Learn to Be a Good Listener

Being a good listener is hard. After almost two decades of working with people in significant conflict, one thing has become consistently clear to me: most people do not know how to truly listen. I include myself in that. I am much more “fight” than “flight,” and I have to work to stay grounded when things escalate. Listening is difficult under normal conditions. When the subject is emotionally charged, it becomes exponentially harder.

Genuine listening begins with managing your own emotional reactivity — which means you have to have some degree of emotional awareness before a difficult conversation starts, not in the middle of it. Emotional reactivity locks you into the most primal part of the brain: the place where fight-or-flight lives, where the overriding drive is “make this stop, no matter the cost.” You literally cannot listen well from that state. The part of the brain where rational thought, empathy, and perspective-taking live — the prefrontal cortex — is functionally offline.

Real listening means being completely focused on the other person’s experience. That requires temporarily removing your own ego — your preferences, your interpretations, your need to respond or fix — so you can actually hear what is being said without adding your own layer to it. Information flows only one direction while you are listening: from the speaker to you. You can ask questions to go deeper, to get below the surface. But you don’t push information back. Not yet.

Listening also requires understanding the difference between objective truth and subjective experience. Most conflicts in organizations are not actually disputes about facts — they are collisions of two subjective experiences, each of which feels completely true to the person having it. If you approach a conflict as if your version is the objectively correct one, you have already set up a power struggle. The other person is now, by definition, wrong. That almost never produces resolution.

Empathy does not require agreement. I can empathize with you without agreeing with you. Your subjective experience of a thing is yours and it is valid. Mine can be different and also be valid. That is the important thing about subjectivity: yours being true for you doesn’t challenge mine also being true for me. That’s why a subjectivity framework is so important in hard conversations. If we are each trying to present our version of objective truth, then we have made the other person wrong by definition. That’s a power struggle that won’t work out well for anyone.

The whole point of listening is to get to a genuine understanding of how the other person arrived where they are — not to agree with them, but to comprehend their position well enough to respond to it accurately, rather than to the version of it you’ve already decided they hold.

The leaders I work with who struggle most with their teams are almost never the ones who don’t care. They’re the ones who can’t hear what’s actually being said because they’re too busy managing their own reaction to what they expect to hear. That gap — between what’s being said and what’s being received — is where most organizational conflict lives.

And where most of it can be addressed, if someone is willing to actually listen.