How to Practise Active Listening: Practical Habits for Leaders

Active listening is more than wearing a polite smile, waiting your turn to speak, or asking the occasional open question. For leaders, it means creating enough space to understand what someone is actually trying to tell you - and being willing to notice your own reactions along the way.

The good news is that better listening can start by simply reframing how you approach and engage in a conversation.

Active listening isn't about sitting quietly

Active listening is easily reduced to a checklist.

Make eye contact. Do not interrupt. Nod. Ask open questions. Paraphrase what the other person has said.

It is all sensible advice. It is also entirely possible to do every one of those things and still listen badly.

Amy Gallo's work for Harvard Business Review makes much the same point: putting distractions away, remaining quiet and repeating someone's words back to them can all be useful, but they do not automatically make the other person feel heard. Active listening also requires attention to tone and body language, alongside awareness of your own emotional response.

Real listening asks more of you: for a while, at least, your own agenda has to move to one side.

Imagine someone in your team tells you that a new process is creating unnecessary work.

You immediately know why the process was introduced. You know the pressures the organisation is under. You know the previous system wasn't working either.

So your instinct might be to explain.

“We had to introduce it because…”

“We've already looked at that…”

“The problem is that people aren't using it properly…”

All of those statements might be true. But if you move straight to them, you may never discover what the person was actually trying to tell you.

A better starting point is curiosity.

“What is it about the process that's causing the biggest problem?”

Or simply: “Tell me more about that.”

It sounds almost too easy. In practice, it is anything but.

Most of us are used to solving problems. Leaders, especially, are rewarded for having answers. Listening means holding back that instinct long enough to check that you are solving the right problem.

The hardest person to listen to may be the person who is criticising you

Listening is relatively easy when someone agrees with you.

The real test comes when they don't.

Suppose someone tells you that a decision you made has landed badly. Defensiveness may appear before you have consciously decided how to respond.

That's not fair.

They don't understand the full picture.

We had no choice.

Why didn't they tell me this earlier?

Those reactions are human. The skill lies not in denying them, but in noticing them before they take over the conversation.

The review of 117 studies identified five recurring barriers to workplace listening: haste, defensiveness, invisibility, exhaustion and inaction. The first two are particularly easy to recognise. We are busy and under pressure, and sometimes what someone tells us threatens a decision or challenges our sense of competence.

One of the simplest ways to interrupt that defensive response is to slow the conversation down.

You might say, “Before I respond to that, I want to make sure I've understood what you're saying.”

Then reflect back what you have heard.

“So you're not saying the decision itself is wrong. You're saying the way we communicated it has created a different problem. Have I understood that?”

The person may confirm your reading or correct it. Either response tells you something you did not know before.

That is the value of the exchange.

Listening is not agreement. It is the willingness to understand another person's perspective before deciding what you make of it.

A leader who can hear criticism without rushing to defend it will usually learn more than one who always has an explanation ready.

Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is leave a gap

Silence makes people uncomfortable.

A question is asked and, after a couple of seconds, the leader fills the space. Someone pauses halfway through explaining something and the leader jumps in. A difficult point is raised, and the instinct is to reassure, fix, or move on.

People do not always know what they think until they have had a moment to think it through.

The first answer isn't necessarily the most useful answer.

Try leaving a little more space.

Not a staged, self-conscious pause designed to prove that you have read about active listening. Just enough room for the other person to continue if they have more to say.

You might ask, “What happened next?”

Then wait.

What comes next may surprise you.

Often, that is where the useful part of the conversation starts.

Listen for what is underneath the words

Good listening is not just about collecting facts.

People communicate through tone, hesitation, emphasis and the things they almost say.

Someone tells you: “I'm fine with the change.”

But they don't sound fine.

You don't need to assume you know what they are feeling. In fact, that can be another form of poor listening.

Instead, you might say, “You sound less comfortable with it than the words suggest. Have I got that right?”

They may say yes. They may say no. Either answer gives you something useful.

This is where empathy enters active listening. Leaders do not need to diagnose everyone's emotions; they do need to stay interested in the person behind the information.

One discipline matters here: understanding someone is not the same as agreeing with them.

You can understand someone's frustration without accepting their version of events. You can recognise their concern without reversing the decision. You can acknowledge what matters to them and still choose a different course.

Being candid about that is part of listening well.

“I understand why you think we should do this. I still don't think it's the right decision, but what you've said has made me think differently about how we implement it.”

That is far more credible than pretending to agree simply to make someone feel heard.

There is evidence that the one-to-one really matters

One of the more interesting pieces of research on psychological safety gives this practical advice some weight.

