Active Listening Isn’t Just Tactics

You could tell the executives had been on training.

Active listening training, to be precise.

It was noticeable. Not in a good way.

When technique without care makes things worse

One spring morning I sat at my desk overlooking the river, clearing overnight emails. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him emerge from his corner office.

Normally, you could feel the atmosphere shift when he moved. He was a vending machine in human form: push the right button, get a predictable, emotionless response. Efficient. Cold. Reliable. We had learned how to work with him. Button B2 for approval. C3 for escalation. D4 for aircover.

Today was different.

He was smiling.

Not a human smile. A training smile. Creepy.

He scanned the floor for people to talk to, like a robot seeking test subjects. He asked questions. He nodded. He paraphrased. He leaned in. His face held the same expression throughout, slowly morphing from a grin into something between a grimace and a horror-movie clown. His joints moved with mechanical precision, as if he were being wheeled around on an invisible trolley.

After five minutes he announced "Time up," reversed into his office — having been told never to turn his back on people — and closed the door.

The tension evaporated.
Slack exploded.

What was that? Is he okay? Did HR get to him?

He was doing exactly what the training told him to do. Active listening tactics. Nods. Eye contact. Paraphrasing. Open questions. It was technically correct. And emotionally wrong.

The ear hears. The brain listens. The heart decides.

Pauline Oliveros said:

"Expand your attention to include everything that you can possibly hear, without judgement. The ear hears. The brain listens."

I would add a third step: the heart then processes what you listen to.

Listening is physical – your ears hear something.
Listening is cognitive — the brain interprets.
Listening is emotional — the heart decides whether the other person matters.

You cannot fake the third step.

The ear and the brain can be trained. Nods, paraphrasing, eye contact, open questions — these are learnable techniques and they are genuinely useful when they emerge from care.

But when they are deployed as a performance — applied for a five-minute rotation and then switched off — people feel it immediately. The difference between presence and performance is one of the most reliably detectable things in human interaction. We are wired for it. We know.

The return of the vending machine

The training did not last. Within weeks he was back to being the vending machine. Predictable. Detached. Efficient. And, oddly, we were relieved.

At least we knew where we stood.

Outside work he was a caring husband, father, and community member. At work, he wore the only leadership mask he knew — and he wore it consistently, which made it navigable. We had learned the buttons. We knew the outputs. Button B2, followed by C3, reliably produced what we needed.

What he never gave us was the thing people crave most at work: to be genuinely heard. Not listened to by someone running through a checklist, but connected with by someone who actually cared what they were saying.

That is what the training was trying to produce. It was not able to, because the training addressed the technique while leaving the care untouched.

Presence is the point

Listening is not something you perform for the benefit of an observer. It is not a posture you adopt or a set of behaviours you schedule into your morning rounds.

Active listening is attention, interpretation, and care, combined. Technique without the third is performance. Performance without care is, in most cases, worse than honest disengagement — because at least disengagement does not pretend to be something it is not.

The greatest compliment you can give someone is your genuine attention. Not for five minutes. Not as a managed interaction. But as a way of being present with another person while they are speaking to you.

That is something no training can install. It can only be chosen.

Now — where did the vending machine go? I need approval for more headcount.

B2, followed by C3.