active listening | powerful questions | emotional intelligence | interviewing | STAR | 360 feedback | survey design
What You Will Learn:
- Ask a question that produces information rather than the answer the person thinks you want
- Use STAR and CARE to get from a rehearsed story to what actually happened, and notice when it was invented
- Design a questionnaire that measures something: question types, scales, open questions, and the length people finish
- Run a 360 assessment properly — observable behaviour, evaluator bias, response rates, and delivering the result to the person
- Recognise your own emotional state in a conversation and its effect on what the other person is willing to say
- Build a competency profile from what your best performers actually do, not from a job description
- Design an assessment exercise for the cases where asking will never give you the answer
- Deliver findings from a survey or a 360 in a way that produces a plan instead of defensiveness
- Learn alongside Mike’s 1.6 million students from 185 countries
- Get the author’s experience from Preply, Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank
Overview
In the tech world, we pride ourselves on being data-driven. We obsess over logs, metrics, and sprint velocities, yet we often fail at the most critical data collection point: the human conversation. I’ve seen countless projects stall not because of a bad stack, but because a Senior Dev or PM couldn’t extract the right requirements or misunderstood a stakeholder’s underlying concern. This is where Mike’s course, Active Listening and Powerful Questions at Work, steps in to bridge the gap between technical expertise and job-ready skills in communication.
Most “soft skills” courses are filled with corporate fluff and “I hear you” clichés that don’t survive five minutes in a high-pressure engineering environment. Mike’s approach is different. Drawing from his experience at heavy hitters like Wargaming and Preply, he treats a conversation like a real-world project with specific deliverables. He moves past the surface-level “eye contact” advice and dives into the mechanics of information extraction. It’s about understanding that every time you ask a question, you are either opening a door or leading the witness. If you’ve ever felt like your 1-on-1s are just going through the motions or your discovery calls are yielding useless “yes” answers, this course provides the analytical framework to fix that.
Prerequisites
While this is marketed as a beginner to advanced curriculum, you don’t need a background in psychology or HR to get value here. However, a baseline of professional experience is helpful. If you’ve never had to lead a meeting or interview a candidate, some of the nuances might feel abstract. The real prerequisite is a willingness to be wrong about how good you think you are at listening. You’ll also need an environment where you can practice—whether that’s a scrum team, a hiring panel, or a 360 feedback cycle. If you are currently in a leadership track or aiming for a promotion, this acts as unofficial certification prep for the interpersonal demands of management.
Skills & Tools
The course is surprisingly technical in its methodology. You aren’t just “listening better”; you are learning to use industry-standard tools for human data collection. Key highlights include:
- The STAR & CARE Frameworks: Moving beyond the basic Situation-Task-Action-Result to use CARE as a diagnostic tool to spot when a story is being “invented” or rehearsed.
- Psychometric Survey Design: Learning how to build questionnaires that actually measure intent, focusing on scale selection and avoiding “the answer they think you want.”
- 360-Degree Assessment Architecture: Understanding evaluator bias and how to deliver results without triggering defensive walls.
- Emotional Intelligence (EQ) Monitoring: Developing the career growth habit of checking your internal “state” before it compromises a critical negotiation.
- Competency Profiling: Building hiring rubrics based on what high performers *actually* do, rather than copy-pasting generic job descriptions.
Career Benefits & Job Roles
This isn’t just for HR; it’s for anyone whose paycheck depends on getting accurate information from other humans. For Product Managers, it’s about better user discovery. For Engineering Leads, it’s about conducting interviews that actually predict job performance. For Data Analysts, it’s about designing surveys that don’t return “garbage in, garbage out” data. If you are eyeing a move into Executive Leadership or high-level Consulting, these are the job-ready skills that separate the individual contributors from the strategic thinkers. Mastering 360 feedback and active listening can drastically shorten your path to a Director-level role by proving you can manage the “human layer” of the organization.
Pros
- Practical “Audit” Focus: I loved the focus on spotting “invented” stories. In tech interviews, candidates are coached to death on STAR. Mike gives you the hands-on labs mindset to dig deeper and find the reality behind the rehearsed pitch.
- High-Stakes Pedigree: The instructor’s experience at Alfa-Bank and Wargaming shows. He isn’t talking about “kumbaya” moments; he’s talking about delivering findings in a way that produces a plan instead of a fight.
- Scalable Methodology: The section on survey design and 360 assessments is gold. It turns what is usually a messy, subjective process into something repeatable and objective.
Cons
If I’m being honest, the pacing in the middle sections can feel a bit dense if you are looking for quick hacks. This isn’t a “top 10 tips” video; it requires deep focus and a fair amount of self-reflection. If you’re a “2x speed” watcher, you might miss the subtle cues Mike demonstrates regarding tone and silence, which are just as important as the frameworks themselves. It’s a commitment, not a shortcut.