The Lost Art of Listening: Why No One Feels Heard at Work

BETTER THAN THIS — Article 5 of 9

This is the fifth article in the Better Than This series on toxic workplace cultures — what they are, how they work, and what actually helps. New to the series? Start with Article 1: The Workplace That Wears You Down →

Think about the last time someone truly listened to you at work.

Not the head-nodding while checking a phone. Not the waiting-for-their-turn-to-talk that masquerades as attention. Not the listening-to-respond that turns your words into a launching pad for someone else’s point.

Actually listened. Stayed with what you were saying. Let it land before they reacted. Made you feel, when you walked away, like something real had been exchanged.

If you had to think for a moment, that’s telling. If you’re struggling to come up with an example, that’s also telling.

Not feeling heard at work is one of the most consistent themes across coaching conversations, workplace surveys, and organizational research. It cuts across industries, roles, and levels. And it sits, quietly, at the root of a remarkable number of other problems — disengagement, conflict, attrition, innovation failures, burnout — that organizations spend significant resources trying to fix downstream rather than upstream.

The listening problem isn’t new. But it may be getting worse. And it’s worth understanding why.

It Was Never That Simple

In The Lost Art of Listening, therapist and researcher Michael P. Nichols makes a deceptively simple observation: most of us think of ourselves as better listeners than we actually are. Not because we’re dishonest about it — but because we’ve never been taught what listening actually requires. We were taught to read, write, and speak. Listening was assumed.

That assumption has consequences.

What most people do in conversation — especially high-stakes workplace conversations — isn’t really listening. It’s waiting. It’s filtering incoming information through existing frameworks. It’s tracking the argument rather than the person. Nichols identifies the heart of the problem as the struggle to suspend our own needs long enough to genuinely receive what another person is communicating — and he’s clear that this struggle is universal, not a sign of poor character (Nichols & Straus, 2009).

Otto Scharmer, a senior lecturer at MIT and developer of Theory U, offers a complementary framework that maps the levels at which listening happens in organizational settings. At the most surface level — what Scharmer calls downloading — we aren’t truly listening at all. We’re confirming what we already believe and waiting to recognize something familiar. This is where much routine workplace conversation happens, and where the person speaking often feels vaguely unheard without always being able to say exactly why (Scharmer, 2007).

Factual listening, the second level, involves genuine attention to content — we’re tracking what’s being said, possibly updating our position. But we’re still centered on our own reference point. Empathic listening, the third level, is where the real shift happens: we move from our own perspective into the other person’s, genuinely trying to understand not just what they’re saying but what it’s like for them to be saying it. Most people are capable of this. Most people rarely practice it at work.

The practical value of Scharmer’s framework isn’t the top level. It’s recognizing that much workplace listening happens at level one or two — and that the gap between where we’re actually listening and where people need to be heard can have real consequences.

What Happens When People Don’t Feel Heard

The consequences of a poor listening culture show up in concrete, measurable ways.

Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, whose research on psychological safety has become foundational in organizational psychology, has consistently demonstrated that people’s willingness to speak up is shaped by whether they believe speaking up is safe — and safe includes being genuinely heard, not just technically permitted (Edmondson, 1999). Research by Edmondson and colleagues also suggests that employees often become less likely over time to share concerns, questions, or ideas when they perceive those contributions are not meaningfully engaged with. The excitement fades. The ideas stop coming. The person is still present, but they’ve learned to be quieter about what they actually think.

Additional research by Edmondson and colleagues found that psychological safety can help buffer against burnout and improve retention, even in demanding work environments (Edmondson & Kerrissey, 2024). Listening, in other words, is not a soft skill adjacent to the real work. It is infrastructure.

The APA’s 2024 Work in America survey found that psychological safety is among the workplace factors employees increasingly value, yet many workers still report environments where openness, trust, and honest communication are inconsistent. The gap between what people need and what they’re experiencing is not a matter of values. It’s a matter of practice.

