The Best Leaders Listen: 7 Important Voices to Listen To

There is a world of difference between passively and actively listening. The best leaders and managers are also the best listeners, they asked themselves 3 questions every week:

Who Does Not Feel Listened To?
What People Have I Neglected to Listen to?
Have I audited my own listening to ensure that my listening still have standards?

There are 7 Important Voices that Every Leader Listens to:

The Unhappy Voice - discontentment with what is happening now
The Inner Voice - the unspoken feelings inside of you
The Higher Voice - something higher than what we are doing and thinking now, like kindness
The Successful Voice - Who can we learn and leverage from?
The Undermined Voice - the people who are losing out, if left unchecked, will lead to chaos
The Hidden Voice - this is beyond your inner feelings, it is the spirit or soul of you
The Repeated Voice - anything that repeats 3 times or more is a cause for concern, this is usually the neglected voice.

In my opinion, the Malaysian authorities have not been listening to the families of the missing plane MH370. What they are doing now is just hearing the sounds, which is useless. If they were to engage in a heart-to-heart talk with the families, they will begin to hear the above 7 important voices.

By Andy Ng of Asia Trainers, related articles on Self Leadership and Leading Others are as follows:

Comments

What an Executive Coach and Business Coach Does

The Secret Under the Mattress: Why would a 79-year Man Bet So Big on 4D?

It was 2007 when we discovered his secret. While moving my father’s mattress, we found them: heaps and heaps of Singapore Pools 4D tickets. They were stacked in layers, a paper trail of lost hopes. What shocked us most wasn’t just the volume, but the stakes. He wasn’t betting a few dollars for fun. He was punting hundreds of dollars per draw—nearly ten times a month. At the time, my siblings and I were furious. Our father was a 79-year-old retiree. We wondered, with a mix of anger and confusion, why a man at his stage of life would need to win such "big money." What was he going to do with the money? We saw it as a reckless habit, a sign of poor judgment in his final years. Some of us would say, "If I were to give him money to buy 4D, why don't I use the money and buy 4D myself? At least I have better discipline". It has taken me two decades, and the experience of raising my own three grown-up children, to finally see the truth that was hidden under that matt...

Head Bleeding when the Chair Falls

The Weight of Silence: What Were We Really Arguing About? My earliest memories are punctuated by the sound of shouting. In 1970, when I was barely 6 years old, I stood as a small witness to the fierce quarrels between my father and my late eldest brother Kah Yang (he passed away in 1971 at the age of 17). As I grew up, these contradictions became the soundtrack of our lives, usually centered around our family's shoe shop and clothing stalls in Chinatown. In the court of family opinion, the verdict was almost always the same: my father was "wrong." He was judged as a man who didn't fulfill his role, who wasn't "burdening" enough for the family’s success. But as I look back from the vantage point of 2026, I have to ask: Was that actually true? Let me finally put to rest what my father did right: the truths that were buried under decades of criticism: Unseen Labor: He worked grueling, long hours. I remember him hauling boxes of goods and equipment to set u...

Business and Money Tips

Search This Blog