Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / The Need to Understand and Be 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 The Need to Understand and Be Understood. Here we go. Today I want to talk about something so basic that leaders forget to practice it on purpose. They don't forget on purpose, but they just don't practice it on purpose. Ralph G. Nichols spent much of his career studying how people listen, and he came to a conclusion that still holds up today. He said, The most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and be understood. Think about that for a moment. Not the need to be liked, although that's important, not the need to be right, although for many people that's essential. The need to understand and to be understood. Nichols is telling us that communication is not really about information at all. It's about a much deeper human hunger to know that we have been heard. I've watched a lot of leadership moments unfold over the years, and here's what I keep noticing. The breakdowns rarely start as disagreements. They start as two people who never actually understood each other, and then everything built on top of that misunderstanding starts to wobble. Now, here's where a lot of leaders misread this. They think communication is a broadcasting problem. If people aren't getting it, say it again. Say it louder. Say it more confidently. Put it in a better slide. Say it backwards. Say it sideways. No, seriously. The leaders whose teams actually move together are usually the ones who listen first and speak second. Understanding isn't something you add on top of good leadership. It's the mechanism that makes the rest of leadership work at all. Here's the harder truth. It gets more difficult the further you climb, not less. Titles create distance. People start editing what they tell you because they're managing how you'll react. The pace of decisions leaves less room for the slow, patient work of actually hearing someone out. So the discipline of understanding doesn't happen by accident once you're leading. It has to be chosen, on purpose, every day. If you're leading in a world where AI tools are doing more and more of the thinking work, this principle does not get less important. It gets more important. A tool can summarize a meeting. It can draft a message for you. What it cannot do is sit across from another human being and make them feel understood. That's still entirely on you, and honestly, that's good news. It means the thing that makes you irreplaceable as a leader was never your ability to process information faster. It was always your ability to understand people and to let them know it. Here's something to carry forward. The next time you're in a hard conversation, resist the urge to make your point first. Try understanding the other person's point so well that they'd say you got it exactly right. You'll find that a lot of what looked like disagreement was actually just two people who had not been heard yet. Being right and being understood are two different achievements. And the leaders people actually follow over the long run are usually the ones who chose the second one. Thanks for spending this time with me.