When people consistently don’t feel heard, the behavioral arc is predictable. They stop raising concerns. They stop volunteering ideas. They become, in ways easy to mistake for disengagement, the people we described in Article 1 — the ones who used to light up a room and now keep their heads down. This isn’t personality change. It’s rational adaptation to an environment that has communicated, repeatedly and without necessarily intending to, that their voice doesn’t matter here.

Why Listening Breaks Down in Toxic Environments

In healthy workplaces, poor listening is often a skill gap — something that can be addressed through practice and feedback. In toxic or chronically stressful workplaces, something more structural is happening.

Recall what we covered in Article 4: chronic stress dysregulates the nervous system, and a dysregulated nervous system has significantly reduced access to the cognitive and relational capabilities we associate with genuine listening. Empathy becomes harder to access. Perspective-taking narrows. The threat-detection system is running, which means attention is allocated toward self-protection rather than open receptivity.

This creates a dynamic that compounds quickly. Leaders under chronic pressure become worse listeners precisely when their teams most need to be heard. Teams who don’t feel heard become less willing to speak — which deprives leaders of the information they need to make good decisions and reduce the pressure they’re under. Everyone is stressed. No one is communicating. The problems that could have been caught early get bigger.

There’s also a power dimension that doesn’t get named often enough. Research on inclusive leadership and employee voice consistently finds that people are often reluctant to raise concerns when they perceive risk — including the risk that managers won’t listen or will penalize them for going against established norms (Mohase et al., 2025). In environments where listening is inconsistent or selective — where some voices reliably land and others routinely don’t — people with less organizational power learn to self-censor. Not because they have nothing to say, but because experience has taught them that saying it isn’t worth the cost.

The result is an environment where the people with the most direct knowledge of how the work actually functions go systematically unheard. Decisions get made without their input. Problems they could have predicted go unaddressed until they become crises. And then, as we saw in the implementation scenario in Article 2, accountability for those crises falls on the very people who were never meaningfully included in the conversation.

The Listening–Burnout Connection

There’s a thread here that connects directly to what we explored in Article 3.

Research on employee listening environments has found that when employees experience a genuinely positive listening culture, wellbeing tends to improve and burnout tends to decrease. Studies also suggest that strengthening listening practices within organizations may contribute to lower burnout and reduced turnover intentions (Itzchakov & Kluger, 2023). The relationship is bidirectional: listening affects burnout, and burnout — which shrinks our nervous system window of tolerance and makes genuine presence harder — affects our capacity to listen.

This is one of the clearest examples in this series of why individual interventions alone aren’t enough. A burned-out team in a listening-poor environment can’t simply be asked to listen better. The structural conditions producing both the burnout and the listening breakdown need to be addressed together.

DeKay’s research on Adverse Work Experiences is relevant here as well. Among the chronic stressors she documents — the ones that accumulate without producing a single, reportable incident — are experiences related to exclusion, invalidation, and repeatedly feeling unheard in matters that directly affect one’s work. Not because each instance is necessarily severe on its own. Because the cumulative message — your input doesn’t matter here — can become deeply demoralizing over time (DeKay, 2022).

For Leaders: You Are Setting the Listening Climate

If you lead a team, your listening behavior isn’t just a personal communication style. It’s organizational infrastructure.

Research consistently finds that the listening climate on a team is shaped significantly by leadership behavior — by what leaders model, what they reward, and what they implicitly penalize. Edmondson describes the aspiration as “fearless candor” — an environment where people feel honest and direct in sharing their thoughts, concerns, questions, and even mistakes in service of better performance (Edmondson & Kerrissey, 2025). That environment doesn’t emerge on its own. It’s built, interaction by interaction, through the quality of the listening leaders demonstrate.

Here’s a useful and uncomfortable question: when someone on your team raises a concern, what happens next? Is it engaged with — genuinely, and with follow-through? Or does it land and get moved past? Or, more damaging still, does something happen to the person who raised it that makes others conclude that raising concerns isn’t safe here?

When employees believe it’s too risky to speak up, many decide it’s safer to put their heads down and keep their opinions to themselves — and that muting of views creates barriers to learning and collaboration that affect both morale and organizational performance (Edmondson et al., 2024).

