Listening like a leader: Confidence, curiosity and the space to hear
What recent months reminded me about confidence, curiosity, and the danger of certainty…
Over the last few months, we’ve been searching for answers to a family member’s health issues. It’s been a worrying time, with more than one trip to A&E and many conversations with professionals across the UK healthcare system.
What has stood out the most hasn’t been the treatments or medical knowledge; it’s the listening.
We’ve met some exceptional listeners who have shown curiosity and quiet confidence. They knew their stuff, but they didn’t need to prove it. They asked questions, checked understanding, and clearly stayed open to what they might not yet know. That kind of listening builds trust. You can feel your shoulders drop a little because you sense that someone genuinely wants to understand.
And then there were others, people so fixed on their own view that they only heard what confirmed it. Not ill-meaning, just certain. But certainty can be very risky. In healthcare, it can lead to wrong conclusions. In leadership, it can do the same.
If we unpick this a little, it’s easy to see how it happens. When we listen only long enough to form our response or confirm our position, we stop being curious. That’s when bias takes over. We’ve seen it first-hand with conclusions being drawn in under five minutes: looking at age and gender and confidently saying it is “just” anxiety. Once that assumption was made, other possibilities were dismissed, and the conversation narrowed. Most worrying of all, trust evaporates.
Assumptions like that can be dangerous in healthcare, but they can also quietly undermine leadership. When we decide too soon what someone means or what’s really going on, we stop noticing what might actually be true. We lose insight, we damage trust, and we make poorer decisions.
The best leaders I know listen to understand, not to defend. They listen to find what’s missing, not to validate their own opinions. Fundamentally, that takes a different type of confidence - the quiet kind that leaves space for others to think and speak freely.
These past months have reminded me that listening isn’t a soft skill or a nice-to-have. It’s an essential act of leadership, one that shapes how people feel, how teams function, and how decisions get made.
In my most recent experiences of being truly listened to, the impact was immediate. I felt lighter, clearer, and unexpectedly emotional because being fully heard is rare, and powerful.
