A few years ago, I was coaching a senior engineering director at a technology firm in Kuala Lumpur. He was brilliant — the kind of leader who could diagnose a system architecture problem in minutes and rattle off solutions before his team had finished explaining the issue. His technical instincts were exceptional. But his team was haemorrhaging talent. Three senior engineers had resigned in six months, and exit interviews all pointed to the same root cause: they did not feel heard.
When I sat in on one of his team meetings, the problem was immediately obvious. A team lead was explaining a deployment bottleneck, and within thirty seconds, the director had cut in with a solution. He did not ask clarifying questions. He did not acknowledge the frustration behind the words. He simply fixed. The team lead nodded politely, but I could see the energy drain from her face. She had not come to him for a fix — she had come to be understood.
This is a pattern I have seen repeatedly across two decades of coaching technology leaders in ASEAN. The higher people climb in an organisation, the more they believe their value lies in having answers. But here is the uncomfortable truth I have learned through facilitating hundreds of leadership sessions: the leaders who retain top talent, build the strongest teams, and navigate the most complex challenges are not the ones with the best answers. They are the ones who listen with genuine intent. Active listening is not a soft skill — it is the hardest, most strategically valuable capability a leader can develop.
The Communication Gap
Most leaders believe they are good listeners. In a survey I conducted informally across several coaching cohorts in Singapore and KL, over eighty per cent of leaders rated themselves as above-average listeners. Yet when I asked their direct reports the same question, the number dropped to below thirty per cent. That gap should alarm every leader reading this.
The problem is that most of us confuse hearing with listening. Hearing is passive — sound enters your ears and your brain processes it in the background while you formulate your response. Active listening is fundamentally different. It requires you to suspend your own agenda, resist the urge to solve, and focus entirely on understanding the other person’s meaning, emotion, and intent. It is an act of discipline, not personality.
In ASEAN business culture, this gap is amplified. Many team members — particularly in Malaysian, Indonesian, and Thai contexts — are culturally inclined towards indirect communication. They will not always tell you directly that there is a problem. They will hint. They will use softer language. They will say ‘maybe we can consider another approach’ when they mean ‘this approach is fundamentally flawed.’ If you are not listening at the deepest level, you will miss these signals entirely, and your decisions will be built on incomplete information.
The A.L.I.V.E. Framework for Active Listening
1. Attend — Give Full Physical and Mental Presence
The first step is deceptively simple: be fully present. Put your phone face down. Close your laptop lid. Turn your body towards the speaker. Make appropriate eye contact. These physical signals matter enormously because they communicate respect before you have said a single word.
I coached a CTO in Jakarta who had a habit of glancing at his smartwatch during one-on-ones. He did not even realise he was doing it. When I pointed it out, he was mortified. ‘I was just checking the time,’ he said. But his direct report had interpreted it as disinterest. Every glance at that watch was a micro-signal that said, ‘Something else is more important than what you are saying right now.’
Attending also means mental presence. This is where it gets difficult. When someone is talking, your brain naturally races ahead — anticipating where they are going, formulating your response, connecting their words to your own experiences. Active listening requires you to notice that mental drift and gently pull yourself back. A technique I recommend is to focus on the speaker’s words as if you will need to repeat them back verbatim. This anchors your attention to the present moment.
Try this in your next meeting. When a team member begins speaking, consciously set aside whatever you were thinking about. Take a breath. Focus your eyes on them. Notice their facial expressions and tone. You will be surprised how much more information you absorb when you are truly attending.
2. Listen for Emotion, Not Just Content
Most leaders are trained to listen for facts and data. What is the problem? What are the metrics? What is the timeline? But beneath every factual statement is an emotional current, and that current often carries the most important information.
Consider this example. A project manager comes to you and says, ‘The client has changed the requirements again. We will need to adjust the sprint plan.’ On the surface, this is a factual update. But listen to the tone. Is there frustration? Resignation? Anxiety about the team’s capacity? The factual content tells you what happened. The emotional content tells you what it means to this person and, often, what they actually need from you.
I once facilitated a session where a team lead in Singapore said to his manager, ‘It is fine, we can handle the extra workload.’ His words said one thing, but his voice was flat, his shoulders were tense, and he avoided eye contact. The manager, to his credit, paused and said, ‘I hear you saying it is fine, but I want to check — how is the team really feeling about this?’ That single question opened a conversation that revealed the team was on the verge of burnout. Without listening for emotion, the manager would have walked away thinking everything was under control.
