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For senior managers and communicators: why active and empathic listening aren't enough. By Edouard Gruwez.
"First understand, then you will be understood" is one of Stephen Covey's seven habits of highly effective leaders. It is a secret to no one that good communication starts by understanding your audience, and good strategy by understanding your key stakeholders. Covey calls this quality "empathic listening"; others talk about "active listening". This article explains why those two concepts aren't enough. Strategic listening is more.
Mr Dewilde, my teacher in the second year of primary school, was by miles the strictest teacher I ever had. One day, standing in line to enter the classroom, he caught me talking to my neighbour. He pulled my ear so hard I can still feel it, and said: "Gruwez, why do we have two ears and one mouth?" Years later I discovered Mr Dewilde had borrowed the words from the Greek philosopher Epictetus: we have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak. Two thousand years later, in a world with unlimited communication tools, it is more true than ever.
Why would they listen? When I ask leaders what matters most when preparing communication, they say: "a clear message and goal". The problem: your audience won't listen if your message doesn't matter to them. If you don't find out first why they would listen, chances are your communication effort is useless.
Quality over quantity. Our research shows that 76% of presentations in large companies have no clear added value, for two main reasons: too much information, and not relevant to the audience. Because we hardly ever know what matters most to them, we include everything that might matter — and as soon as you present more than your audience needs, effectiveness drops fast towards zero.
We assume too much. A researcher once told me he would love to shorten his 140-slide report, "but my client always asks for all the details." I met that client, who said: "Those reports are way too long. I'm interested in the big picture — but they come with so much detail that I lose the overview." Because the detail was there, the client asked critical questions about it; because the client asked questions about details, the researcher assumed detail was what the client wanted.
And yes — listening influences. Robert Cialdini describes it as the reciprocity effect: first make the other person feel that you listen, understand and genuinely care, and they become far more inclined to listen to you.
Daniel Kahneman describes how our brain runs two competing processes: fast, intuitive thinking and slow, deliberate thinking. The same applies to listening.
Fast listening is efficient: you hear the words, interpret them automatically, link them to what you know, and reach the obvious conclusion — all with little effort, even while walking, driving or scanning a slide deck. But it is unreliable: the meaning that comes automatically to mind may not be the intended one. You evaluate the words against your knowledge and experience, while they were spoken from the speaker's frame.
Slow listening is deliberate listening with the conscious intention of really understanding the other person. It requires effort: consciously stepping out of your own frame of reference and immersing yourself in theirs, checking your assumptions, testing how everything fits together. It monopolises your mental resources — you cannot slow-listen while doing something else — and it inherently needs pauses: moments of silence to reflect and check. In return, it is reliable: the probability of misunderstanding drops sharply, and your questions become far more precise.
Choose consciously between fast and slow. Slow listening is not always better — it is more precise but costs far more energy, and even the best listeners reach their limit after 10–15 minutes. Two practical consequences:
Check the framework. Your counterpart talks from their frame — as salesperson, CFO, client; you listen from yours. The differences are rational (different angles, patterns and experience) and emotional (in a different emotional state, words change meaning; a small problem becomes a disaster, and high emotion narrows reflection).
Build a mental structure. More than words and facts, your counterpart is laying out interpretations and reasoning. You must see how everything is interconnected — is the reasoning complete and correct? For complex matters, put it on paper: a mind map or a pyramid diagram makes flaws visible.
Check for cognitive biases. Especially when fast-listening, we make consistent thinking errors. "Mr X is gentle, empathic, humble, honest and always keen to help — is he more likely a car salesman or a priest?" Almost everyone says priest. In reality, car salesman is far more likely: there are about 35 times more of them. Probability judgement is also warped by whatever comes easily to mind.
Covey calls the quality "empathic listening" — and this is where I disagree, if empathy means "feeling the other person's emotions". Feelings are part of our fast processes: effortless, mostly unconscious, and prone to error — you can be completely wrong about someone else's feelings. Strong emotions also degrade decision quality: when you feel the other's (negative) emotion, you first have to distance yourself from it before deciding wisely, and that effort competes for the same mental resources as the decision itself. And emotion narrows your focus to one person, here and now — you cannot feel the emotions of a whole room.
But if empathy means seeing the world through the other person's eyes, exploring their paradigms, understanding them intellectually and emotionally — then I agree. Understand the other's emotions. Don't feel them.
As mental processes become routine, they need less effort. Experienced managers recognise patterns quickly and often see the solution before the other person has finished explaining the problem. That is exactly where it goes wrong: their ease of understanding makes the temptation to drop into fast listening — or to stop listening altogether — even greater. Staying in slow-listening mode costs them more discipline, not less.
And the responsibility is shared: the one who speaks owes the listener concision and precision.