great listener because she tells me when it's time to stop whining and to get back to work.

Now, we took all these answers, we wrote them out on brightly colored sticky notes, spread them across the dining room table, put them into groups, and that's when it hit us.

It's not that people weren't listening at work.

It's that there's more than one way to be a great listener at work.