Active Listening in Leadership: Why Listening Steadies High Pressure Moments
Listening Isn’t a Soft Skill. It’s a Leadership Essential
TL;DR
Active listening in leadership is not a soft skill. It is a critical ability that builds trust, reduces friction, and creates clarity in the conversations that matter most. When the stakes are high, many leaders listen for what to say next rather than what is being said, and that is where trust starts to slip.
The solution is practical: slow the pace, ask fewer steering questions, use prompts that keep the other person talking, and summarise with accuracy. Done well, listening becomes a performance skill that strengthens relationships and improves outcomes.
Listening Isn’t a Soft Skill. It’s a Leadership Essential.
For many, our ability to communicate effectively, whether as a leader or not, sits in the category of “soft skills”. Sadly, even the name of this category, the human skills, diminishes their importance compared to the “hard” technical skills needed in whichever environment you work in. That means they are often pushed down the priority order, playing second fiddle to the development of technical skills.
I am often approached by potential clients who start the conversation with, “We are looking to do some soft skills training.” My response is always the same: “I don’t do soft skills. I do communication.”
In the workplace, and particularly as a leader, being excellent at the technical aspects of your role is valuable. However, if you cannot communicate your ideas, your vision, and your knowledge in a way that lands and motivates the team around you, you are not effective.
What Negotiating With Nothing to Offer Teaches About Listening
I often talk about negotiating with nothing to offer, because as a hostage negotiator that is the basic truth. You have nothing to offer.
I often talk about negotiating with nothing to offer, because as a hostage negotiator that is the basic truth. You have nothing to offer.
In a crisis negotiation with someone who wishes to take their own life, I have life to offer. Life to offer to someone who doesn’t want it. In kidnap, I have 15 years to life in prison to offer. Not the best starting point for a negotiation.
When you have nothing to offer, you must think differently about negotiation, and about how you communicate. It is no good listening at surface level. It is no use listening to respond, because your responses will be based on your beliefs, your values, and your experiences.
The line every trainee on the hostage negotiation programme will hear repeatedly is: “Get off your agenda and get on theirs.”
Why Listening Is the Foundation of Influence
If you are going to influence, persuade, and motivate a person, you must understand what will influence and persuade that person. You must understand what will motivate them to move towards the direction you are aiming for. You must understand their fears so you can address them.
The key to uncovering all of this is the skill of listening.
This is why listening skills for leaders sit at the centre of leadership communication and listening. It is the starting point for trust, connection, and progress.
Communication Is a Skill That Must Be Practised
I firmly believe that as a leader, the most important skill you can develop is your skill as a communicator. Yet for many, communication is not considered a skill to be trained, practised, and developed. It is thought of as a given.
Working with elite sports organisations, I know that if I ask coaches how much time, each week, they practise technical skill development, the answer is always hours upon hours.
Conversely, when I ask how much time they spend consciously practising and developing their communication skills, the answer is usually zero.
When Pressure Is High, Listening Becomes the Technical Skill
As a hostage negotiator, communication is your technical skill. It is a skill you practise and develop constantly, and within that skillset, listening is the absolute focus.
I learned very quickly, as a leader within the police, that the skills I practised and developed as a hostage negotiator were exactly the same skills I needed to be effective as a leader. They go hand in hand.
When people feel listened to, trust builds rapidly. When trust is built, your ability to influence grows. The secondary impact is that when people trust you as a leader, they are more comfortable giving their viewpoint. That enables more informed decisions, and better quality decisions, to be made.
Why Most People Listen to Respond, Not to Understand
The first step in improving your communication is to recognise it as a skillset to be honed and developed. Recognise that your ability to listen, to truly listen to what another person is saying to you, is a skill. Like any other skill, you will improve the more you practise.
All too often, people are listening to respond rather than listening to understand. As soon as the other person begins speaking, whether to answer a question or to give their opinion, the listener starts to formulate their own response. In doing so, they slip into passive listening and fail to listen effectively.
Catch yourself the next time you realise you are doing it. The moment you do, you will start to hear so much more of the conversation.
What High-Level Listening Actually Sounds Like
The foundation of being an effective communicator is rooted in your ability to listen. Not just to the words being spoken, but to how those words are delivered. Their energy, their rhythm, the intonation, and the values, beliefs, motivations, and fears that are wrapped up within them. All of that gives a deeper understanding of the person you are engaged with.
If we are wrapped up inside our own head, formulating a response, we miss all of that. We become like everyone else who has never listened, or understood, what the other person was trying to convey.
