Learning to Listen: Leadership Beyond Words
Watching people’s behavior cues is one of the best ways to understand what is truly going on.
I remember the day I received an unexpected diagnosis of familial hearing loss.
The irony wasn't lost on me, as someone who listens to others for a living. Listening allows me to illuminate the hidden factors propelling or hindering leaders and teams from making progress. It’s a skill I’ve developed since I was a kid. I was a keen observer of the world, an easier role to play when you don’t quite fit into it.
After the initial shock and fear, this diagnosis sparked a question: How can I listen even more deeply, beyond the words people choose to share with me?
In the corporate world, we rely heavily on verbal communication. Our days are spent in meetings discussing and informing each other, then we exchange emails and messages through Slack or Teams, and continue to rely heavily on slide decks to document and explain work to each other. The amount of verbal information spread across various channels, apps, groups and threads is overwhelming. We do our best to analyze and interpret each other, but often misinterpret or simply forget the information shortly after we consume it.
The Signs Nobody is Talking About
Watching people’s behavior cues and sensing the environment, however, are some of the best ways to listen to get at what is truly going on.
One thing that sounds an alarm for me in organizations is when people drift into individualism and away from collaboration. You'll see it and feel it in small ways. A slight undercurrent of "every person for themselves". A lack of celebration when someone joins or leaves the team. Individuals working by themselves or in a small inner circle, despite multiple offers or requests from others to help. These behaviors tell me something needs repair at a foundational level, ie, at the emotional fabric of the organization. A realm that is often under-verbalized, but directly impacts team effectiveness.
Sometimes, these signals are so subtle that you can’t quite put your finger on the situation. I was once part of a team leading a large transformation. Things were going pretty well for the first several months. Then, for about two weeks, I felt an inexplicable heaviness in my body. During work meetings, in interactions with colleagues, and just simply walking the hallways. I couldn’t shake it off, and I couldn’t explain what the cause was. At some point, I decided to share this with my team: "Guys, I cannot explain this rationally. I don't have any specific data. All I have is this sadness and dullness. Everything feels like a huge lift, things don’t flow… Am I the only one who feels this way?"
It was as if I had taken a pin to a balloon. Others had felt it too, but either had dismissed it as “just a feeling” or hadn't known how to express it. This opened up a crucial conversation that helped us identify and address emerging issues before they became real problems. We had been listening with our bodies to what the organization was transmitting to us, and all of this was happening without words. It was through sensing first, then using words to make sense of the experience together, that we broke through the problem.
Lesson learned: Talking about your unexplained “gut feelings” at work can save your company time and money.
Beyond Structural Solutions
A typical approach to organizational change is to start with a structural change. Reorganizing teams, creating new roles, and eliminating management layers. This is usually because changing structures is easier. While these matter, they often miss the deeper work needed at the human level. Changing hearts and minds (the key to any lasting transformation) is much harder.
I've seen organizations invest enormous resources in transformation initiatives while ignoring the subtle and mission-critical signs that eg, people don’t trust each other, are disengaged or pretending to agree. Sometimes what's really needed is to pause the frenzy of business as usual and invest in repairing and nurturing those foundational human connections.
Learning to Listen Differently
I'm reminded of a Brazilian friend who moved to the US without speaking a word of English. She attended Jiu-Jitsu classes where she was unable to understand the teacher’s verbal instructions. In spite of that (or because of that very constraint), she developed extraordinary awareness of movement, expressions, and human dynamics- very important capabilities in martial arts. Her “limitation” became her strength.
Another example of alternate ways to listen which caught my attention recently is neuroscientist David Eagleman's work developing devices that allow people with hearing impairments to learn to hear through their skin.
These examples, and my own experience as a dancer which enables me to use my body consciously to navigate and change the world around me added a new dimension and meaning to the skill of listening, a more dynamic listening, if you will. We are biological listening devices, adapting to and tapping into multiple channels.
What Leaders Can Do
I was on a videocall with a client recently, and as I listened to her ordeal, I started feeling heat in my eyes. I shared with her that “listening to everything you’re going through, I just feel like crying.” And that’s when she started to cry. They were, indeed, not my tears, but hers that I was sensing.
One thing I learned in my Dance Movement Therapy training is to pick up on the subtleties of my clients’ broadcasting (we all broadcast more than our words), even through a computer screen. When you learn to use your somatic intelligence, you can listen at deeper levels, access more data, and respond in ways that can lead to breakthroughs.
Here are a few ways you can develop dynamic listening skills:
Practice body awareness: Notice your physical responses in meetings. Is your chest tight? Jaw clenched? These sensations often register important information before your conscious mind catches up.
Sense the energy in the system: shifts can start as subtle waves reverberating through the organization. Pay attention when you start seeing more competition than collaboration within teams, when people stop showing up for all-hands meetings, and when progress slows down despite a strong start. Don’t dismiss these subtle signals as “just a feeling”. Bring them up with others and invite people to share their own sensing, so that you can validate the pattern.
Create in-person connection opportunities: The pandemic opened up a world of possibilities for getting work done in the comfort of our homes or in transit. But sometimes we just need to look into each other's actual eyeballs. Not the ones projected on computer screens, but the "fleshy bits of brain sticking out of our skulls," as I heard someone describe it recently. In my experience, months and months of remote work is fertile ground for tensions and overwhelm. We need in person interactions to generate energy for change, be creative and build and repair relationships.
Make space for repair: When individuals or team are in a frenetic pace, lacking focus and feeling disconnected, they usually amp up the activity: they pile even more stuff on the to do list, in hopes of solving the problem. In my experience, that makes things even worse. When things are hectic, stop. Get back to basics. Breathe. Listen. Prioritize synchronising with yourself and with each other, before pushing ahead with more initiatives.
While much of organizational life happens through verbal communication – in meetings, emails, and presentations – the most crucial information often comes through different channels entirely. In my experience, the best leaders are those who can tune into these alternative frequencies and respond to what they're really hearing.
Just like my hearing loss opened up curiosity for new ways of perceiving, perhaps it's time to expand our definition of listening in leadership. What signals might you be missing by relying too heavily on words?
The next time you're in an interaction at work, try focusing less on what's being said and more on what you're sensing. You might be surprised by what you hear.