Most of us in this sector are good talkers. We brief, we frame, we align. We are far less practiced at sitting still while someone tells us our plan is wrong, our pilot did harm, or our own presence made something worse. Yet that is precisely the information that decides whether a programme works. The signals we most need tend to travel through the channels we are least comfortable opening. When we treat listening as a courtesy we extend at the end of a meeting, we hear only what confirms what we already decided.
It helps to be honest about why this is hard. The incentives push the other way. We are funded on confidence, reviewed on results, and rewarded for certainty. A leader who surfaces an inconvenient truth can look, for a moment, like a leader who lost control. So the system quietly favours the smooth report over the accurate one, and we learn to manage upward rather than listen downward. None of this requires bad faith. It is simply what the structure currently pays for, and what a structure pays for is something we can change.
Make dissent cheaper than silence
Listening becomes real when speaking up costs less than staying quiet. That is a design problem, not a question of personality. We can build standing channels that do not route through the person being critiqued: a rotating listening session with field teams, a route to raise a concern outside the direct reporting line, an after action review whose first question is what we got wrong. The test is simple. If no one has told us something uncomfortable this month, it is usually the channel that is broken, not the field.
We can also change what we ask for. “Any concerns?” at the end of an agenda invites silence. “What is the strongest argument against what we just decided?” invites the truth. We can ask the most affected and the most junior to speak first, before the room has read the leader’s face. And we can close the loop in plain view, so people see that what they raised actually moved something. A team that flags a registration step as unsafe, and then sees that step changed the next week with a note explaining why, learns that speaking up works. Feedback that vanishes teaches everyone to stop sending it.
Listening is not agreeing
Real listening is often confused with giving in, and that confusion is what makes leaders defensive. We can hold both at once. We can take in a hard view fully, repeat it back until the other person agrees we have it right, and still make a different call, saying clearly why. That is not weakness. It is the difference between a decision that absorbed the available reality and one that flinched from it. People can live with a no. What corrodes trust is the sense that they were never actually heard.
The communities we serve have always known things our dashboards miss. So have the national staff who stay long after visiting expertise has gone home. Building the discipline to hear them is not the soft part of the job. It is one of the most direct routes we have to programmes that hold up, and to a sector that earns the trust it asks for.
So the standard we can set for ourselves is plain. If the only version we are hearing is the comfortable one, we are not yet leading the situation, we are waiting to be surprised by it. The work is to make ourselves easy to tell the truth to, on purpose, before the truth becomes a crisis. That is a skill. Like any skill, we can choose to build it.