This is the third article in a leadership series exploring the six practices that create exceptional leaders. Read the introductory article here: The Future Of Work Has Outgrown “Good Enough” Leadership. Your 6-Part Playbook To Become An Exceptional Leader Starts Here
If you asked most senior leaders to rate themselves on how well they listen, the scores would be high. We have been told for years that listening is a core leadership skill. Most of us believe we are good at it. We nod in meetings, ask follow-up questions, and keep 1:1s on the calendar.
The people who work for us tell a different story.
When we partnered with The Harris Poll to survey 2,206 employed Americans on what separates exceptional leaders from good ones, listening came in second, just behind gratitude. Exceptional leaders were 2.16 times stronger on listening than good leaders. And one number in the data is worth pausing on.
Only 19% of employees under good leaders feel heard.
Eighty-one percent do not.
Why the gap is so persistent
Listening and hearing are different skills, and leaders routinely confuse them. Hearing happens whenever someone talks. Listening is the effort to understand what someone is actually carrying, including the things they are not saying out loud.
When leaders say “my door is always open” or “I hear you loud and clear,” they usually mean the first one. Their people know the difference, even if they cannot name it.
Harvard Business School’s Amy Edmondson has studied what happens when employees do not feel safe to speak up. She calls the pattern “invisible silence.” People withhold what they really think and instead tell leaders what they think the leaders want to hear.
In her research on hospital teams, she found that the best-performing teams were not the ones with the fewest errors. They were the ones reporting the most errors, because people felt safe enough to name problems out loud.
In her subsequent work on the need for “psychological safety” and leader listening, Edmondson has cited numerous instances in which the failure to speak up had grave consequences. This includes the NASA engineer who knew about defective rocket boosters but wasn’t able to alert higher-ups ahead of the Challenger disaster. And the countless employees at Wells Fargo who, under pressure to sell the bank’s financial services products, lied rather than stand up to their supervisors. As a result, customers were duped by accounts opened without their consent and other highly unethical practices, and the company was fined billions in regulatory penalties.
When 81% of employees under good leaders do not feel heard, Edmondson’s pattern is exactly what is happening. The signal is not getting through.
Where exceptional leaders break the pattern
During the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jon Harris, Chief Communications & Networking Officer at Conagra Brands, helped pull together a network of more than 40 communications leaders from Fortune 500 companies. The original purpose was straightforward: a working group sharing crisis communications strategies in real time.
Over the months that followed, it became something else. Senior leaders who were used to performing in public started doing something they rarely do with peers. They shared what they did not know. They asked for help. They admitted the parts of the job that were scaring them.
That kind of listening is rare at the senior level because it requires leaders to stop managing the impression they are making, and most senior leaders have spent decades perfecting that impression.
The specific thing most leaders are doing wrong
I have worked with executives for more than three decades, and one pattern repeats itself. Good leaders were trained early in their careers to project composure. Give nothing away. Keep your cards close.
Think of it as armor. Leaders were taught to put it on and never take it off. The problem is that armor does not signal strength to the person standing in front of you. It signals distance. And humans read distance as a threat.
Research on what psychologists call stonewalling, the behavior of shutting down and going blank during a conversation, shows that the person on the receiving end experiences it physiologically. Heart rate rises, stress hormones release, the fight-or-flight system activates. That is the exact response you do not want in someone you are trying to hear.
When a leader listens behind armor, with no facial feedback, no head nods, no small sounds of acknowledgement, the person speaking starts to feel unsafe. They edit themselves. They hedge. They give the abbreviated version of what they meant to say. The leader walks out convinced the conversation went well. The employee walks out convinced they were not heard.
What to do starting Monday
Three practices close the gap faster than leaders usually expect.
1. Take the armor off on purpose.
Listening visibly tells the person in front of you that it is safe to keep talking. Make eye contact. Let your face react. If you hear something hard, let your expression show you heard it. Leaders trained in the old school of executive presence will find this uncomfortable, and I would encourage you to do it anyway.
2. Replace “any questions?” with a better question.
“Any questions?” signals the conversation is ending. Try one of these instead:
- “What am I missing?”
- “What is something you are worried about that you have not said out loud?”
- “What would you change about how this is being rolled out?”
The first one alone, asked with genuine curiosity and followed by silence, will pull information you did not know you needed.
3. Check what was heard, not what you said.
Most leaders end meetings by summarizing their own point. Try ending meetings by asking someone else to summarize what they heard. You will learn two things quickly: where your message landed differently than you intended, and what your people actually care about in what you said.
Why this matters right now
The cost of the 19% problem — the fact that employees don’t feel truly listened to — has gone up. Employees have more access to information about their own companies than at any previous moment, and more access to what their peers at other companies are experiencing. They can tell when a leader is performing interest instead of feeling it, and they have less tolerance for it than they used to.
In a labor market where top talent has options, the leader who listens well keeps people. The leader who does not is running a retention risk, whether they see it yet or not.
Listening came in second in our research because it is the practice that determines whether the other five differentiators reach the person you are trying to lead. Gratitude, inclusion, context, growth, and enablement all depend on hearing people first. Everything else rides on top of it.
Next article: Why inclusive cultures hold together through hard change, and why the ones that do are rarely the product of policies or programs.