This is what reflective listening in leadership looks like in real time. You are listening for meaning, not just for information.
Why Being Heard Changes Outcomes
Like many crisis negotiators, I have experienced the intense relief of getting someone to safety after a period of negotiation. Something I heard on many occasions, and I know other negotiators have heard the same thing, is the person saying, in that moment of connection as they step to safety: “You are the first person that’s listened to me.”
I find it profoundly sad that people can get to a point in their life where they genuinely believe ending their life is the right choice for them, when all it took for them to see a way out was for someone to listen. Not to judge or give advice, but to truly listen to them and how they see the world.
“You used your Jedi mind tricks on them, did you?”
That was another line I heard on many occasions from police officers at the scene after the person had stepped to safety. There was a misconception that negotiators deployed some mystical technique to manipulate the outcome.
My usual response was: “Nope. We just listened to them.”
Listening in High Pressure Moments Leaves No Room for Warm-Up
I don’t mean that to sound flippant or to minimise the challenges of such negotiations. They are incredibly hard and incredibly stressful, and having confidence in your skills is crucial.
There is no opportunity to warm up. There is no time to practise beyond your opening line. You must arrive on top of your game, with your skills and knowledge honed, ready to go. None more so than your ability to listen, and to be effective in your use of active listening.
This is exactly why listening techniques for high pressure conversations matter. They are skills you cannot invent in the moment. You have to train them.
What Active Listening Really Means
I know there are many people who have heard of active listening, and many cite it as being the key skill in communication. They are right. It is.
Yet when you explore beyond the title, very few people truly understand what active listening really means.
When working with teams, and asking the question, “What is your understanding of active listening?”, the most common responses are maintaining eye contact, nodding your head to show you are listening, asking relevant questions to show interest, and my personal favourite: “listening actively”.
Those responses do form part of the skills. Although for me, questions sit outside of listening, but that is for discussion another day.
To give a negotiator’s view, I would say this: active listening is a suite of skills that allow you to keep a conversation going without the need to ask a question. That is what active listening is.
Why Questions Can Get in the Way of Listening
Why is it important to keep the conversation going without asking questions? Put simply, questions steer the conversation. They steer it in the direction you want to take, not the direction the other person wants to take you.
When we ask too many questions, we only get surface-level responses. We don’t dig deeper into the person, or their drivers.
We listen in different modes, and depending on which mode we are in, it affects what we focus on, and what we therefore hear the person saying. By asking too many questions, often driven by your agenda, you are in danger of putting yourself into a confirmatory listening mode. A mode where you only tune into what you want to hear, the words that confirm your position.
You will miss what the other side is actually telling you. This is where misunderstandings start, and relationships start to fracture.
How High Pressure Changes the Way We Listen
Like any skill, our communication, and our ability to listen effectively, deteriorates when we are faced with high pressure, uncertain situations.
In high pressure situations, our communication shifts and our ability to listen degrades. Our internal voice gets loud as we consider the challenge, try to work out our options, and anticipate the impact. The moment it gets loud, we slip into passive listening, shutting out the surrounding noise and the surrounding voices.
As a leader, recognising this effect, not just in ourselves but in those around us, is critical. You can be in danger of thinking you have communicated your message clearly and that everyone has understood, when in reality those around you did not even hear it.
Listening Is the Most Important Communication Skill
I firmly believe listening is not a soft skill. It is the most important element to develop within your suite of communication skills.
It allows us to understand those we engage with better, understand their values, their beliefs, and their motivations. In turn, it builds stronger, longer-lasting relationships.
This is also why active listening for team trust matters. It strengthens the relationship before you need the relationship.
How to Practise Deep Listening in Everyday Leadership
Practise listening. It is a skill to be developed like any other skill.
Practise in low impact conversations, and start to listen for what the person is telling you about themselves. What values are they revealing?
Tune into conversations around you, when you are less likely to start formulating your response.
Yes, eavesdrop.
The thing I say to new negotiators is this. When listening to someone, consider three things:
What has the person said?
What does it really mean? (subtext, values, beliefs, motivations, fears)
How can I use that?
As a final word of advice, never sit next to a negotiator on a train. They’re practising on you.
Final thought
Active listening in leadership is not about being polite, nodding at the right moments, or asking better questions. It is about presence, composure, and understanding what is really driving the person in front of you. In high pressure moments, listening becomes the technical skill that protects trust, improves decisions, and moves the situation forward.
