Are You Really Listening, or Just Waiting to Solve the Problem?
Why active listening is one of the most underestimated leadership skills, and what leaders can do differently.
When was the last time you sat through an entire meeting without checking your phone, glancing at your emails or mentally preparing your response while someone else was speaking?
And perhaps a more uncomfortable question for leaders:
When was the last time someone came to you with a challenge, and you listened to their entire explanation before offering a solution?
I've spent more than two decades working with leaders, executives and teams across different industries, countries and cultures. Throughout that time, I've seen plenty of investment in leadership development, communication skills, coaching and collaboration.
Yet one of the most fundamental leadership capabilities remains surprisingly difficult to master.
The ability to genuinely listen.
Not simply to hear what someone is saying. Not to wait for an opportunity to demonstrate your experience or expertise. And certainly not to jump in with a solution before they've finished explaining the problem.
To listen with the intention of understanding.
I recently read a TED article, “Want to have better, deeper conversations? Try this”, featuring musician and podcast host Hrishikesh Hirway. It explores three principles of active listening:
1 - Removing distractions - Being physically present doesn't mean you're actually listening.
2 - Reflecting on what you've heard - Listen to understand, not to demonstrate your own experience.
3 - Using nonverbal communication to demonstrate engagement - What they’re not saying matters too.
All valuable advice. But reflecting on my own experiences, I'd add two more principles, particularly important for anyone in a leadership position:
4 - Stop solutionising - Your team may not need you to solve the problem.
5 - Perhaps the problem isn't just listening - It's our meeting culture.
1. Being physically present doesn't mean you're actually listening
Let's start with something that has become remarkably normal in the workplace.
People checking their phones during meetings.
Answering messages while colleagues are speaking. Taking calls and stepping out of workshops. Looking at notifications on their smartwatches during one-to-one conversations.
I've experienced all of these, including in meetings with senior leaders and clients, workshops I've facilitated and conversations with direct reports.
I once had regular one-to-ones with a direct report who would constantly check their smartwatch.
I've also taken a leader's phone away at the start of a meeting so they could focus on hearing their team's challenges and insights.
And I've occasionally considered investing in signal-blocking pouches for workshops!
When someone is speaking to you and your attention is elsewhere, you're communicating something about how much you value their contribution.
You might not intend to. You might genuinely believe you're multitasking effectively.
But what does the person opposite you experience?
Perhaps they shorten their explanation. Perhaps they decide not to raise something sensitive. Perhaps they simply stop talking.
As Hirway explains in his TED Talk, multitasking makes it difficult to fully appreciate what someone else is saying.
And the distractions aren't always technological. Sometimes we're physically looking at someone while mentally preparing our next question, our counterargument or the advice we're desperate to share.
We're hearing words, but we're not necessarily listening.
My recommendation: If a conversation matters enough to have, it deserves your attention.
Put the phone away. Close the laptop unless it's genuinely needed for the discussion. Turn off notifications.
And if you really cannot give the meeting your attention, consider whether you should be attending at all.
2. Listen to understand, not to demonstrate your own experience
This is one I have personally had to work on.
In the TED Talk, Hirway describes how he used to respond to someone's experience by immediately sharing a similar story of his own, believing it demonstrated that he understood.
I recognise that behaviour in myself.
Earlier in my leadership career, I would frequently draw on my own experiences when someone shared a challenge.
It came from a genuine desire to help.
I'd been through something similar. I'd seen what worked. Perhaps I could save them some time or help them avoid a mistake.
But over time, particularly through coaching leaders and working with individuals and teams, I've become much more conscious of the difference between sharing an experience that genuinely helps someone and unintentionally redirecting the conversation towards yourself.
Sometimes the most useful contribution is not a story, an example or a recommendation.
It's a question.
What do you think is driving the issue?
What have you tried so far?
What would a good outcome look like for you?
And sometimes it's simply reflecting back what you've heard.
So, if I've understood correctly, your biggest concern isn't the deadline itself, but the impact on the team?
This is particularly important when someone has a perspective we disagree with.
