Listening with Peter
Every Friday at eleven, this company stops working. The CEO, the designers, the engineers, the person who answers the front desk, and a few of the investors, advisers, and friends who walk alongside us, all of us sit down in one room with Peter Yaholkovsky, and for an hour we practice listening.
Peter is our resident Chief Listening Officer. He came to this work through an unusual road: medicine first, then decades in the discipline of language and human coordination, and twenty-five years teaching some of the most demanding teams in the country how to speak and listen to each other about what matters. He wrote a book called Listening for Candor, and he has spent most of his life on a single question: what actually happens between two people when one of them finally hears the other?
We call the hour Listening with Peter. There is no agenda in the usual sense. Some weeks we read a passage together and stop on a single sentence for forty minutes. Some weeks one of us brings something real, a negotiation that is stuck, a relationship inside the company that has gone quiet, and Peter works with that person while the rest of us watch what listening actually looks like when it is done with skill. Sometimes the person being worked with is me, in front of everyone I employ. I recommend the experience. It is not comfortable, and it is not optional if I want the rest of the room to believe this matters.
Why does a software company spend an hour a week this way? Because of what we build. COROS exists on a claim: that most of what breaks between people, in companies and in homes, breaks in conversation, and can be repaired in conversation. If we believed that claim only enough to sell it, you would be right not to trust us. The hour with Peter is where we find out, on ourselves, whether the thing we tell our customers is true.
What we keep finding is that it is. Two people on our team who had been politely routing around each other stopped needing to. Questions that had been circling for months got asked in plain words and answered in minutes. And something harder to name: when a group of people practices making sense together, week after week, a kind of capacity shows up that none of the individuals brought into the room. Ideas arrive that belong to nobody. That capacity is, as far as we can tell, where everything good we have shipped actually comes from.
This is an internal practice, and we are not turning it into a product or an event series. We are writing it down because we think more companies should have a room like this, and because it would be dishonest to build what we build without telling you how we live. If you lead a team and any of this stings a little, start smaller than we did. One hour. One real conversation. Someone in the room whose only job is to listen.
Saqib Rasool, Founder & CEO