Practice this by asking yourself two questions after someone speaks: What did they say? And how did they seem when they said it? If there is a mismatch between the words and the energy, that mismatch is where the real conversation lives.
3. Inquire with Genuine Curiosity
The questions you ask after listening reveal whether you were truly engaged or merely waiting for your turn to talk. Genuine inquiry is not about interrogating someone or steering the conversation towards your preferred solution. It is about deepening your understanding of their perspective.
Compare these two responses to a team member who says, ‘I am not sure this new process is working.’ Response A: ‘What do you mean it is not working? We spent three months designing it.’ Response B: ‘Tell me more about what you are experiencing. What specifically feels off?’ Response A is defensive and shuts down the conversation. Response B is curious and opens it up.
I have coached leaders to use what I call ‘curious questions’ — questions that start with ‘what’ or ‘how’ rather than ‘why.’ ‘Why’ questions can feel accusatory. ‘Why did you miss the deadline?’ triggers defensiveness. ‘What got in the way of hitting the deadline?’ invites honest reflection. This is a subtle but powerful shift that changes the entire dynamic of a conversation.
In one coaching session, a VP of engineering in KL practised this technique with his team lead. Instead of asking, ‘Why is the migration behind schedule?’, he asked, ‘What are the biggest obstacles your team is facing with the migration right now?’ The team lead opened up about a dependency on another team that had been blocking progress for weeks — something she had not previously raised because she was afraid it would sound like an excuse. That single curious question uncovered the real bottleneck.
4. Validate Before You Respond
Validation is the step most leaders skip, and it is arguably the most important. Before you offer your perspective, solution, or feedback, take a moment to reflect back what you have heard. This serves two purposes: it confirms that you understood correctly, and it makes the other person feel genuinely heard.
Validation does not mean agreement. You can validate someone’s experience without agreeing with their conclusion. For example: ‘It sounds like you are feeling overwhelmed by the volume of client requests and that the current prioritisation framework is not giving you enough clarity. Is that right?’ You have not agreed that the framework is broken. You have simply demonstrated that you understood the concern.
I worked with a managing director in Singapore who started every response to his team with validation statements. Within three months, his team engagement scores went up significantly. When I asked his team what had changed, one engineer said, ‘He actually gets it now. He understands what we are dealing with before he starts talking about solutions.’ The irony was that his solutions had not changed much. What changed was that people trusted his solutions more because they believed he understood the problem.
5. Engage — Respond Thoughtfully, Not Reactively
The final step is to respond — but to respond in a way that builds on what you have heard rather than redirecting the conversation to your own agenda. This means referencing what the speaker said, connecting your response to their concerns, and being transparent about your thought process.
Instead of saying, ‘Here is what we are going to do,’ try, ‘Based on what you have shared about the team’s capacity concerns, here is what I am thinking — and I want your input.’ This small shift transforms your response from a directive into a collaboration. The speaker feels that their input shaped the outcome, which increases buy-in and trust.
A leader I coached in Penang adopted this approach and told me, ‘The quality of my decisions has not changed, but the speed of execution has improved dramatically. When people feel heard, they commit to the plan instead of quietly resisting it.’ That is the strategic value of active listening — it does not just build relationships, it accelerates results.
The most powerful thing a leader can do in any conversation is to make the other person feel genuinely understood before offering a single word of advice.
How to Practice This Week
Choose three conversations this week — ideally one-on-ones with direct reports — and commit to practising the A.L.I.V.E. framework. Before each conversation, set an intention: ‘I will listen to understand, not to respond.’ During the conversation, resist the urge to offer solutions for the first five minutes. Simply attend, listen for emotion, inquire with curiosity, and validate. Notice what happens when you create that space. After each conversation, jot down one thing you learned that you would have missed if you had been in ‘solution mode.’ By the end of the week, you will have concrete evidence of how much richer your understanding becomes when you truly listen.
Key Takeaway
Active listening is not about being patient or polite — it is a strategic leadership discipline that unlocks better decisions, stronger teams, and faster execution. When your people feel heard, they bring you better information, commit more deeply to shared goals, and trust your leadership even through difficult times. In the high-context, relationship-driven business cultures of ASEAN, this skill is not optional — it is foundational.
Ready to Transform Your Communication?
If you recognise yourself in any of these patterns — the urge to solve before understanding, the habit of half-listening while formulating your response — you are not alone, and the good news is that active listening is a skill that can be developed with deliberate practice. Our Active Listening & Empathetic Communication workshop at Being Specific gives leaders a structured environment to practise these techniques with real-time coaching and feedback. Visit being-specific.com/contact to learn more and reserve your place.