Most leaders who create a poor listening climate are not doing so intentionally. They’re overwhelmed, distracted, dysregulated, or simply operating on habits they’ve never been asked to examine. But intent doesn’t shape the culture. Behavior does.

The Tools

These aren’t fixes. Listening cultures don’t change through single interventions. But they’re grounded in what the research and lived experience suggest actually helps — and they’re designed to be usable now, without waiting for the environment to change first.

Tool 1: The Listening Level Check — For Individuals and Leaders

Before your next significant conversation — a one-on-one, a team meeting, a check-in with a colleague — take a moment to honestly identify where you’re likely to be listening from.

Using Scharmer’s framework as a reference, ask yourself:

Am I going into this conversation with my conclusions already formed? (Downloading — Level 1)
Am I open to new information, but still primarily in my own reference frame? (Factual — Level 2)
Am I genuinely willing to step into this person’s perspective, even if it’s uncomfortable? (Empathic — Level 3)

You don’t need to achieve the highest level in every conversation. But identifying that you’re at Level 1 when the situation calls for Level 3 is information — and that awareness creates the possibility of a deliberate shift.

After the conversation, ask: did the other person seem to feel heard? How do I know? If I’m not sure — that’s worth noticing too.

Tool 2: The Speaking Up Audit — For Leaders

Over the next two weeks, track what happens when people on your team raise concerns, questions, or ideas:

Who speaks up in group settings? Who doesn’t?
When someone raises something, what’s your first response — engagement, deflection, defense, or redirection?
Has anyone stopped raising a type of concern they used to raise? When did that change?
If you had to name the person on your team who feels least heard right now — who would that be? When did you last ask them a genuine question and stay with their answer?

This isn’t about tallying failures. It’s about making the listening climate visible — because what isn’t named can’t be addressed.

Tool 3: The Felt-Heard Check — For Individuals Who Have Gone Quiet

If you’ve stopped speaking up — in meetings, in one-on-ones, in conversations where you used to have things to say — sit with these questions:

When did this change? Was there a specific moment, or did it happen gradually?
What would need to be true for you to feel safe raising a concern or idea again?
Is there one person — a trusted colleague, a mentor, a coach — with whom you still feel heard? If so, what does that relationship make possible?

You don’t have to find a way to speak up in the room where it feels most unsafe. Start somewhere smaller. Find the one relationship or context where genuine exchange is still possible and tend to it. Your voice matters — even when the environment has made it hard to believe that.

We Want to Hear From You

Which of these resonates most right now?

I work in an environment where I genuinely feel heard
I’ve stopped speaking up and I’m not sure when that happened
I lead a team and I’m not confident everyone feels heard by me
I’ve watched someone go quiet and I didn’t know what to do
I feel heard by some people and completely invisible to others

Take the full anonymous survey → {MS Forms link} Under 10 minutes. Fully anonymous. Your experience shapes what gets built next.

Coming Up in This Series

Gaslighting at Work: When Reality Becomes a Moving Target
What Actually Helps: Evidence-Based Strategies for Surviving a Toxic Workplace
For Leaders: The Accidental Bad Boss
Finding Your Way Out: Recovery, Resilience, and What Comes Next

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

Edmondson, A. C., & Kerrissey, M. J. (2025). What people get wrong about psychological safety. Harvard Business Review, 103(3).

Edmondson, A. C., Kerrissey, M. J., & Bransby, D. (2024). Psychological safety as an enduring resource amid constraints. Academy of Management Discoveries.

Itzchakov, G., & Kluger, A. N. (2023). Listening training in organizations. Current Opinion in Psychology, 50, 101582. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2023.101582

Mohase, K., Donald, F., & Israel, N. (2025). Inclusive leadership, psychological safety, and employee voice in remote and hybrid work employees. Group & Organization Management. https://doi.org/10.1177/00812463251365484

Nichols, M. P., & Straus, M. B. (2009). The lost art of listening: How learning to listen can improve relationships (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Scharmer, C. O. (2007). Theory U: Leading from the future as it emerges. Society for Organizational Learning.

If this is resonating and you want support figuring out your next step — schedule a free discovery session →