Are You Actually Listening — or Just Waiting to Talk?
Most of us are waiting to talk. We call it listening because we have gone quiet, but inside we are loading the reply, judging the point, or already three tasks ahead. Real listening is rarer and harder than that. It is the deliberate act of making another person feel understood before you respond — and it is not a soft skill. It is the most strategic one a leader has. Because the higher you rise, the less people volunteer the truth, and listening is how you earn it back. This piece is about the gap between performing attention and actually giving it: why leaders default to the performance, what genuine listening requires, and how to turn the Conversation Compass toward hearing rather than speaking. The short version — if your people have stopped telling you things, the problem is rarely that they have nothing to say.
Key Takeaways
• Most “listening” is just waiting to talk; genuine listening is the act of making someone feel understood.
• Listening is not passive or soft — it is the most active, strategic skill a leader has.
• People decide whether to tell you the truth based on how it felt the last time they did.
• Being more interested than interesting beats being impressive — and earns far more influence.
• The Hanlon Conversation Compass™ turns toward listening: Care becomes presence, Candor becomes drawing out their truth, and Commitment becomes acting on what you heard.
Waiting to Talk Is Not Listening
Janie van Hool, in The Listening Shift, is precise about what listening is not. “It is not waiting to speak, not filling the silence, not planning your reply while the other person is still talking, and not nodding along to look engaged.” What it is, she writes, is “an art, a skill, a practice, a commitment.” Those are not words we usually attach to listening, and that is exactly her point.
Part of why we are bad at it is that no one taught us. We are trained to speak well, to present, to persuade. Almost no one receives instruction in how to listen. So we default to the version that feels productive — quiet on the outside, busy on the inside — and mistake it for the real thing.
Be More Interested Than Interesting
Mark Goulston, a psychiatrist who trained hostage negotiators, distills the whole skill into one instruction in Just Listen: “be more interested than interesting.” Most of us do the opposite. We try to impress — the clever reply, the relevant story, the point that lands. And in the effort to be interesting, we stop hearing the person in front of us.
Goulston's core move is to make the other person feel “felt” — genuinely understood, not just heard. When people feel felt, they soften. They move, in his words, “from resisting to listening to considering to agreeing.” Which means listening is not the opposite of influence. It is the on-ramp to it. The leader who makes people feel understood first is the one they will follow second.
The Tools of Real Listening
If listening is a skill, it has techniques. Nixaly Leonardo, in Active Listening Techniques, lays out the practical ones, and they are less obvious than they sound. “Paraphrasing — briefly restating what you heard — confirms understanding and tells the speaker they landed. Emotional labeling, naming the feeling you are picking up, lets people know you are tracking more than their words.”
Two tools matter most for leaders, because we are worst at them. The first is silence: staying quiet long enough for the other person to think, gather, and say the thing they did not plan to say. The second is validating — acknowledging someone's feelings “without judgment,” which, crucially, is not the same as agreeing. You can validate that a frustration is real without conceding that it is correct. Most leaders skip both, because both require us to stop talking.
Drop the Story You've Already Written
The quietest barrier to listening is the story we have already written about the person. Van Hool calls one version of this “closeness communication bias” — “the better we think we know someone, the more we assume we already know what they will say, so we stop actually listening.” Goulston makes the parallel point that “our preconceptions quietly shape how we interpret everything we hear;” the receptionist who forgot the package is “incompetent” until you learn she spent the night in the ER.
The discipline here is presence: noticing the judgment, setting it down, and choosing curiosity over certainty. Leonardo frames it as the difference between responding and reacting. Giving someone your complete attention for two genuine minutes is worth more than half-listening for twenty.
Listening Is How Leaders Get the Truth
There is a reason this matters more at the top. In The Listening Leader, Emilio and Clementina Galli Zugaro describe what they call “the trust meltdown” — “long erosion of faith in institutions and leaders — and argue that the way back is communicative leadership built on actually hearing people.” Their striking finding: stakeholders trust the frontline employee they deal with more than the executive or the press release.
For a leader, that is both a warning and a map. The people closest to the work hold the most accurate picture of it, and they will share it only with someone who has proven it is safe to. Listening, then, is not a courtesy you extend when you have time. It is the instrument that keeps your information honest — and the higher you go, the more you need it.
The Conversation Compass, Turned Toward Listening
Last week we introduced the Hanlon Conversation Compass™ — Care, Candor, Commitment — for the conversations you initiate. Listening is the same instrument pointed the other way. When your job is to hear rather than to speak, the three bearings become:
• Care — Presence. Have I made it safe and given my full attention — no phone, no half-listening, no story already written? Short, complete attention beats long, divided attention.
• Candor — Their candor. Am I drawing out the real thing rather than the polite version? Ask the open question, make them feel felt, and let silence do its work.
• Commitment — Act on it. Have I shown that what I heard will change something? Listening with no follow-through is just a performance, and people learn quickly not to bother.
Built on the work of Leonardo, Goulston, the Galli Zugaros, and van Hool, the Compass keeps the discipline simple: be present, draw out the truth, and prove you heard it. Same three bearings as candor — aimed now at understanding before being understood.
Frequently Asked Questions
I'm slammed. Isn't giving someone my full attention a luxury?
It is the opposite of a luxury — it is the efficient option. A few minutes of complete attention resolve more than long stretches of distracted half-listening, which usually require a second conversation anyway.
What if I disagree with what I'm hearing?
Validating is not agreeing. You can acknowledge that someone's frustration is real and that they feel it strongly without conceding the underlying point. People who feel heard are far more open to hearing you in return.
How do I get a quiet person to actually open up?
Ask open questions, then stop talking. Silence is the most underused listening tool there is. A simple “Tell me more”, followed by a genuine pause, will usually surface what a dozen pointed questions cannot.
Isn't listening just being passive?
No — done well, it is the most active thing happening in the room. You are tracking words, emotion, and what is going unsaid, all while resisting the pull to jump in. That is work.
Final Thoughts
If the people around you have gone quiet, it is worth asking what they learned the last time they spoke up. People do not stop talking because they have nothing to say. They stop because, somewhere, it stopped feeling worth it.
Listening is how you reverse that — not by waiting more patiently for your turn, but by making people feel understood before you respond. This week, pick one conversation and try the discipline: full attention, an open question, real silence, and one visible action afterward. Care. Candor. Commitment — pointed, this time, at hearing what your people are not yet saying.
Sources & Further Reading
Sources drawn on this week
• Nixaly Leonardo, Active Listening Techniques
• Mark Goulston, Just Listen
• Emilio Galli Zugaro & Clementina Galli Zugaro, The Listening Leader
• Janie van Hool, The Listening Shift
Further reading
• Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening — a reporter's case for why we've lost the skill, and how to recover it.
• Edgar H. Schein, Humble Inquiry — on the art of asking instead of telling.
• Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence — on the self-awareness that real listening depends on.