Most leaders are not listening. They are reloading.

At 5:06 PM on March 27, 1977, KLM Flight 4805 began its takeoff roll on Runway 12 at Los Rodeos Airport in Tenerife, Spain.

The captain had not received clearance to take off. His co-pilot said so. Air traffic control said so. A Pan Am 747 was still on the same runway, invisible in thick fog.

The captain heard all of it. He did not listen to any of it.

583 people died. It remains the deadliest aviation accident in history - caused not by mechanical failure, not by weather, and not by a lack of information. It was caused by a captain who had already decided and could not hear anything that contradicted the decision he had made.

The post-incident analysis revealed something that has stayed with me as a clinician and a coach. The co-pilot hesitated to assert himself because of the captain’s seniority and authority. The information existed. The channel was open. The hierarchy made it impossible to deliver the truth at the speed the situation required.

Last week, we established that credibility is the foundation of influence. This week, we go one level deeper: you cannot build credibility with people you are not genuinely listening to. And genuine listening is far rarer than leaders believe.

The listening deficit presents in four distinct patterns. Each one is common. Each one is invisible to the person doing it.

01 - Reloading. The leader is composing their response while the speaker is still talking. They are physically present in the conversation but cognitively elsewhere - assembling their argument, forming their counter, deciding what they think. When the speaker finishes, the leader responds fluently. But they have responded to the first thing they heard, not to everything that was said. The speaker knows this. They adjust what they say next accordingly.

02 - Filtering for confirmation. The leader listens selectively - absorbing information that confirms their existing view and unconsciously discarding information that challenges it. This is the KLM captain pattern. The decision is already made. Incoming information is processed through a filter that protects the decision. The leader believes they are listening. What they are actually doing is looking for permission to proceed.

03 - Hearing words, not the question. People rarely open with what they actually need. They open with what feels safe to say. A team member who asks “how do you think the project is going?” may actually be asking “am I going to be blamed for what went wrong?” A direct report who says “I just wanted to check in” may be signalling something far more serious. The listening deficit is the gap between what was said and what was meant - and the leader who only hears the words will miss the meaning every time.

04 - Hierarchy-induced silence. This is the pattern the Tenerife investigation named most clearly. When authority creates an environment in which disagreement feels dangerous, people stop saying the difficult thing. They hedge. They soften. They raise concerns obliquely and drop them when they go unaddressed. The leader who does not actively create safety for uncomfortable information will eventually stop receiving it. And they will not know they have stopped receiving it - because nobody will tell them.

Four moves that close the listening deficit. Not techniques for appearing to listen - behaviours that produce genuine understanding.

H - Hold your response. Please hold off on replying until the speaker has finished. Not paused - finished. This is harder than it sounds because most leaders have a fast internal clock and feel pressure to respond quickly as evidence of competence. It is not. The three seconds of silence after someone has stopped speaking, before you begin, is not dead air. It is the space in which the speaker decides whether to say the next, more important thing. Fill it too quickly, and you will never hear what they were about to say.

E - Extract what is beneath. Ask yourself: What is the real question beneath the stated question? What is this person actually trying to understand or communicate? In clinical practice, this is called taking the history behind the presenting complaint. It requires deliberate attention - not to what is being said, but to what is being circled. The presenting question is the door. What is beneath it is the room.

A - Acknowledge before answering. Name what you heard before you respond to it. Not a paraphrase - an acknowledgement. “What I am hearing is that you are concerned about X.” This single move does two things simultaneously. It confirms to the speaker that they were actually heard, which is rarer than most leaders realise. And it allows them to correct you if you heard wrong. “Actually, it is more about Y” is information you could not have received if you had responded immediately.

R - Reflect on what changed. After the conversation, ask yourself: what do I understand now that I did not before I listened? If the honest answer is nothing, you were not listening. You were waiting. Genuine listening changes something in the listener. It updates their model of the situation, the person, or the problem. If your view is identical before and after the conversation, the conversation did not work - regardless of how attentive you appeared to be.

In your next one-to-one conversation, do one thing differently: after the other person finishes speaking, wait three full seconds before you respond.

Then, before you say anything substantive, say this:

After the conversation, answer this question in writing:

If you cannot answer it specifically, run the conversation through your mind again and identify the moment you stopped listening. That moment is the data.

You’re Not Listening - Kate Murphy

Murphy makes the empirical case for what this edition argues: that genuine listening is becoming rarer as the pace of communication accelerates, and that the cost of that loss is paid in relationships, decisions, and organisational intelligence. Her research on what happens in the brain when we are listened to versus when we are not is the scientific basis for the HEAR framework. Readable, grounded, and genuinely useful.

Get it on here → https://amzn.to/4fbqqfk.

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The KLM captain who did not listen to his co-pilot on that runway in Tenerife was not a bad man or an incompetent pilot. He was an experienced, respected aviator who had made a decision and could not hear anything that contradicted it.

The room always knows. The people around you know when they are being heard and when they are not. They know when the question is genuine and when it is performative. They know when their answer is changing your thinking and when it is disappearing into a decision already made.

What they do with that knowledge - whether they keep telling you the truth, soften it, or stop telling it altogether - is one of the most reliable indicators of your influence as a leader.

Lead honestly. Lead clearly. Lead by listening.

Forward this to the one leader in your network whose listening would change everything around them if they improved it.

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Dr Ikechukwu Okoh | MBBS MPH MBA MRCEM FIMC CMC FRSPH CLSSC

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All previous editions at leadership-pulse.beehiiv.com