The listening trap: when hearing isn’t helping

23 June 2025 Reading Time: 4 minutes

by Sharon O’Dea:

These days, no corporate transformation is complete without a round of “listening.” Leaders proudly announce the number of sessions held, as if volume equals value. Pulse surveys, anonymous Q&As, and slick town halls are deployed with fanfare. The message is clear: We hear you.

But what if all this listening isn’t helping?

What if it’s become a ritual—repeated, revered, and ultimately hollow? In many organisations, listening has morphed into performance: a way to signal virtue, defuse dissent, and delay decisions. It’s less a path to action than a proxy for it. And in doing so, it risks becoming part of the problem.

This piece explores how listening, once a tool for inclusion and insight, has been co-opted into a corporate comfort blanket—one that muffles urgency and maintains the status quo.

The performance of listening

Listening has become theatre. It’s not just something leaders do—it’s something they stage. The choreography is familiar: a town hall with pre-approved questions, a pulse survey that offers five shades of beige, a feedback form that promises anonymity but delivers ambiguity. The more channels we use to “listen,” the more we mistake data collection for caring.

The number of listening sessions becomes a badge of honour, as if quantity alone signals empathy. But when listening becomes a metric, it stops being about understanding and starts being a performance of virtue. Look how much we listened becomes the goal, conveniently replacing Look what we changed.

This performative listening creates a façade of inclusion. People are invited to speak, but rarely empowered to shape. Feedback is gathered, but seldom acted on. And when everything stays exactly the same, the message is loud and clear: We heard you. We’re just not doing anything about it.

As Jeff Yip and Colin Fisher note in Harvard Business Review, creating space for people to speak isn’t the same as listening. True listening demands responsiveness—and follow-through.

Listening as fetish

In many organisations, listening has drifted from being useful to being symbolic. It’s no longer just a way to gather insight—it’s become a fetish object. Repeated obsessively, venerated unquestioningly, and rarely linked to outcomes, it’s treated as inherently good regardless of what follows.

This shows up in the reverence for feedback rituals: quarterly surveys, “Ask Me Anything” sessions, open-door policies that are more symbolic than functional. These practices exist because they look good, not because they work. Not doing them would feel wrong. Doing them badly, apparently, is fine.

When listening becomes sacred, it becomes untouchable. Leaders point to the presence of mechanisms—Look, we have a form!—as though that proves responsiveness. It’s a kind of magical thinking: if we just listen hard enough, the problems will fix themselves.

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argued that in postmodern society, rituals often serve less to achieve tangible goals than to signal belonging and provide reassurance in an otherwise fragmented world. Corporate listening, viewed this way, isn’t about change. It’s about reassurance. You’ve been heard becomes the message—even when nothing is different.

The consequences of performative listening

When listening becomes ritual, not response, the cultural impact is corrosive. People quickly learn the difference between being heard and being heeded. And when feedback disappears into the void, cynicism rushes in to fill the space.

The result is disengagement—not from apathy, but from experience. People stop contributing because they’ve learned it doesn’t make a difference. The very tools meant to foster inclusion end up reinforcing alienation. A survey with no follow-up becomes a monument to futility. A town hall with no answers becomes a stage play of managerial anxiety.

Worse, performative listening undermines trust. When leaders ask for input and then do nothing, it signals that participation is cosmetic. Your voice is welcome; your influence is not.

And nowhere is this clearer than in the overuse—and misuse—of focus groups. They appear interactive and inclusive, but more often serve as a corporate fig leaf: a way to say “we listened” without having to do anything uncomfortable. Run by HR or Comms, filled with safe questions and safer answers, they tend to confirm what leaders already believe. Insight isn’t what emerges—it’s what’s selected, sanitised, and slotted into a slide deck. Employees know this. They’ve sat through the sessions. They’ve seen nothing change.

This doesn’t just dent morale—it stifles progress. Organisations that confuse listening with action collect insight but never convert it into change. They soothe critique without addressing its cause. And in doing so, they preserve the very power structures that listening was meant to challenge.

When listening fatigues rather than fuels

A Harvard Business Review study found that French workers who regularly offered feedback and suggestions reported greater mental fatigue and cognitive strain. The more proactive they were, the worse their performance became.

The lesson: if you ask for input but provide no support or mandate to act, you create frustration, not progress. Employees are encouraged to speak up, but not empowered to follow through. The result is feedback fatigue—where the burden of change rests on those with the least power to enact it.

Listening without redistribution of power isn’t just ineffective. It’s extractive.

A better way forward

So what now? Should we stop listening altogether? Of course not. But we should stop pretending that listening is the point. It isn’t.

If performative listening is the trap, structural responsiveness is the way out.

This doesn’t mean listening less. It means listening differently. Not as an end in itself, but as a means to transformation. That means moving from extractive listening—gathering input to tick a box—to generative listening that leads to change.

Some shifts to consider:

• Fewer surveys, more co-design: Let people help shape the questions—not just tick the boxes.
• Close the loop: Be explicit about what’s been heard, what’s changing, and what won’t
• Decentralise action: Give teams the autonomy to act on what they know
• Read the silence: If no one’s saying anything, that’s probably worth investigating.

Organisations that build trust aren’t the ones who listen the most. They’re the ones who respond with something meaningful.

We’ve heard enough

Listening has become the corporate comfort blanket—wrapped around every change programme, every crisis response, every transformation. But comfort isn’t the same as courage. And hearing isn’t the same as helping.

When listening becomes ritual, it soothes, it signals, it stalls. But it doesn’t shift systems. And in organisations crying out for responsiveness, equity, and courage, that’s not good enough.

At some point, you’ve got to put the clipboard down and do something. Listening should never be the final act—it should be the opening scene.

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Sharon O’Dea is a digital workplace expert and co-founder of Lithos Partners, helping complex organisations design intranets and communications that actually work.

Written by: Editor