Leadership is often equated with authority and volume.
By Leonie Stanley, operations director at Euphoria Telecom
Early in my career, I thought being the loudest voice in the room created the greatest influence.
Experience has taught me otherwise. Real impact comes from listening, because listening builds understanding and trust, and leads to action.
Empathy matters, but it only takes you so far. Change comes from what you do next. That’s where compassion makes all the difference because it turns awareness into accountability.
In practice, that might mean calling a customer who has given you a poor rating to understand and resolve the issue, tightening a flawed onboarding process, or adjusting workloads when staff raise concerns about burnout.
Over time, consistent, visible action builds credibility with both customers and employees.
Acting on responses, however, is where many businesses fall short. Surveys such as Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Effort Score (CES) and Employee Engagement surveys all provide useful insight.
CSAT captures how people feel after individual interactions, NPS reflects long-term loyalty, CES measures ease of use, and engagement surveys reveal internal morale.
Turning survey data into competitive advantage might mean phoning a customer who gave a low score to understand what went wrong and fix it quickly.
It could be sharing engagement results with staff, discussing issues and concerns openly, and making visible changes to address concerns. Or simplifying processes when CES results show customers are frustrated.
The point is to show people that their feedback has led to improvements they can see and feel. Without that follow-through, surveys are just a box-ticking exercise.
Listening must also be embedded internally. Employees need structured, safe ways to raise issues and know their voices count. Weekly pulse surveys, whether anonymous or open, can provide valuable insights into how people experience their work.
Weekly meetings that review performance and use methods like Identify, Discuss, Solve (IDS) give staff a forum to raise concerns and see them resolved quickly.
Issues that can’t be addressed at one level must escalate upwards until they are solved.
When employees see their concerns raised, discussed and acted on, they know the organisation takes them seriously. Over time, this consistency creates a culture where people are willing to speak up, confident that their input will lead to action.
Testing your listening
Onboarding is a clear test of whether businesses listen effectively. Onboarding is one of the most critical moments in any business relationship.
Imagine a large client going through the process and facing repeated errors, billing mistakes, unclear handovers, missing documentation and delays. For your customer, these are early warning signs about competence and reliability.
Dismissing onboarding problems as minor teething issues erodes confidence before the relationship has even begun and increases the risk of churn and negative word-of-mouth. Instead, sit down with the client and walk through the journey step by step.
That way, the pain points become clear, and you can fix them quickly.
The fixes might be practical, such as tightening invoicing, streamlining handovers, improving documentation, and offering tailored support for high-value accounts, but the real impact is far more profound.
Acting on onboarding feedback strengthens the client relationship at a critical stage and sets higher standards across the organisation.
It is far cheaper to repair a relationship and retain a client through listening than to win back lost trust after the fact.
Onboarding is, in many ways, a litmus test for how seriously a business takes feedback. Companies that treat it as an opportunity to listen and improve send a clear message that they are committed to getting it right, and that their voice matters from day one.
That’s why we should not be fooled into thinking that listening is a soft skill. Listening means admitting when processes fail and using feedback to strengthen performance and improve communication.
By entrenching listening into your business strategy, you can adapt faster, build stronger relationships, earn long-term trust and create lasting value.