I used to think the job of a leader was to have good answers. Looking back, I'm a little embarrassed by how long I believed that. I prepared well. I read widely. I showed up to meetings ready to solve problems and cast vision and keep things moving. And for a while, it worked — or at least it looked like it was working, which isn't the same thing.
The year everything changed started with a conversation I wasn't expecting. One of the most capable people on our team asked for a one-on-one, and I came prepared with talking points. She had something different in mind. After about ninety seconds of my prepared remarks, she stopped me.
"Can I just ask you something?" she said. "Have you ever considered that you might be part of the problem you keep trying to fix?"
I'd like to tell you I responded gracefully.
The Thing About Talking
Leaders talk. It's practically in the job description. You cast vision, give direction, answer questions from the stage, and model clarity in meetings. There are real and important reasons for all of this. Communication is leadership. I still believe that.
But there's a failure mode I've come to recognize in myself and in a lot of leaders I respect: we talk so much that we stop learning. We're so busy transmitting that we lose the ability to receive. And then, over time, we become subtly isolated from the actual reality of the organizations and communities we're supposed to be serving.
"The people around us often know this before we do. They see the gap between the story we're telling and the one that's actually unfolding. But most of them know — whether we've told them explicitly or not — that our preference is for the story we're already telling."
So they stop sharing the other one. They smile in the meeting and vent in the parking lot. And we keep talking, convinced we're connected.
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Learning to Listen Like It Matters
The year after that hard conversation, I tried an experiment. I started every one-on-one with a version of the same question: "What are you seeing that you don't think I'm seeing?" And then — this was the hard part — I didn't respond immediately. I took notes. I asked follow-up questions. I resisted the urge to explain, contextualize, or defend.
It was uncomfortable in a way I hadn't expected. Not because the feedback was always harsh, but because I realized how much of my energy in previous conversations had been spent managing perception rather than seeking truth. I had been listening in order to respond. I needed to start listening in order to understand.
The information I gathered from that experiment was more valuable than anything I'd gathered in years of strategic planning. People told me about frictions I hadn't noticed and assets I'd been underutilizing. They told me when my decisions had landed differently than I'd intended. They told me what they needed that I hadn't thought to offer.
None of it was in any meeting agenda. All of it was sitting in the room with me the whole time.
What I Believe Now
I believe the best leaders I know are distinguished less by what they say than by their capacity to hear what's actually true — about their organization, their team, their own blind spots. That capacity doesn't come naturally to most of us, and it doesn't stay without practice. Listening is a discipline the way prayer is a discipline: it has to be chosen repeatedly, against our default.
It also requires a specific kind of humility that leadership culture doesn't always reward — the humility to be wrong, to not have the answer yet, to let a long pause sit in the room without filling it.
That's a different kind of leadership than the one I was trained for. It's slower and messier and less impressive from the outside. But it's also the only kind that, in my experience, actually builds the trust that makes real change possible.
My team member was right, by the way. I was part of the problem I kept trying to fix. And I wouldn't have known it if I'd kept talking.
In your next one-on-one or team meeting, ask one genuine question — then don't respond for a full minute. Just take notes. See what you hear.