TLDR: The most powerful executive behaviour is often the quietest one: listening with intent, and acting with discipline.
I still get flashbacks. My first job out of university was a baptism by fire: I was the only marketer in the company, presenting weekly to the Managing Director and Sales Director.
They’d enter the room late, sit on the edge of the desk like they were interrogating a suspect, and glare through the meeting like it was a test I was expected to fail. It was a tough gig—but it taught me something most leadership training never touches: meetings aren’t neutral. They’re stage sets for power, trust, and tension. And the way leaders listen—or don’t—shapes every outcome that follows.
In too many leadership meetings, the loudest voice sets the direction—but not the outcome. Over time, we’ve confused decisiveness with clarity, and presence with power.
Most leaders believe they are good listeners. They host all-hands meetings. They invite feedback. They make time for one-to-one conversations. Yet when it comes to actual outcomes—decisions made, trust earned, or blind spots surfaced—those rituals frequently fall short.
At issue is not the absence of listening, but the erosion of what it signals.
Listening is rarely discussed as a leadership strategy. It is typically filed under “soft skills” or reduced to body language. But in the boardroom, where time is scarce and alignment costly, listening is not a courtesy. It is a control mechanism—one that can shape the velocity of decisions, the quality of execution, and the credibility of the leadership itself.
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Subscribe →What happens when the most important ideas don’t come from the top—but the top is ready to hear them? Take Nike’s decision to build an in-house creative studio, Icon Studios, in Shanghai. It wasn’t just decided by the board—it was shaped by a growing recognition that the most culturally resonant ideas often come from those closest to the market, not furthest from the consumer.
It signalled a leadership shift: from global directives to local trust. From brand voice control to market-listening infrastructure.
Power Heard, or Power Performing?
In a review of 117 academic studies on workplace listening, researchers Jeffrey Yip and Colin M. Fisher found a disconnect between what leaders believe they are doing and how employees perceive it. Listening, they note, is cognitively and emotionally taxing—particularly for those under pressure to decide quickly or defend established positions.
The same pitfalls recur across organisations: executives speak first, misread feedback, or respond too quickly—mistaking decisiveness for clarity. More damaging still is symbolic listening, where no discernible action follows. Employees are consulted but not engaged. They participate but do not influence.
In such environments, trust deteriorates—not through scandal, but through repetition.
Indra Nooyi, the former chief executive of PepsiCo, recalled being told by her ballroom dance instructor: “If you learned to follow, you’d be a better leader.” It’s a lesson she took from the dance floor to the boardroom—a reminder that power doesn’t always come from leading. Sometimes, it comes from listening well enough to let others step forward.
That distinction is operationally significant. It shifts the purpose of leadership from driving consensus to surfacing insight. As Nooyi puts it, “There are always people with ideas for how we can do things differently – ideas we may not want to hear. But I’ve found that when I’ve been willing to listen, I’ve been better for it, as a CEO and a person.”
The Multiplier Effect of Meeting Behaviour
Executive conduct in meetings often serves as a blueprint. When leaders dominate the agenda, avoid challenge, or redirect discomfort, those behaviours cascade. Department heads mirror them. Directors internalise them. Soon, decision-making begins to resemble performance—polished but ineffective.
This is not hypothetical. Research by the Center for Creative Leadership indicates that when leaders not only listen actively but also take action on employee feedback, it significantly enhances trust and encourages ongoing employee engagement.
The lesson is not that leaders must say less. It is that their silence must signal more.
Microsoft’s Cultural Reset
One of the clearest recent examples comes from Microsoft. Upon taking over as chief executive in 2014, Satya Nadella reframed the company’s culture from “know-it-all” to “learn-it-all.” That shift was more than rhetorical.
By embedding mechanisms for learning—including peer-led feedback sessions, open architecture decision-making, and frequent silence in leadership meetings—Microsoft increased its internal agility and rebuilt credibility with partners. Nadella later described empathy as a “source of innovation” rather than a personality trait—recasting listening as a tool for discovery, not politeness.
Mental Preparation Matters
This form of listening—deliberate, reflective, outcome-driven—begins before a meeting starts. It is behavioural, but it is also cognitive. Senior executives who listen effectively often do so because they have mentally reframed the purpose of the meeting itself.
Rather than prepare what to say, they prepare how to listen.
“This meeting is not for me to prove clarity. It is for me to gain it—and act.”
Some make the intention explicit. A subject line such as:
Meeting: Input-Driven – Decision to Follow establishes tone and reinforces accountability before the first word is spoken.
Such framing de-escalates performance anxiety and focuses the group on substance. It is a quiet but effective exercise in governance.
The Distinction Between Signal and Noise
Listening is not deference. It is not passive. It is the process of gathering incomplete information, weighing competing realities, and making a decision under imperfect conditions. As Jeff Bezos once wrote in a letter to Amazon shareholders, “Most decisions should probably be made with about 70 per cent of the information you wish you had.”
In practice, this requires leaders to be acutely aware of what they are not hearing—and to make space for it. This may mean waiting before responding. It may mean resisting the urge to summarise too quickly. It may involve asking the person who says least to speak next.
It is not indulgent. It is efficient. And increasingly, it is a differentiator.
What is Heard, and What Follows
Listening alone is insufficient. Unless followed by tangible movement—reallocation of resources, revised priorities, visible change—the benefits dissipate. Inaction, even when accompanied by empathy, is experienced as indifference.
At Copa Airlines, a programme to improve listening and feedback across more than 1,000 leaders produced measurable results. Employee engagement rose. Organisational climate scores climbed. Most tellingly, the company’s leadership index improved—a clear marker that listening had moved beyond sentiment into system.
Listening becomes a form of risk management. It is how leaders avoid making decisions in a vacuum. It is how they protect against the subtle but corrosive effects of silence from below.
Power, when exercised constantly, becomes noise.
Power, when calibrated and precise, becomes progress.
We are all hyperconnected but suffer with compressed attention and chronic distraction. The leaders who build listening into their structure—not just their style—will not only hear more. They will know more. And they will move faster, with greater conviction, because of it.
