Learning Entry 3: Listening as a Leadership Strategy

How leaders learn what the system cannot tell them through dashboards alone

Joe Jezierski · September 17, 2026 · 7-8 min read

People First, Roles Second

Some of the leadership moments I remember most clearly have very little to do with strategy documents. Early in one principalship, a storm destroyed the home of my administrative assistant. I had known her only a matter of weeks. But the situation immediately clarified something I have carried throughout my leadership: she was a person before she was an employee. Our staff came together around her, helped organize practical support, and did what a community does when one of its members is hurting.

That belief shaped smaller daily choices, too. I made a point of talking with custodians, cooks, paraprofessionals, and bus drivers because those roles can easily become invisible in school leadership conversations. I would remind bus drivers that they were often the first school adult a student encountered each morning. The way a student is greeted on a bus, in a lunch line, or in a hallway is part of the climate students experience.

Listening Is Access to the Real System

Listening grows from the same stance. It begins with an assumption that the person in front of me has information I do not yet have. I have learned this when working with leaders who tell me, “Staff are good.” My response is often: I would love to talk to them. I am not assuming the leader is wrong. I am trying to understand the variation inside the word good.

Research on psychological safety helps explain why this matters. Edmondson (1999) defined team psychological safety as a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. A later meta-analysis across 136 independent samples and more than 22,000 individuals found psychological safety to be meaningfully associated with learning, performance, and other important workplace outcomes (Frazier et al., 2017). The practical implication for leaders is that an invitation to speak is not enough. People also watch what happens after someone raises a concern, admits uncertainty, or challenges a prevailing view.

Listening therefore includes the response to the information. If every concern is met with explanation, correction, or immediate defense, people learn to edit what they share. If questions are treated as useful data, leaders gain access to information that would otherwise remain hidden.

Presence and Power Matter

Listening is also about who carries important messages. I once worked with a superintendent who supported the direction of our leadership team but frequently wanted me to deliver the major messages. I was comfortable speaking publicly, so I could do it. But I kept pushing back that some messages needed to come from the superintendent. Staff needed to hear the expectations from the person ultimately responsible for them.

That experience taught me that listening and presence are connected. Leaders cannot fully understand how decisions are landing if they consistently position themselves away from the conversations where those decisions are explained, questioned, or experienced. Presence does not mean the leader must personally facilitate every meeting. It means leadership cannot outsource all of the moments where trust is either strengthened or weakened.

Usable Listening Practices

Listening does not mean every concern changes the plan. It does not mean consensus, and it does not remove the leader’s responsibility to decide. It means resisting the temptation to treat the first answer as the whole answer. I find four practices especially useful. Ask questions that invite description before evaluation. Seek more than one role’s perspective. Listen for repeated patterns rather than reacting to the loudest individual comment. Finally, close the loop: tell people what you heard, what will change, what will not change, and why.

One of the simplest shifts is moving from “Any feedback?” to questions that make experience easier to describe: What are you noticing? Where is this working differently across teams? What feels unclear? What is one barrier we should understand before moving forward? These questions produce more useful information because they give people something concrete to examine.

At the end of the conversation that shaped this series, I noticed something myself. After talking for more than 90 minutes, I felt lighter. I am a verbal processor. Being asked questions and having room to make connections helped me see my own leadership journey more clearly. Listening does more than collect information from another person. Sometimes it helps the other person hear their own thinking.

For leaders, that means we need structures that make listening possible beyond one-on-one relationships. Short listening rounds, role-based focus groups, exit tickets after major professional learning, and periodic “what are we learning?” questions in team meetings can widen the information available to leadership. The key is follow-through. When people repeatedly offer input and never hear what happened to it, participation becomes performative. A simple response—what we heard, what we are doing, what we are not doing yet, and why—helps preserve trust even when the answer is not the one everyone wanted.

Listening is not passive. It is one of the ways a leader gains access to the system they are actually leading.

From “Any Feedback?” to Better Inquiry

Instead of asking	Try asking
How is it going?	What are you noticing in practice that we should understand?
Are staff on board?	Where is the experience different across roles, teams, or buildings?
Any questions?	What still feels unclear or difficult to use?
What should we do?	What pattern needs more understanding before we decide?

Reflect. Connect. Grow.

Reflect. When someone brings uncertainty, disagreement, or frustration, what happens inside you first? Where might your desire to help or be efficient move you toward an answer too quickly?

Connect. Whose voices reach leadership easily? Whose perspectives arrive only after a problem escalates? Where does hierarchy or meeting structure shape what the system can hear?

Grow. In one upcoming meeting, replace a general request for feedback with structured inquiry. Capture what needs more understanding before deciding, and close the loop afterward.

References

Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Frazier, M. L., Fainshmidt, S., Klinger, R. L., Pezeshkan, A., & Vracheva, V. (2017). Psychological safety: A meta-analytic review and extension. Personnel Psychology, 70(1), 113–165. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12183

Next in this series →

Explore More In this series

Entry 1 · Culture Is What We Practice, Not What We Post

Entry 2 · What Adult Wellness Means in a Real School Year

Entry 3 · Listening as a Leadership Strategy

Entry 4 · Sustaining Connection Through the Hard Middle of the Year

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