Julian Treasure On The Listening Gap Most Leaders Have

Julian Treasure has given five TED talks on listening, watched more than 170 million times, and they all return to the same uncomfortable point: most of us believe we’re good listeners, and most of us aren’t.

In this episode of The Connection Experiment, Julian and Nathalie explore what that listening gap costs us — an estimated $1.2 trillion a year in the U.S. alone, and something harder to measure: a world where disagreement reads as a threat instead of a difference of opinion. Every school teaches reading and writing; Julian can’t name a single country that also teaches listening, and it shows — only 1 in 12 employees rate their leader as a genuinely good listener.

His answer is the RASA method — receive, appreciate, summarize, ask — and an even simpler place to start: two words, “tell me more,” which do more to make someone feel heard than almost anything else you can say. Along the way they get into silence and why it makes us so uncomfortable, the “right or wrong” thinking that quietly destroys real listening, and what it would take to teach the next generation to listen instead of scroll.

Connect with Julian Treasure on LinkedIn and Nathalie Blais on LinkedIn. Ready to build this kind of listening into your own practice? Learn more at Canada Coach Academy.