The leadership shift that changes the way people experience you.
Have you ever been halfway through explaining something to someone when you realise they’re no longer listening?
Perhaps their eyes have wandered. They glance at their phone. They offer a polite nod, but you can tell their attention is somewhere else.
What happened?
Maybe you were talking too much. Maybe the conversation wasn’t relevant to them. Or perhaps you were so focused on what you wanted to communicate that you forgot to pay attention to the person in front of you.
It’s something most of us have done.
We want to contribute, demonstrate our knowledge, share our experience and help people solve problems. These are not bad intentions. But sometimes, in our eagerness to add value, we overlook the first step towards doing so.
We need to understand the person before we can genuinely help them.
When the need to help gets in the way
Think about what happens when someone approaches you with a problem.
You want to help. You have experience, ideas and perhaps a solution that has worked before. So you listen briefly, recognise a familiar situation and begin explaining what they should do.
Your intentions are good. You want to save them time and help them move forward.
But what if you’ve misunderstood the problem? What if the person isn’t looking for a solution yet? Or what if they simply need the opportunity to think aloud before deciding what to do?
We can be so eager to provide answers that we stop asking questions.
A team member raises a concern, and we immediately offer a solution. A colleague describes a challenge, and we jump in with a story about how we handled something similar. Someone disagrees with us, and we start preparing our counterargument before they’ve finished speaking.
We might believe we’re being helpful. But there’s a difference between wanting to solve someone’s problem and wanting to understand their experience.
The first is about getting to an answer. The second begins with the person.
Sometimes, the most important thing we can do is resist the urge to fix things long enough to understand what is really happening.
Who is the conversation really about?
Think about the last time you met someone new or attended a networking event.
How much of your attention was devoted to making a good impression?
You might have thought about how to introduce yourself, what you do, what you’ve achieved or how to explain your work in an interesting way.
There’s nothing wrong with communicating confidently. But when the desire to impress takes over, a conversation can become an exercise in self-presentation.
We start thinking about what we can say rather than what we can discover.
The shift is deceptively simple: stop treating a conversation as an opportunity to demonstrate your value and start treating it as an opportunity to discover someone else’s.
Instead of thinking, “What can I tell this person about myself?”, try asking, “What can I learn about this person?”
You might be surprised by the difference.
A thoughtful question can open a door that another five minutes of talking would never have opened.
Ask better questions
We often rely on familiar questions when meeting people.
“What do you do?” “How’s business?” “Have you been busy?”
These are perfectly reasonable conversation starters. But if every conversation stops at the surface, we learn very little about the person behind the answers.
Try going one step further.
Instead of asking someone what they do, ask what they enjoy most about their work.
Instead of asking whether they’ve been busy, ask what’s been keeping them excited or challenged lately.
Instead of immediately sharing your own experience, ask what they’ve learned from theirs.
The aim isn’t to turn a casual conversation into an interview. It’s to show genuine curiosity about the person in front of you.
And remember: asking a question is only the beginning. The real test is whether you’re prepared to listen to the answer.
That requires us to put our own agenda aside, at least temporarily. Author Sonya Hamlin captures this challenge:
“Listening requires giving up our favorite human pastime – involvement in ourselves and our own self-interest.”
It’s a confronting thought. While someone else is speaking, our minds are often busy preparing a response, recalling a similar experience or deciding what advice to offer.
Genuine listening asks us to do something different: give the other person our attention without immediately bringing the conversation back to ourselves.
What people really want from a leader
Think about the leaders who have made a lasting difference in your life.
What made them memorable?
Was it simply their knowledge, their ability to speak confidently or their capacity to provide answers?
Or was it something more personal?
Perhaps they remembered what mattered to you. They listened when you had a concern. They took your ideas seriously. They made time for a conversation when they could easily have been somewhere else.
These small moments communicate something important: you matter.
This applies to how we build relationships, serve customers, develop colleagues and work with our teams.
Zig Ziglar captured the value of helping others in this observation:
“If you will first help people get what they want, they will help you get what you want.”
The important word is first.
Before thinking about what we want from a relationship, we need to consider what we can contribute. Before expecting people to listen to us, we should be willing to listen to them. Before trying to influence someone, we should make the effort to understand what matters to them.
This isn’t about using interest as a technique to get what we want. It’s about recognising that meaningful relationships are built when people genuinely value one another.
For leaders, this doesn’t mean agreeing with everyone or avoiding difficult conversations. Sometimes good leadership requires challenging people, giving uncomfortable feedback or making unpopular decisions.
But those conversations are more productive when people know we have taken the time to understand them.
People are more likely to receive our message when they believe we’ve made an effort to understand theirs.
Your intentional action
Over the next week, pay attention to how you approach your conversations.
In your next three meaningful conversations, try this:
- Ask before you advise. When someone describes a problem, resist the temptation to immediately offer a solution. Ask one more question before responding.
- Listen for what matters. Don’t just listen for facts. Notice what the person cares about, what concerns them and what they hope to achieve.
- Follow their lead. Ask a follow-up question based on what they’ve said, rather than steering the conversation back to your own experience.
You don’t need to become a different person or learn a complicated communication technique. You simply need to redirect some of your attention from yourself to the person in front of you.
Notice what changes.
Do people share more openly? Do you discover something you would otherwise have missed? Do your conversations become more meaningful?
The goal isn’t to become a perfect listener. It’s to become more intentional about how you connect.
One final thought
As leaders, we spend considerable time learning how to communicate our ideas, influence decisions and get our messages across.
But perhaps the more important question is this:
When people finish a conversation with you, do they feel impressed by what you know — or valued for who they are?
There is a place for knowledge, expertise and persuasive communication. But none of these can replace genuine interest in another person.
The next time you enter a conversation, try shifting your focus.
You don’t have to be the most interesting person in the room.
You can start by being the person who is genuinely interested in the people around you.
Because better leadership doesn’t begin with getting everyone to listen to you.
It begins with showing people that you’re willing to listen to them.
