Leader.co.za - Management, Training and Career Advice for Business Leaders





01 JUNE 2026
The 1 thing you can do to instantly become a better leader
by Jeff Haden: Bestselling non-fiction ghostwriter, speaker and columnist for Inc.com.


Great leaders guide. Great leaders instruct. Great leaders decide. Great leaders communicate. The nature of the job requires talking. A lot.

Or not.

A meta-analysis of 144 studies involving 155,000 people published in Journal of Business and Psychology found that listening doesn’t just improve communication and relationships.

Listening also improves employee job performance. Leaders who are better listeners not only develop better professional relationships, they get better results. (Maybe because they develop better professional relationships?)

That shouldn’t come as a surprise. A study published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that asking a question, and then asking two follow-up questions (which necessarily requires actually listening to how the other person responds) dramatically increases how likable other people perceive you to be. And likability matters: a study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that likable people are better able to influence the people around them.

So how do you become a better listener? Easy. All you have to do is talk less.

A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that approximately 40 percent of everyday speech is spent telling other people what we think or feel. Think subjective experiences; not what you had for lunch, but whether you liked it. Whether you liked the service. Whether you liked the ambience. Whether you would go there again. Mostly thoughts, and feelings.

Why? We’re wired to talk about our thoughts and feelings. The same study found that self-disclosure, whether in person or on social media, causes increased activity in brain regions associated with the sense of reward and satisfaction you get from food, sex, and money.

In fact, the study found many people will turn down money if they get to keep talking about themselves. Participants who were offered cash if they chose to answer questions about other people instead of about themselves voluntarily gave up between 17 and 25 percent of what they could have made just so they could keep talking about themselves.

In simple terms, sometimes you can’t pay people to talk about someone else. They greatly prefer to talk about themselves.

Again, that’s not because people are self-centred. (Well, at least not always.) That’s how we’re made.

Those findings have leadership implications. A study published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found people feel less objectified (think feeling like an employee rather than a person, or a name rather than a number) when their boss or employer knows them better. The Journal of Experimental Psychology study cited above found that feeling known is a precursor to feeling supported.

Granted, you don’t need research to tell you that. Say I’m your boss. You don’t need to know me, but you do want me to know you. You don’t want to hear about my vacation, but you may want to tell me about yours. You want me to ask about your career goals, and listen to how you respond, and help you achieve them. You want to hear about my problems with other departments, and listen, and help you solve them.

As a leader, your job isn’t to be known. Your job is to know. Your job isn’t to be interesting; your job is to be interested.

Your job isn’t to talk. Your job is to listen.

As the researchers of the meta-analysis write:
… the association between perceived listening and job outcomes is robust, generally yielding effect sizes indicating strong positive outcomes…

… the results also underscore the important role of listening as an antecedent to positive workplace relationships and suggest that listening may be an underutilised job-performance predictor and a cause of superior performance.

Superior performance for your employees, and for you.

Because you already know what you know - and you definitely don’t need to hear yourself say it.

But when you listen, you get to learn and benefit from what other people know.

And from the increase in their performance that often results.
Useful resources:

BlackBird Media
 Jeff Haden learned much of what he knows about business and technology as he worked his way up in the manufacturing industry from forklift driver to manager of a 250-employee book plant. He has written more than 30 non-fiction books, including four Business and Investing titles that reached #1 on Amazon's bestseller list. Visit our website.

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