Genuine listening, reflection and open-ended questions can help us navigate conversations with people who hold different views.
Understanding someone's perspective doesn't mean you have to agree with it.
But without understanding it, how can you have a productive conversation about it?
As leaders, we should be creating the conditions for people to challenge our thinking, share different perspectives and raise concerns without feeling they need to defend themselves before they've even finished speaking.
3. What they’re not saying matters too
Active listening isn't just about words.
It's also about eye contact, posture, facial expressions and the space we give others to think.
When you're looking at your laptop or phone, you're not just missing what someone is saying. You're missing the nonverbal cues that help you understand how they're feeling.
The hesitation before answering a question.
The discomfort when a particular topic comes up.
The colleague who appears ready to contribute but never quite finds the opportunity.
The person who becomes noticeably quieter when a senior leader enters the conversation.
Of course, nonverbal communication varies between individuals and cultures. We shouldn't assume that everyone demonstrates engagement through the same behaviours, or that someone who avoids eye contact isn't listening.
But we should pay attention to the whole conversation, not simply the words being spoken.
And perhaps most importantly, we need to become more comfortable with silence.
I've facilitated countless workshops and collaborative sessions, and it's easy to feel pressure to keep the conversation moving.
But silence doesn't necessarily mean disengagement.
Some people need time to process a question before responding. Others prefer to reflect before contributing.
When we rush to fill every pause, we risk hearing only from those who think and respond most quickly.
Giving people space to think is not slowing collaboration down unnecessarily. It's creating an opportunity for better contributions.
4. Stop solutionising. Your team may not need you to solve the problem.
This is the fourth principle I'd add to the TED recommendations, and one I've seen repeatedly throughout my career.
A team member or colleague approaches a leader with a challenge.
Before they've finished explaining it, the leader starts offering solutions.
Have you tried this?
What you need to do is...
When I dealt with something similar...
The leader is engaged, enthusiastic and genuinely trying to help.
But they've missed something important.
The team may not have come to them looking for a solution. They may already have one.
They might have spent days exploring the problem, evaluating options, considering risks and agreeing on a preferred approach.
What they actually need is support, a decision, the removal of an obstacle or simply confirmation that they can proceed.
I've seen meetings where teams were trying to explain both their challenge and their proposed solution, only for a leader to take over the conversation before they'd finished.
Suddenly, the discussion becomes about the leader's preferred approach rather than the work the team has already done.
This isn’t always about micromanagement or a desire for control. Often, the leaders doing this have genuinely good intentions. They care about their people. They want to help them succeed and protect them from unnecessary difficulties.
But good intentions don't automatically create good outcomes.
When leaders consistently provide the answers, they can unintentionally reduce the very problem-solving capability they're trying to develop.
So what should we do differently?
For leaders: Ask what support is needed before offering solutions
Before jumping in, try asking:
What options have you explored?
What's your preferred approach?
What do you need from me to move forward?
Are you looking for my input, a decision or simply my support?
Then listen.
Your role is to build an empowered team who have the skills, information, confidence and support to resolve challenges themselves.
Sometimes that means coaching. Sometimes it means removing an organisational obstacle. Sometimes it means making a difficult decision.
And sometimes it means saying, "That sounds like a sensible approach. You have my support. Go ahead."
It also means accepting that your team may choose a different solution from the one you would have chosen. That isn't necessarily a problem.
People develop capability through making decisions, testing ideas, learning and occasionally getting things wrong.
Protecting teams from every possible mistake can prevent them from developing the confidence and judgement they'll need in the future.
For teams: Be clear about what you need from your leader
When coaching teams, I encourage them to do the thinking before escalating a challenge.
Explore the problem together. Evaluate possible solutions. Develop a recommendation supported by evidence.
Then be explicit about what you need:
Are you seeking approval to proceed?
Do you need the leader to remove a dependency or resolve an organisational constraint?
Do you want their perspective on two possible approaches?
Do you genuinely need help finding a solution?
The clearer you are about the purpose of the conversation, the more likely you are to get the support you need.
And the less likely the discussion is to turn into an unnecessary problem-solving exercise led by someone who doesn't have all the context.
