Listening Well
Imagine yourself at the beginning of a large-scale (but fun!) personal project…like planning a vacation to Bali. You do what any good information-gatherer does: you turn to your hive mind. You put out the call for restaurant recommendations, hiking trails, the best spa for a foot scrub after a long travel day. Friends and colleagues flood your inbox and text threads with tips and must-dos, and you save the ones that sound like your vibe. Later, when you are sipping a tamarind cocktail at the beachside place your friend swore by, you send them a picture and a “You were so right! Great call!,” thank you text.
That’s how responsive listening works. Or, at least, how it should work. You ask for input, you receive it, and you use what fits. And you tell people when their wisdom made a difference.
On a campus (or any workplace, really), listening is a leadership competency. When done well, it reinforces that your team’s opinions not only count, but they shape the work ahead.
Real Listening = Acknowledgement and Action
Whether you’re in a department of five or a division of hundreds, staff tend to feel their opinions matter when one of two things happens:
- Their words or ideas are put into action with visible results, or
- Their contributions are acknowledged in a meaningful way, whether privately or publicly.
It does not take a multi-million dollar transformation to show your team that what they said mattered. A “we’re moving this deadline because y’all flagged a conflict” in a meeting recap, or a “thanks to Ashley for the heads-up about that app form glitch” in a staff email, can go a long way in reinforcing that someone was heard.
How You Set Up Listening Makes a Difference
No matter how heartfelt your “we want to hear from you” message is, people will be wary of speaking up unless the setup invites honesty and makes good on follow-through.
Formal Listening might look like:
- Hosting listening sessions that are open to those impacted by a policy or proposal
- Creating a structured comment period or feedback tool with a deadline, a next step, and a point of contact
- Sharing a “Here’s What We Heard” summary with all participants that reflects the tone, content, and weight of the input offered
In a perfect world, Leader-Bosses return to their team and say something like, “We originally thought we were heading toward X. But based on what we heard from you, we are going to scrap X and explore Y instead.” Even when every suggestion can’t be adopted, communicating how input influenced the direction is a powerful way to build trust.
Embedded Listening is another approach, especially during seasons of change or campus upheaval. This happens when the folks on the front lines who are going to deliver or implement something are brought into the fold early. Not just to react after decisions are made, but to help shape the decisions from the very beginning.
This kind of listening includes multi-stage brainstorming and iterative feedback. It treats staff expertise as an asset worth curating and elevating. And it signals to your team: “We are building this with you, not just handing it to you.” And if you’ve ever worked on a campus rollout that went sideways because the people implementing it were looped in too late, you know just how valuable that early listening can be.
Uncomfortable Conversations Need A Home, Too
Not all input is neatly packaged as suggestions for improvement. Sometimes the feedback we need most is the kind that no one wants to say out loud. The kind that begins with “this might sound like gossip, but…” or “I don’t want to throw anyone under the bus, but…”.
There are moments on a campus when something feels off. A practice that seems unfair, a team dynamic that’s unhealthy, or an incident that, if left unaddressed, could cause real damage to morale or trust. But no one wants to be labeled the tattle-tale or the troublemaker.
That is why good Leader-Bosses build in mechanisms for their humans to bring forward concerns without personal blowback. Whether that’s a confidential check-in process, a third-party ombuds system, or a recurring “what’s not working?” agenda item that includes space for anonymous submissions, the goal is the same: offer a channel. Make it clear how that feedback is handled. And when appropriate, close the loop by sharing what changed because someone had the courage to speak up.
Listening Is Proven by Change
The bottom line is this: if you say your team’s opinions matter, then it should be evident in your approach, your policies, and your practices.
So whether you’re canceling a project based on a staff recommendation, shifting the tone of a student service based on what your front desk team observed, or simply giving someone a quick nod in the weekly roundup because their insight helped your work improve, know this: the act of listening is only proven by what comes next.
And if what comes next is better, you’ll have your people to thank.
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