What Aren’t They Saying?

One of the strongest cultures you can build is one where people know they’ll be heard.

When employees, customers, coworkers, or partners start to believe you’re only listening long enough to respond, correct, defend, or move on, they begin to modify what they tell you.

They give you the safer version. They leave out the part they don’t think will be received well. Eventually, they may stop raising the same issue because they’ve already decided nothing will change.

And you may start noticing the effects before you can name the cause.

People seem less engaged. Meetings feel flatter. Important problems surface later than they should. Frustration builds in ways the numbers don’t explain.

Eventually somebody says, “Nobody tells me anything until it’s too late.”

That isn’t just a communication problem.

It’s a culture problem.

One useful framework for active listening describes three things: attention, attitude, and adjustment.

Attention is whether you’re actually focused on the person speaking. Attitude is whether you’re open enough to hear them. Adjustment is your willingness to adapt to the way they’re communicating rather than expecting them to communicate exactly the way you would.

I think that’s a good foundation.

But great listening asks more of us.

Over the years, I’ve come to think of great listeners as people who are actively listening, observing, interpreting, confirming, and correcting their assumptions as the conversation unfolds.

The words matter, of course, but the words are rarely the whole message.

How was it said?
What changed in their tone?
What did they spend a lot of time talking about, or barely mention at all?

And maybe most importantly:
What aren’t they saying?

That doesn’t mean we get to play amateur psychologist and decide we know what someone really means.

It means we notice, and then we stay curious long enough to find out whether what we noticed actually matters.

This is where assumptions can get you into trouble.

You may hear something in a person’s tone and think they’re angry, only to find out they’re embarrassed.

You may assume someone is resisting a decision when they’re actually worried about something you haven’t considered.

When we decide too quickly that we understand, we usually start responding to our interpretation instead of the person.

And once that happens often enough, people learn what’s safe to bring up, what’s likely to be dismissed, how honest they can afford to be, and whether disagreement is actually welcome.

That becomes your true culture.

It happens slowly enough that you may not notice it at first.

Then one day you’re wondering why nobody challenged a bad decision in the meeting, why a good employee waited six months to tell you something had been bothering them, or why a customer finally left after insisting for months that everything was “fine.”

It can be tempting at that point to look for a process problem.

Maybe another survey would help. Maybe managers need communication training. Maybe people really do need to speak up more.

But I think there’s a bigger question worth asking first:

What have people learned to expect when they tell us the truth?

(That question draws some serious attention.)

Listening well isn’t simply a courtesy. It changes what information reaches us, how early we hear it, how accurately we understand it, and ultimately how well we lead.

This comes up in coaching more often than you might think.

A leader may come into a conversation frustrated with an employee, concerned about engagement, or convinced there’s a communication problem somewhere in the organization.

We start talking about what they’re seeing, and somewhere in the conversation a different question may emerge:

What might the other person have been trying to tell me that I didn’t hear the first time?

That can change what the leader sees. And once that changes, what “better” looks like may change, too.

Being willing to consider that you may have missed something requires humility. Being willing to go back, ask another question, have the conversation again, or change your approach requires confidence.

The healthiest cultures need both.

So that leaves me with this thought (maybe it’s worth thinking about it for you, too):

When people talk to me, do they leave feeling like I heard what they said, or like I understood what they meant?

Those are not always the same thing.

— James