Most leaders believe they’re good listeners. Their teams would disagree.
Active listening isn’t about waiting for your turn to speak—it’s about asking questions that uncover what’s really going on beneath the surface. When leaders rush through conversations with surface-level questions, they miss the truth. And missed truth leads to missed performance.
In this video, Roxanne Emmerich breaks down why real answers usually show up at the third level of questioning, and why most leaders never get there.
Here’s what active listening actually unlocks:
– Clarity over assumptions: Great clarifying questions expose the real blockage, not the symptom.
– Performance through perspective: Shifting how people see the world is the fastest way to shift results.
– Mastery without ego: Top five percent performers ask more questions, not fewer.
This isn’t just about customer conversations. It’s about how teams talk to each other every day—and how often ego shuts down understanding.
A culture of active listening is a culture where people lean in, stay curious, and refuse to move on until they truly understand. That’s where trust deepens, execution improves, and performance accelerates.
If you want a workplace where people don’t just hear—but actually get it—this message is essential.
Watch now.
How can a business foster a culture of active listening in the workplace?
Most people think that they’re a pretty good listener because they’re seeing it through their own filter. But most people also think the people around them are not very good listeners, right?
So when I’m teaching trusted advisors how to be trusted advisors, one of the things I teach them is that it’s the questions you ask—the Socratic questions that get to the soul of the situation—that unleash authenticity, unleash real answers, and help you understand where the blockage is. But it’s not just that you know how to ask the questions; it’s that you know how to be an authentic listener who is actively understanding the words and knows how to dissect that and take the answer further.
Usually, the best answer comes in about the third level of that. But most people move on to the next question because they think their job is to ask a few surface-level questions, check the boxes, and say it’s done.
It’s not just in the communications we have with our customers. It’s in the communications we have with each other as well.
Because people are not asking good clarifying questions and not really engaging as listeners to say, “Hang on a second, I need to hear that,” problems ensue.
I went through an ontological coaching certification years ago, which is about coaching people on how to be—how to shift their worldview—because the only way to really shift people’s performance is to have them see the world in a different way.
As the instructor was teaching, this was all new to me. She would teach something, and I would raise my hand and ask a question. She would answer the question. Then I’d raise my hand again and ask another question. She would teach something else, and I’d raise my hand and ask another question.
I remember looking around and thinking there are people here who are twenty years old. I know they don’t know the answer.
And the problem is that their ego won’t let them ask the question.
You cannot be a master. You cannot be a top five percenter unless you wholly understand everything about how to do something. And the only way to get that understanding is to make sure you can replicate the result—to fully get whatever you’re Discovering to happen.
And the only way through that is to ask a lot of great questions. That requires that you lean in and actively listen to what is being said through the lens of, “Can I do this correctly?”