Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / Understanding Before Being Understood
Transcript
- Blake Holman: Welcome to Lead with Clarity. This is a space for leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process. Each episode is a short reflection on leadership, influence, and the inner work that shapes how we show up for others. It's not hype, not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled Understanding Before Being Understood. Here we go. Today I want to talk about something that sounds simple but is actually one of the hardest habits in leadership. It has nothing to do with strategy, it has nothing to do with vision, it has everything to do with how you listen. Stephen Covey wrote it plainly when he said seek first to understand, then to be understood. He listed it as one of his seven habits of highly effective people. If you strip away the framework, what he's really describing is a leadership discipline. Understand before you respond. Think about the last hard conversation you had. A disagreement with a peer, a difficult performance review, a negotiation that got tense. In that moment, where was your attention? Many of us are already building our response while the other person is still talking. We're not listening anymore. We're waiting for our turn. I've done this myself. Early in my career I sat across from someone on my team who was clearly frustrated. Instead of asking what was actually going on, I jumped straight to solving it. I offered three ideas in the first two minutes. She stopped talking. Not because I'd helped, because I'd made it clear I wasn't actually listening. Here's where a lot of leaders get this principle wrong. They here seek first to understand, and they translate it into agree with the other person or let them win. That's not what Covey meant, and it's not what makes a leader effective. Understanding someone is not the same as agreeing with them. You can fully understand a position and still disagree with it. In fact, you can only meaningfully disagree with something once you actually understand it. The real value of understanding first is trust. When someone feels heard, genuinely heard, before you offer your perspective, something shifts. They become more willing to hear you in return. Compare that to a conversation where you jump straight to your point. Even if you're right, The other person spends the rest of the conversation defending themselves instead of considering what you said. This is also one of the clearest dividing lines between leaders who use AI well and leaders who don't. A tool can draft your talking points in seconds. It can summarize a meeting transcript instantly. What it cannot do is sit across the table from someone, notice the pause before they answer a question, and decide that that pause is worth exploring. That is still your job. And leaders who treat that as a shortcut to skip rather than a discipline to build will find their influence quietly erodes even as their tools get more capable. Here's something to try this week. In your next disagreement, whether it's with a colleague, a direct report, or someone at home, resist the urge to state your case first. Ask a question instead. Restate what you heard before you offer your own view. Notice how the conversation changes when the other person realizes you're actually trying to understand them, not just waiting for your turn. Covey's habit has outlasted plenty of management trends because it points at something timeless. Leadership isn't about being the most persuasive voice in the room. It's about earning the kind of trust where people actually want to hear what you think because they already know you took the time to understand what they think. Seek first to understand. The being understood part tends to take care of itself.