How to Really Connect With Your Team
David Buirs is a leadership and executive coach based in Amsterdam. This article explains why most managers think they’re listening to their team while their team experiences it differently. You will read about the gap between reactive and real listening, what that gap costs you, and which concrete questions open up the conversation.
Your team has noticed something about you that you haven’t.
In most of the conversations you have with them, you’re not fully there. Not gone. Just somewhere behind your own eyes, three sentences ahead, ready with your answer. They feel it. Most of them won’t say it.
That’s the gap between thinking you connect with your team and actually doing it.
Two monologues pretending to be a conversation
In most workplace conversations, two people take turns talking about themselves.
Someone tells you something about a project. You wait politely until they’re done, then jump in with something similar from your own experience. Or worse, with a solution they hadn’t asked for. Or worse still, with the next agenda item you had ready before they walked in.
Everyone has talked. Everyone has the impression a conversation took place. Nobody has learned anything.
Why you think you’re listening when you’re not
Listening is a skill almost everyone thinks they’re good at. In practice, most managers listen mainly to respond. Actually understanding comes second, if it comes at all.
The difference is where your head is. With real listening, you’re with the other person. With reactive listening, you’re with your next sentence. With your judgment. With the solution. With how it fits into your schedule.
To you, both feel like listening. To the other person, only the first feels like being heard.
What it costs your team
People only bring problems to someone who actually listens.
If a team member tries three times to put a vague beginning of something in front of you, and you keep responding before they’re halfway through, they won’t try a fourth time. They’ll tell you when it’s too late. Or not at all.
Same goes for feedback about you. For doubts about a decision. For the real reason someone has quietly been putting less energy into the work over the past few weeks.
What a team doesn’t tell you is almost always the most important thing happening.
What listening actually is
Real listening is different from being quiet while someone else talks. Being quiet is waiting your turn. Listening is emptying your head and letting the other person in.
That doesn’t work when you’re thinking about three other things. That doesn’t work with a phone on the table. That doesn’t work when you have to be in the next meeting in two minutes.
It requires a kind of slowness most work environments don’t reward. But it’s the basic condition for everything that falls under leadership.
Questions that open up the conversation
A few questions I often give people:
What makes that important to you?
How did you end up there?
What would a good outcome look like for you?
What are you actually trying to say?
That last one is underrated. Someone comes to you with a long build-up. You feel something underneath it. Ask.
What happens when you practice this
In the beginning, not much. A conversation runs a little longer. Someone doesn’t consciously notice you’re different, but they tell you a bit more.
After a few months, something happens. People come to you with problems earlier. They’ve sensed somewhere, without consciously thinking about it, that it’s worth talking to you.
The senior person on your team starts pushing back at you. They used to do that only with peers. Now they do it with you too, which actually means you’re being seen for the first time as someone who can handle it.
Someone comes to you about workload pressure two weeks earlier than they normally would. That saves you a good employee.
What it asks of you
An uncomfortable amount of slow attention.
You’re not going to make it to your next meeting through your one-on-ones anymore. You’re going to have to let moments of silence stand without immediately filling them. You’re going to have to sit in something uncomfortable sometimes, without smoothing it over with a quick “yeah, got it, so what you can do is…”.
What you build over time is a kind of calm inside yourself. Techniques don’t get you there.
How you develop that calm internally is a different story. I wrote a separate piece about how to develop leadership presence from a quieter internal place. For this article, what counts is this: the decision to listen better, and the practice of it, does more than any communication course.
The leaders I work with through management coaching often struggle with exactly this. Their team describes them as solid communicators. The real work sits deeper. They have never learned how to actually be present in a conversation. For organizations that want this addressed across their leadership layer, leadership training offers the team version of the same principle.
