You're Not Actually Listening - by Bruna Batista %

Most people in HR would say they’re good listeners.

Most people are wrong, not because they’re not trying, but because we’ve collapsed “listening” and “hearing” into the same thing, and they’re not.

Hearing is passive. It’s the sound entering the room. Listening is active, it’s the effort to understand what someone means, not just what they’ve said.

The distinction sounds obvious until you’re in a one-to-one with someone who is upset, choosing their words carefully, leaving gaps you’re filling in with your own assumptions. Until you’re already formulating your response before they’ve finished speaking. Until the silence feels too long and you jump in to fix it.

That’s where most listening breaks down. Not in bad intent, but in discomfort.

I studied this before I ever worked in HR.

In organisational psychology, active listening is a clinical skill. It involves specific behaviours: reflecting back what someone has said, naming the emotion rather than ignoring it, asking open questions, tolerating ambiguity. It’s taught as technique because, left to default, most people do the opposite.

What surprised me when I moved into HR practice was how rarely this was explicitly discussed. The assumption seemed to be that good people instinctively know how to listen. But instinct in a difficult conversation is often fight-or-flight, manage the problem, give the answer, end the discomfort.

Active listening asks you to do none of that. It asks you to stay present with someone in their uncertainty.

In practice, this looks like small things:

Asking “how are you finding it?” and actually waiting for the answer.

Not immediately offering solutions when someone shares a problem.

Saying “that sounds really difficult” before moving to the next agenda item.

Noticing when someone’s words and their body language don’t match, and being curious about that, gently.

It changes what you learn. Genuinely. People will tell you things in a well-held conversation that they’d never put in a formal complaint or a survey.

That information, the early signal, the thing that hasn’t escalated yet, is where the most valuable HR work happens. And it comes directly from the quality of how you listen.