Active listening and leadership

Frustrated resident: “I am so angry about that decision. It is a terrible decision and it will harm my community!”

Active listener: “I hear you saying you disagree with the decision. Let me tell you why it was the right one.”

No. Just no.

That is not active listening. That is a pause before a rebuttal, dressed up in a technique. And if you have sat through a leadership course in the last 20 years, you have probably been taught to do exactly this. Reflect the words back. Show you were paying attention. Then move on to what you actually wanted to say.

Active listening is not repeating back what someone said. It is listening to understand.

Why this distinction matters

When a leader listens to respond, the resident, the employee or the council member on the other side of the table can tell. People are remarkably good at sensing when they are being managed rather than heard. The reflection technique, done badly, can feel worse than no reflection at all. It signals that you were waiting for your turn to talk the whole time.

Listening to understand means something different. It means you are genuinely curious about why this decision feels like a threat to that resident’s community. It means you are willing to sit with the discomfort of their anger for a moment before you explain yourself. It might even mean the explanation changes, because you learned something you did not know before you started listening.

This is not a soft skill. It is a leadership skill. In local government, in particular, the decisions you make land on real people in real neighbourhoods. A resident who feels heard, even when the decision does not go their way, is far more likely to stay engaged with the process. A resident who feels processed through a script is far more likely to disengage, or worse, to become the loudest voice against everything you do next.

The science behind why this works

This is not just a nicer way to have a hard conversation. There is real research behind why asking questions and listening to understand actually calms people down. Don’t roll your eyes, I’m going to talk about the science stuff now. It’s really interesting.

Neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman and his colleagues at UCLA found that when people put strong feelings into words, activity in the amygdala, the part of the brain that drives the fight-or-flight response, goes down. At the same time, activity increases in a part of the prefrontal cortex associated with reasoning and self-control. In plain terms, naming a feeling out loud helps the brain shift out of alarm mode and into a state where rational conversation is actually possible again.

Here is why that matters for a leader listening to an angry resident. When you ask a genuine question, such as what worries them most about the impact on their community, you are inviting them to name and articulate their own feeling. You are not doing it for them, and you are certainly not doing it in a way that sounds like a script. But the act of putting words to their own frustration, in their own way, can measurably lower their physiological arousal. A person who is calmer is a person who can actually hear your explanation, weigh it and respond to it.

So those key messages you prepped with for your meeting/event/open house still really matter. But you need to be a human and ask questions and make it a conversation before you launch into your messages.

There is also decades of research on procedural justice, led by social psychologist Tom Tyler, that backs this up in the specific context of government and institutions. Tyler’s work found that people’s satisfaction with a decision has less to do with whether they got the outcome they wanted, and much more to do with whether they felt they had a genuine chance to voice their perspective and believed it was sincerely considered. In one study of small claims court in Hennepin County, Minnesota, judges who spent a few extra minutes hearing out each person and explaining the reasoning behind a ruling saw meaningfully higher compliance, even among people who lost their case.

The takeaway for local government leaders is direct. Residents are not only judging you on the decision itself. They are judging whether they were genuinely heard before it was made. Asking a real question and listening to the answer is not a delay tactic or a soft skill. It is one of the most effective tools available for lowering tension and building the kind of trust that makes the next difficult conversation easier.

What understanding actually sounds like

Understanding does not require agreement. You can fully understand why a decision upsets someone and still believe the decision was right. The difference is in what you do with that understanding.

Instead of “I hear you saying you disagree,” try asking what specifically worries them about the impact on their community. Instead of moving straight to your justification, ask what they think would need to be true for this decision to feel less harmful to them. You might not change the outcome, but you will change the conversation and, often, the relationship that follows it.

This takes longer. It is less tidy than a scripted reflection. But it is the difference between a resident who feels dismissed and one who feels respected, even in disagreement.

Five things you can do right now

1. Before you respond to a frustrated resident or colleague, ask yourself whether your next sentence is meant to understand them or to move past them.
2. Replace reflective phrases like “I hear you saying” with genuine follow-up questions.
3. Resist the urge to explain your reasoning until you have asked at least one question about theirs.
4. Notice when you feel defensive. That feeling is often a sign you have stopped listening and started preparing your rebuttal.
5. Debrief difficult conversations with your team, not just to review the decision, but to review how well you understood the person on the other side of it.

Leadership is not about having the best rebuttal ready. It is about being curious enough, and secure enough, to actually hear what is being said, even when it is angry, even when it is inconvenient and even when you have already made up your mind.