Are We Really Listening?

I’ve been wondering… what actually changes when we begin to notice how our listening is already shaped - before anyone speaks?

In my last newsletter, I explored how Gen Z’s behaviours - “taskmasking”, the desire for “severance”, the refusal to perform “corporate theatre“ - are often read as demands or disengagement. I suggested something else: that they are signals, pointing to where inherited ideas about work, authority, and success no longer align with the realities people are living inside.

Beneath those signals sits a deeper shift in how knowledge and authority are being renegotiated across generations. And one of the first places that shift becomes visible - and felt - is in how we listen.

As I’ve looked more closely at my own life - as a human, a mother, a professor, a colleague - I’ve come to see that listening is rarely neutral. It is shaped by habit, by hierarchy, and by what and who we were taught to trust. Inherited ideas about authority are like rungs on a ladder many of us have been climbing our whole lives. We learn to look upward for answers - toward titles, experience, position - far more readily than we look sideways. Long before a word is spoken, something in us is already deciding whose voice will carry weight.

The first time I became aware of this, I was sitting in a school office. During my children’s middle school years, I was certain I was listening. When an incident happened in class and I was called into school to speak with my son’s teacher, I instinctively listened to the teacher first. When my son tried to explain what he had experienced, I listened too - but not in the same way. I wasn’t dismissing my son intentionally. I was simply more receptive to one voice more than the other.

Looking back, I can see that it wasn’t that I wasn’t listening at all; it was that I decided too quickly whose voice carried more weight. Out of old learnings, I trusted the teacher’s perspective because they were the adult, the professional, the authority in the room. I wasn’t weighing two accounts - I was trusting one by default. Authority had quietly taken the place of accuracy.

I suspect many of us have found ourselves in versions of this moment - not only as parents, but as colleagues, leaders, or sometimes as the voice that goes unheard.

It was the first place I noticed a pattern that would show up again and again - in classrooms, in teams, and in moments of tension or disagreement. Different contexts. Different people. The same default reflex. I was listening, but often while already moving toward an explanation, a resolution, a conclusion.

Research in cognitive science tells us this is not unusual. We do not first hear and then interpret. We interpret as we hear. Our brains are constantly predicting meaning, filling gaps, and assigning weight based on past experience, role, and status - often before a sentence is finished.

What I’m coming to see is that listening is not simply a skill; it is a conditioned practice. Over time, we are trained - by early learning, by institutions and roles, by professional habits and cultural norms - to associate credibility with certain tones, titles, and forms of expression. Before we consciously agree or disagree, our attention has already been steered. Some voices arrive carrying weight. Others must work harder to be heard - not because they lack insight, but because they do not fit the forms we have learned to trust.

Which means that when listening is rushed, outcome-driven, or filtered through inherited ideas about who “knows” best, entire forms of intelligence struggle to surface. Over time, people learn which parts of themselves are welcome - and which are not. They begin to speak more carefully. The room grows quieter, but not wiser.

What changed things for me was not learning to listen harder, but learning to listen deeper.

In my teaching, this became a deliberate practice. I operate from a simple belief - one I learned from both my children and the people I worked alongside: no question is silly, and no answer is devalued. I see you. I hear you. I value you - all of you. Not just the polished contribution or the confident voice, but the half-formed thought, the tentative question, the perspective still finding its language.

When space is held for people to finish not just their sentences, but their thinking, something shifts. Conversations stop being transactional. They become relational. People begin to show up more fully - not to perform, but to participate.

This is also where I began to notice something else - what I’ve come to think of as a cyclical movement of energy. I often walk into my afternoon classes feeling flat, sometimes depleted. Yet I leave them enthusiastic and fulfilled. Not because I have given more, but because listening has become mutual. Knowing is no longer moving in one direction. It begins to circulate.

Many leaders are exhausted because they believe they must carry everything themselves. When listening becomes generative, energy moves differently. A classroom or a boardroom stops being a one-way demand and becomes something closer to a living system - responsive, reciprocal, alive.

I’ve seen this most clearly under pressure. Deadlines closing in. Teams stretched thin. And then something unexpected surfaces: the nurturing presence of an analyst, the creative response of a manager, the emotional intelligence of someone who wasn’t speaking the loudest in the room. Often, it is younger colleagues who carry these capacities most naturally - not because they “know better,” but because they have not yet learned which parts of themselves need to be hidden in order to be taken seriously.

I’ve also learned the quiet power of a genuine smile - a real laugh that can soften a moment that has gone rigid. When I was upset - with my children or with people I worked alongside - a smile could melt the ice almost instantly. Sometimes, that shift was all that was needed for something human to re-enter the room.

Listening is not something we do once and master. It is something we practice - and lose - and return to again and again. It shows up in small moments: who we interrupt, who we reassure, whose words we carry forward, and whose we let fall away.

Every time we decide whose voice matters, we are shaping the kind of world we are building - at home, in classrooms, in organisations. And every time we default to authority over inclusion, we reproduce the very hierarchies we say we want to move beyond.

Perhaps the real question is not whether younger generations have something to teach us - but whether our bandwidth of listening is spacious and deep enough to receive it.

You might pause and ask yourself:

• Who do I instinctively listen to first - and why?
• Where might I be mistaking authority for accuracy?
• What forms of intelligence am I still learning to recognise - especially in those younger than me?
• What intelligence might be present in this room that hasn’t yet found language?
• If your team, your child, your colleague feels they must perform to be taken seriously, what brilliance might they currently be hiding from you?

P.S Next time you’re in a meeting, notice who you stop listening to before they finish their sentence and ask yourself “why?”. That’s where your biggest blind spot lives.

With care for “All,” Dr. Laila Marouf and the KMD team