The Executive Voice

Listening Isn’t One Skill

Everyone knows leaders should listen. The harder part is actually doing it.

Leadership rewards decisiveness, judgement and having answers. And when you’re faced with competing priorities, as most leaders are, it seems more useful to half-listen while putting your mind to assessing, solving or preparing your response.

Instead, treat listening as part of how you arrive at the best answer. And don’t listen the same way every time. Sometimes you need to understand, sometimes you need to uncover and sometimes it’s important to simply empathise. The person and situation will determine which listening mode you use.

1. Listen to understand

Most of us listen while preparing our response. Listening researcher Graham Bodie argues that active listening requires consciously shifting your attention towards understanding the other person’s perspective. When people see you’re willing to see things from their perspective, they’re more willing to acknowledge your perspective.

Try this: Before responding, summarise what you think you heard and ask, “Have I got that right?” It forces you to suspend judgement and gives them the chance to correct you.

Go deeper: What Does It Take to Really Listen to Someone? – Greater Good

2. Listen for what isn’t being said

What someone says they want and what’s actually driving them can be quite different. Negotiation experts distinguish between a position, the stated demand, and the underlying interests, such as needs, fears or motivations. There is always subtext and if you’re not paying attention to it, it could undermine a business relationship especially one relating to a complex multi-million dollar sales negotiation.

Try this: When something feels incomplete, don’t fill in the gaps. Ask, “What’s driving that?” or “What’s the concern behind it?” Then listen for what changes in their answer.

Go deeper: Principled Negotiation: Focus on Interests to Create Value

3. Listen to empathise

With empathetic listening you’re not probing for hidden information or preparing to solve the problem. You’re focussed on ”understanding the needs of others, and being aware of their feelings and thoughts.” Simply doing this is a powerful way to have the other party feel heard and seen. This creates a connection and allows for better communication flow between you and them.

Try this: Don’t jump in to offer advice, instead say, “It sounds like the part that’s really worrying you is…” Then stop. Let them confirm, correct or expand.

Go deeper: The Importance of Empathy in the Workplace – Center for Creative Leadership

I Feel Like You Know Me

A beautifully crafted proposal is no substitute for a meaningful relationship with a client.

The best compliment a new customer can give you is: “We chose you because, through the whole sales process, we felt like you really knew us.”

Yet in B2B IT, we’re often not that good at taking the time to get to know prospective customers. We get excited about the technology and not the customer. Technical experts rush to design the solution before they’re made aware of the client’s real business needs, while the lead sales executive and support team haven’t done the hard work required to figure out the decision-makers and influencers on the customer side.

How can you strategise when you don’t even know where the pieces go on the chessboard?

Getting to know the customer means more than looking them up on LinkedIn and searching for news articles. That’s speed dating. We should understand their business objectives, strategy, fears, agendas, alliances and personal ambitions. We should know why they need to make big changes, what outcomes matter and which parts of the technology they absolutely must have, and which parts they don’t care for.

Bid kick-offs should be 90% about the customer: helping the pursuit team understand and empathise with them before everyone disappears into ‘solutioning’.

We say we’re customer-centric, but are we?

If you’re spending more time designing the technology than researching, analysing and probing the customer’s objectives or mapping stakeholder agendas, it could be why you’re not winning as much business as you should.

Getting to know a prospective customer takes time. Rushing doesn’t cut it.

Before the next tender arrives, what can you do to know your customer better than your competition does?

A biography has just been published about “how Australia’s first tech billionaires made a fortune, found fame, and fell out.” The Australian Newspaper covered it this week.

Tech Bros: When Bromance Breaks

Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar started Atlassian as university friends with a $10,000 credit-card limit and built it into one of Australia’s greatest technology success stories. But the new book Tech Bros, by journalists, John Stensholt and Perry Williams, reveals how badly the relationship eventually deteriorated. By 2019, the co-founders were reportedly barely speaking, divided over strategy, spending, succession and increasingly personal tensions. Their differences spilled into the business, with employees reportedly identifying as either a “Mike person” or a “Scott person”. A professional counsellor was eventually brought in to try to repair the relationship. Farquhar stepped down as co-CEO in 2024. Read the story in The Australian

My POV: When does productive tension stop being productive?
Great partnerships don’t require constant agreement. In fact, disagreement can produce better decisions. The danger comes when people stop communicating and start defending territory, recruiting allies or managing around each other instead of working through the issue. Tech Bros raises an important leadership question: how do you recognise when creative differences have become a communication breakdown - before they start damaging the culture?

Phrase of the Week

Inference tax: The hidden cost of running AI after you’ve built it – compute, storage, data movement and all the infrastructure required every time a model or agent actually does something.

Pressure-Test Your Customer Knowledge

Want to see where the gaps lie in understanding your customer or tech buyer? Paste in the customer intelligence you currently have like account notes, RFP extracts, stakeholder information, meeting notes, strategy documents, LinkedIn research or news coverage, then use this prompt:

Prompt:
Act as a sceptical pursuit adviser. Based on the customer intelligence below, identify what we still don’t understand that could cost us the deal. Highlight the five most important gaps, explain why each matters, and suggest the questions we should ask or research we should do to close them.

Customer intelligence:
[Paste what you know here]

The value of this exercise is that it deepens your understanding of the customer, strengthens your pursuit and improves your chances of winning the deal.

If this helped you think differently about communication, forward this newsletter to someone who leads, sells or explains complex ideas in tech.