By Contributor,Sally Percy

Copyright forbes

Listening is a vital skill for leaders

Active listening (listening with intent and reflecting on what’s been said rather than just waiting to respond) is critical for career success, according to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025. Listening skills are particularly important for leaders because leaders who listen well have the knowledge to engage with, motivate and understand their teams. In fact, good listening skills can almost be regarded as a leadership superpower. So, how can you enhance your own listening skills?

1. Remember it’s all about your audience

“In the ‘always-on’ world we live in, genuine human connection is one of the most powerful tools in your leadership toolkit,” says Dominic Colenso, a leadership communication specialist and author of Cut-Through: The Pitch and Presentation Playbook. “Whenever you communicate, it’s all about your audience, never about you. What do you want them to know? How do you want them to feel? What are you asking them to do?”

Colenso says that connection starts with listening. “Put away the phone, close the laptop and give others the gift of your full presence,” he says. “In person, that means eye contact. In a virtual meeting, avoid multitasking and look directly down the lens. It’s a small act that has a massive impact, making people feel valued and heard.”

2. Ask meaningful questions that matter

“The depth of your questions dictates the depth of your relationships,” says Ravi Rajani, a global keynote speaker, communication expert and author of Relationship Currency: Five Communication Habits for Limitless Influence and Business Success. “How can you ask questions that convey you’ve truly listened to your team, prospects or customers without being insincere?”

According to Rajani, most people enter conversations with questions like “How are you?” Yet while these kinds of questions seem harmless on the surface, they can lack intentionality. “Enter the ‘what-feel-who method,’” Rajani says, “where you can show your conversation partner that you’re interested in what they are emotionally invested in.”

Rajani cites an example of how this method can work in practice: “Hey Jamie, the last time we spoke, you mentioned you were moving home, and that you were feeling stressed because your daughter was unhappy about the change. How has she settled into her new environment?” In this example, the “what” is the house move, the “feel” is the emotion of stress and the “who” is Jamie’s daughter.

“In your next conversation, your goal is to uncover what is personally important to the person opposite you, how they feel about it and who in their life is being impacted,” Rajani advises. “This will ensure that your follow-up conversation includes a question that shows them you’ve listened and that you care about what they care about.”

3. Bite your tongue

Great leadership is about unlocking the potential in others. Listening enables you to do that.

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“When an employee comes to you for help, resist the urge to interrupt them or fill pauses with your own thoughts,” says Dominic Ashley-Timms, CEO of performance consultancy Notion and co-author of The Answer is a Question: The Missing Superpower that Changes Everything and Will Transform Your Impact as a Manager and Leader.

By learning to bite your tongue, you create space for your team members to think and shape their own brilliant ideas, Ashley-Timms believes. He recommends using an enquiry-led approach to communication, where you ask questions to stimulate your colleagues’ thinking rather than to gather information.

“The act of truly listening signals that you value their contribution and believe in their ability to solve problems,” Ashley-Timms explains. “This builds trust and empowers them to take accountability for seeing through actions, which in turn lightens your workload, allowing you to focus on higher-value tasks. In a chaotic world where knowledge is now democratized, the ability to listen deeply and engage your team’s full talents will differentiate you as a leader.”

4. Invite unwelcome truths

Leaders who shut out unwelcome truths can make catastrophic errors. That’s why, as a leader, you sometimes need your team to tell you what you don’t want to hear.

“Great leadership isn’t about having all the answers,” says Adrian Kelly, author of The Success Complex. “It’s about creating the conditions where the best answers can emerge. Which is often from others. The Intellectual Humility Scale, developed by psychologists, measures how willing we are to consider viewpoints beyond our own. Leaders who score high don’t see listening as a threat to authority; they see it as the cornerstone of sound decision-making.”

Kelly advises that to be a listening leader, you need to practice three habits. “First, invite perspectives from people closest to the issue – they often see what you cannot (don’t shoot the messenger because of the message). Second, resist the urge to defend your position immediately; hold space for other views. Third, act visibly on feedback, so people know their input matters.”

Kelly believes that the best leaders aren’t those who speak the loudest, “but those who hear the quietest voices in the room.”

5. Integrate listening into decision-making

“Being a listening leader isn’t about being more empathetic in meetings,” says Ritavan, entrepreneurial technology leader and author of Data Impact. “It’s about building a leadership system where listening is designed into how decisions get made. That system depends on three things: data, people and alignment.”

According to Ritavan, being a listening leader doesn’t mean stepping back, it means tuning in: deeply and deliberately. It means listening to the data and to the people behind the data. And it means knowing that listening is not a courtesy, but a competitive edge.

“Customers, employees, suppliers, teams on the ground, all of them provide context that makes data meaningful,” Ritavan explains. He believes that ignoring any of these groups is risky, but when you listen actively to them all, you gain clarity “on what value looks like and how to deliver it.”

Why you should make listening your leadership superpower

It can be hard to listen effectively in a busy world that is full of noise. But if leaders don’t listen, they may underestimate problems, lose touch with their teams and miss out on vital information that will enable them to make important strategic decisions. Leaders who consciously choose to make listening their superpower set themselves up to succeed in this complex and uncertain age.

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