Effective Listening Skills Every Leader Should Practise
During a regional team call, I watched a manager struggle to maintain engagement, repeatedly demanding that attendees stay present and active. The immediate conclusion was that the team lacked professional discipline.
No one tried to understand why the team was behaving like this. Until someone did. The calls were getting scheduled in the busiest hours and days. They changed the frequency and timing and somehow the meetings became more productive and shorter.
Why Good Leaders Still Struggle to Listen
Even well-intentioned leaders often fall into these three common traps, where organizational pressure or psychological habits get in the way of truly hearing their teams:
- The Illusion of Performance: Unknowingly, leaders feel they must always provide answers, viewing quiet reflection or listening as a lack of authority.
- Protecting Our Ideas: When a manager is deeply invested in a specific strategy, hearing feedback from the ground can feel like a personal critique.
- The Danger of the Echo Chamber: Genuine listening requires handling the friction of opposing views.
Experience trains us to recognize familiar patterns. Under constant time pressure, it also makes us assume we’ve seen this problem before.
Essentially, when we prioritize projecting absolute certainty over discovering the actual reality of a situation, we lose the chance to collaborate effectively with the people who matter most.
Curiosity Is one of the most basic Effective Listening Skills
Let me share an idea I’ve returned to repeatedly in coaching and leadership conversations. Curiosity is empathy. Empathy is curiosity. When someone comes to you for help, be curious about their challenges, perspective and possible solutions before offering advice. Advice without understanding the root cause is like treating the symptom, not the disease.
Think about it. When someone comes to you with a problem, what’s your first instinct? Do you ask questions or do you solve it for them? Empathy begins when we step outside our own frame of reference and try to see the situation through someone else’s eyes. And that always starts with curiosity.
Questions that create better conversations.
It’s not just about asking any questions, though. It’s about asking the right questions. The kind of questions that dig deeper, that uncover the underlying issues, that demonstrate genuine interest in the other person’s experience. Questions like:
Understand
- Can you tell me more about what led to this situation?
- What happened here?
- What are some of the challenges you’ve encountered so far?
Explore
- What have you tried?
- How do you see this impacting the team/project/customer?
- What are your thoughts on potential solutions?
Support
- What would help now?
- What support do you need from me to move forward?
These questions show that you care. They also create psychological safety, making it easier for people to speak honestly. I cannot stress enough how important this is for your and your team’s development.
Listening Isn’t About Agreement
I’ve found curiosity and empathy to be essential for success. When I was in sales, being curious helped me negotiate better and close some really good deals. That continued in my marketing role, where I used my curiosity when talking budgets with vendors and planning with teams. I’ve seen firsthand how much better equipped a team is when a manager is truly empathetic. In coaching, this is the most important tool that has helped some of my clients have major breakthroughs.
One pattern I’ve noticed in coaching is that breakthroughs rarely happen after the first answer. They usually emerge after someone feels heard enough to think more deeply.
Better Conversations Start With Better Listening
If you’re wondering how to improve communication skills in the workplace, start by improving the quality of your listening before improving the quality of your advice. Every conversation strengthens a habit. Research on neuroplasticity suggests that the brain strengthens behaviours we repeat.
When we repeatedly interrupt or rush to advice those behaviours become easier. The opposite is also true. Every time we pause, ask another question and stay curious, we strengthen a different way of leading.
Experience helps us recognise patterns. Wisdom comes from noticing when this situation isn’t one of them.
The ACT method to develop 3 Core Habits for Deep Listening
Like any leadership habit, deep listening improves with deliberate practice. These are the three habits I come back to most often.
A: Anchoring Yourself
- Ground your attention. To truly listen, you must set down your devices and physically ground yourself. Be comfortable and place your feet flat on the floor. This stillness signal stops internal agitation and moves your nervous system from a reactive to a receptive state.
C: Lead with Curiosity
- Break automatic advice-giving. Instead of jumping straight to a solution, ask a micro-question like, “What is the core friction here?” This forces your brain to move past quick-fix shortcuts and engage in genuine discovery.
T: The Three-Second Rule
- Create thinking space: When your team member has finished speaking, wait for three seconds before you respond. This brief pause suppresses pre-programmed reactions, allowing you to process deeper meanings rather than just offering a knee-jerk reply.
The next time someone comes to you with a problem, resist the urge to solve it immediately. Ask one more question than you normally would. You may discover a different solution and better, you may help someone discover it for themselves.
#leadership #curiosity #communication #teamwork
PS This article was originally published on LinkedIn with a different intention. Read more articles on leading others and leading self or living well.
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