Researchers working with Sandoz, a division of Novartis, conducted a randomised controlled trial involving more than 1,000 teams and over 7,000 employees globally. Managers used different approaches in their one-to-one conversations with team members over a six-week period. One approach encouraged managers to understand what mattered to individual employees and how they could support them. Another focused on identifying and removing obstacles to team performance.

The study is interesting because it moved beyond simply asking whether psychological safety is associated with good outcomes. It tested particular management behaviours in a real organisational setting.

The findings suggest that relatively small changes in how managers use one-to-one conversations can improve psychological safety. Earlier research associated with the work also found that psychological safety and the relationship employees have with their immediate manager are fundamental factors in whether people feel comfortable raising concerns, including potential ethical issues.

There is a practical lesson here in that you may not need another elaborate listening programme. You may simply need to improve the conversation already in your diary.

A one-to-one packed with updates, deadlines and tasks may feel efficient but it is rarely the best setting for listening.

• Ask what is getting in the way.

• Ask what matters to the person.

• Ask what support they need.

Then, crucially, listen to the answer instead of immediately converting it into another task list.

What happens after the conversation matters

This may be the most important part of all.

You can have an excellent conversation, but if the person never sees what followed from it, they may reasonably conclude that it made no difference.

Yip and Fisher's research is particularly useful here. Their argument is that listening involves response as well as attention and comprehension. When managers fail to follow up on what they have heard, they are perceived as not listening. The person doing the listening does not get to decide whether they were a good listener; the person who was listened to does.

Of course, listening does not oblige you to act on every suggestion.

It does oblige you to close the loop and explain what happened to what you heard.

Sometimes the answer will be, “We're going to change this.”

Sometimes it will be, “We need to look into this further.”

And sometimes it will be, “I understand the concern, but we aren't going to change the decision. Here is why.”

All three can be legitimate leadership responses.

Silence is much harder to justify.

This matters even more when organisations run formal listening exercises. Surveys, engagement programmes, focus groups and town halls all create an expectation that something will follow.

If leaders repeatedly ask for views and then seem to do nothing with them, people soon learn that answering is not worth the effort.

Listening without follow-through does not merely disappoint people; it can make them cynical.

Don't turn active listening into a performance

There is one more trap to avoid.

Once people learn the language of active listening, the techniques can become painfully visible.

“So what I'm hearing is…”

“How does that make you feel?”

“Tell me more.”

Used naturally, these phrases can help. Delivered mechanically, they make a conversation feel rehearsed.

The other person does not need to watch you perform active listening. They need to sense that you genuinely want to understand them.

Sometimes that means saying very little.

Sometimes it means asking a question.

Sometimes it means challenging what you have heard.

And sometimes it means admitting that you don't understand.

“I don't think I've quite got that. Can you explain what you mean?”

There is no weakness in saying that. It shows that getting it right matters more to you than looking clever.

Make listening part of the way you lead

“Listen more” is hardly useful advice on its own.

A better question is how to make listening part of your everyday leadership.

Before an important conversation, pause and notice what you already believe. Which assumptions are you carrying in? What might you have missed? What would you genuinely like to understand before the conversation ends?

Once it begins, give the conversation your full attention.

Close the laptop if you do not need it. Put your phone out of reach. Where possible, do not begin a difficult conversation when your mind is already elsewhere.

As you talk, resist the urge to fill every silence. Ask questions because you are curious, not because you are steering the person towards a preferred answer. If you feel defensive, register it before you respond.

And don't underestimate the value of a simple question near the end:

What haven't I asked you that I should have?

That question can open up a conversation that was otherwise coming to a close.

Afterwards, do something with what you heard.

Make a note. Follow up. Explain what you can do. Explain what you cannot do. Come back to it later.

Following through is what turns listening from a communication technique into a leadership habit.

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Research and further reading

Yip, J. and Fisher, C. M. (2025), “Are You Really a Good Listener?”, Harvard Business Review. A review of 117 studies examining workplace listening, identifying five recurring barriers: haste, defensiveness, invisibility, exhaustion and inaction.

Gallo, A. (2024), “What Is Active Listening?”, Harvard Business Review. Explores active listening as a combination of attention, awareness of non-verbal communication and managing one's own emotional responses, rather than simply remaining quiet while somebody else speaks.

Rider, C. et al. (2023), “Proven Tactics for Improving Teams' Psychological Safety”, MIT Sloan Management Review. A randomised controlled trial involving more than 1,000 teams and 7,000 employees at Sandoz, examining how different approaches to one-to-one meetings affected psychological safety.