5. Perhaps the problem isn't just listening. It's our meeting culture.
There's another dimension to this conversation that I think deserves attention. We frequently tell leaders to be more present, listen more carefully and give their people time.
But then we fill their calendars with meetings.
I've seen calendars triple-booked from 8am until 7pm, five days a week.
Back-to-back conversations. Overlapping priorities. Meetings with no clear agenda or decision required.
Is it really surprising that people start checking emails, responding to messages and attempting to multitask?
That doesn't excuse disengagement, but it does suggest we need to look at the environment we've created.
If we want better conversations, we need to make space for them
Earlier in my career, when I was working in senior leadership roles, I adopted a few simple practices that helped me manage this:
No clear agenda? Ask why the meeting is needed -
If I received an invitation without an agenda, I would tentatively accept and ask what the meeting was intended to achieve.
Not because I wanted to be difficult, but because I wanted to understand whether my participation would add value.
If I wasn't needed, I'd politely decline -
Sometimes I would recommend someone from my team attend instead.
Not as a way of avoiding responsibility, but because they had more relevant knowledge or experience, or because it offered them valuable exposure and development.
Being the most senior person doesn't automatically make you the most appropriate person to attend.
Shorten the meeting -
When organising my own meetings and workshops, I would typically remove 10–15 minutes from the standard duration.
A 60-minute meeting became 45 minutes.
This forced me to be more focused about the agenda, the participants and the outcomes we needed to achieve.
It also gave people some breathing space between commitments.
None of these practices is particularly complicated. But they require us to challenge the assumption that being busy, attending everything and remaining constantly available are indicators of effective leadership.
They're not.
A leader's value isn't measured by how many meetings they attend, but by the quality of the decisions, conversations and outcomes they enable.
In the age of AI, listening is becoming more important
There's a wider reason I believe we should be paying more attention to these capabilities.
As AI increasingly supports analytical, administrative and technical work, we're spending considerable time discussing the skills people will need in the future.
Prompt engineering. AI literacy. Data analysis. Automation.
All important.
But I would argue that the capabilities which enable people to work effectively with other people deserve at least as much attention.
Empathy. Judgement. Curiosity. Collaboration. Conflict resolution. The ability to challenge constructively and listen deeply.
These are often labelled soft skills. I really dislike that term.
It implies that these capabilities are nice to have rather than being essential.
In his TED article “Let's stop calling them ‘soft skills’ - and call them ‘real skills’ instead”, Seth Godin makes a compelling argument that these interpersonal capabilities deserve much greater recognition and investment.
I agree. Technical expertise matters enormously. But its value is diminished when people can’t collaborate effectively, communicate openly or understand perspectives different from their own.
These capabilities aren't simply personality traits that some people have and others don't. They can, and should, be developed, practised and improved.
Active listening is a leadership discipline, not an innate talent.
It's something we can all get better at, regardless of how experienced or senior we are.
A final thought: What would change if we listened more and solved less?
I don't think the answer is another mandatory communication skills workshop, although practical training and coaching certainly have their place.
I think it starts with leaders becoming more mindful of their own behaviour:
How often do we interrupt?
How quickly do we move into solution mode?
Do we create space for perspectives that differ from our own?
Are we genuinely present in conversations, or simply physically attending?
Are we creating teams that can think, challenge and solve problems independently, or teams that have learnt to wait for us to provide the answers?
For me, the most effective leaders are ones who know when to ask another question, when to offer guidance, when to make a decision and when to get out of the way.
Further reading and viewing
This article was inspired by and draws on two TED resources:
Want to have better, deeper conversations? Try this — TED, featuring insights from Hrishikesh Hirway and his accompanying TED Talk.
Let's stop calling them “soft skills” — and call them “real skills” instead — Seth Godin, published by TED.
A Note on This Article AI is a valuable research and writing companion, but it doesn't replace experience, judgement or human insight. The views and reflections shared here are my own, shaped by more than 23 years leading transformation across the UK and Middle East. Any statistics or external information referenced have been verified and attributed to their original sources. If this article resonated with you, I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.