Listening Before Leading

The Weight of the Unheard

There is a particular expression of power and authority that announces itself before it understands anything. It comes with conclusions already assembled, solutions pre-packaged, and with a vocabulary of action that precedes any serious encounter with the reality it proposes to change. It is confident in the way that inexperience is always confident. Unperturbed by the complexity it has not yet discovered, and unburdened by the weight of what it does not know. It speaks fluently. It moves quickly. And it leaves, in its wake, the distinctive wreckage of well-intentioned interventions. We then have communities more organised around the leader’s vision than their own needs, institutions reshaped to reflect the leader’s understanding rather than the truth of what they serve, and solutions architectured for the problem that was assumed rather than the problem that existed.

This is not a portrait of the villain. It is what is seen almost everyday. It is a portrait of the average leader. That of one, who rose through structures that rewarded being articulate and charismatic over attentiveness, decisiveness over discernment, and the performance of confidence over the practice of comprehension. Let’s take a closer look at most human institutions. Families, organisations, governments, and communities. And we will see that the ascent to authority naturally gravitates towards the person who most convincingly projects certainty. And when projection is sustained long enough, it becomes the habit of the soul. The leader who has spent years convincing others that she knows, finds it genuinely difficult, in the moment of power, to admit that she does not.

The tragedy is not personal as our society is littered with numerous examples of such. Sadly, its consequences are borne both by the leader who does not listen, and by every person whose life depends on being understood.

What Listening Actually Requires

When you think of listening, what comes to mind? The gentle nodding, the sympathetic face, the performance of receptivity that sophisticated leaders have learned to deploy as a political instrument. At best, those can be hearing. Worst case, it is signalling. It is, in many cases, more dishonest than open indifference, because it extracts the intimacy of disclosure without offering the accountability of genuine response.

To discuss listening as a leadership virtue is not to describe a passive disposition. Real listening is cognitively violent. It requires the listener to allow what is being said to actually penetrate the pre-existing thoughts and rearrange, where necessary, what the listener thought they knew. It requires sitting with discomfort when what is heard contradicts what was believed. It requires the intellectual honesty to distinguish between information that confirms the existing plan and information that challenges it, and to weigh the latter more heavily, because confirmation can sometimes be the currency of flattery while contradiction is the currency of truth. Even when a contradictory thought is borne out of being contrarian, it is often grounded in facts.

In every sphere of life where authority is exercised, the parent governing a household, the teacher shaping a classroom, the manager directing a team, the politician representing a constituency, or the elder adjudicating a dispute, this quality determines whether the authority produces outcomes that serve the people it was granted to serve, or outcomes that serve the self-image of the person who holds it.

For instance, the parent who listens to what their child is not saying is most likely to unearth the anxiety beneath the silence, and the fear beneath the defiance. What that parent is doing (un)knowingly is raising a child who trusts that the home is safe. The teacher who hears the confusion beneath a student’s wrong answer, rather than simply marking it incorrect, produces understanding rather than the desire to pass or comply. The manager who creates conditions in which her team will tell her what is actually going wrong, rather than what she wants to hear will make better decisions than her counterpart who has cultivated a consensus agreement and harvested misinformation.

The Humility That Precedes Competence

There is a Yoruba concept called ìwà that resists easy translation because it contains more than character. It describes the quality of being that a person brings to every encounter. It expounds on the interior posture from which all outward action flows. A person of genuine ìwà does not need to announce their knowledge. They demonstrate it through the quality of their attention, what they notice, what they ask, and what they hold in care long after the conversation has ended.

This is the humility that effective authority requires. It is not the performative humility of the powerful person who makes a point of listening publicly so that others will note how graciously they condescend to hear. It requires the humility of the person who genuinely understands that authority is informational as well as relational. Every leader must understand that the person before you, regardless of their formal status, holds knowledge about their own life and circumstance that you do not and cannot possess from a distance.

Nelson Mandela spent twenty-seven years in confinement and emerged with a listening acuity that his jailers had inadvertently cultivated in him. Having been stripped of the power to act, he had learned to observe. He gave himself to reading the room, to hear the unspoken, to distinguish between what people performed in his presence and what they revealed when they forgot he was attending. That attentiveness became the instrument of South Africa’s negotiated transition. This helped Mandela lead by the force of moral authority and by knowing, with unusual precision, what each party in the room actually needed. This includes the needs those parties had not articulated and in some cases did not consciously recognise.

This is what listening before leading produces at its highest development. It is not just better-informed decisions, but a quality of presence that people experience as being seen. And being seen genuinely, without the distortion of projection or condescension is among the deepest human needs that authority, at any level, is positioned to meet or to withhold.

Where This Lives

The error is to confine this argument to the political. Listening before leading is not a principle for presidents and governors. It is the governing discipline of every relationship in which one person holds greater power than another and must exercise that power in the service of the other’s genuine flourishing.

The father who listens to his son before prescribing his future will nurture that relationship in great ways. He will discover a young man whose gifts and temperament may require a path the father never imagined, and whose flourishing depends on that path being available. The leader who imposes her own unrealised ambitions on a child, however lovingly, is using the child as the medium for her own autobiography. I do not think that is parenting. It is a quiet form of appropriation.

The community organiser who arrives in a neighbourhood with a programme designed elsewhere, who holds consultations after the implementation plan is already fixed, who interprets community feedback as validation exercise rather than design input will produce, at best, a certain level of adoption. She will not produce a sense of ownership in the community. And programmes without community ownership do not outlast the funding cycle that created them. They are replaced, in the community’s practical life, by the informal arrangements that were already working and that the external programme briefly interrupted.

Think of the executive who builds a culture of psychological safety by actively rewarding the team member who identifies a problem early, and responds to honest feedback with curiosity rather than defensiveness. That is someone who never shoots the messenger and therefore always receives the message. (S)he will make fewer catastrophic errors than the executive who has surrounded themself with people who have learned that agreement is professionally safer than accuracy.

At every sphere of life, the principle holds. The direction of listening, whether downward, across, or inward adjusts. The discipline itself does not.

The Aspiration and Demand

To speak of listening as an ideal is easy. To practice it under the pressures that real power and authority generates is among the hardest disciplines in public and private life. Think of the urgency of problems that demand response, the political cost of appearing uncertain, the institutional cultures that reward decisiveness and penalise the pause. And situate yourself in those situations.

But the aspiration is not separate from the demand. They are the same thing, stated at different registers. The aspiration is a world in which those who hold power over others hold it in genuine service. Situations in which the parent, the teacher, the manager, the official, the elder begins every exercise of authority with the question, what does this person actually need, and how would I know if I am wrong? The demand is that we build institutions, families, organisations, and political cultures that make that question the default rather than the exception. We must structure incentives, training, and accountability around the practice of attentiveness rather than only the performance of action.

The leader who listens before deciding does not move slowly. (S)he moves accurately. The authority that is grounded in genuine understanding does not hesitate as it arrives at the right place by a more honest route and sometimes at the right time because the people will be prepared for it. It builds what survives. It earns what it asks for. It governs in the full sense by being trusted and followed because those who follow have concluded, from experience, that the one who leads has first taken the time to genuinely know them.

This is the art of the empty cup. The leader who emerges already full of certainty, conclusions, and the programme designed before the community was consulted, can receive nothing. The leader who comes empty, genuinely open to being filled by what the moment contains, receives everything. And from everything, something real can be built.

Ajibola Oladiipo writes on governance, political economy, food security and the philosophy of public service.