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Fierce listening and the limits of “active listening”

Mar 31, 2026 | Leadership, Inclusivity, Power, Trust

I came across the phrase “fierce listening” while reading Field Notes on Listening by Kit Dobson, a book a colleague recommended.

It stopped me in my tracks.

Not because it was familiar. It wasn’t. And not because it sounded polished or ready to be turned into a framework. It stopped me because it named something I’ve felt for a long time but hadn’t quite found words for.

I spend a lot of time in organizations thinking about communication. Internal communication, leadership messaging, change, trust, and the gap between what people say and what people experience. Listening sits at the centre of it all. We talk about it constantly. We say we value it. We build entire engagement strategies around it.

And still, people feel unheard.

That disconnect has been bothering me for years. This phrase sharpened it.

We’ve reduced listening to a behaviour

In most workplaces, listening gets framed as a skill. Usually, when people say they want leaders to listen better, they’re talking about active listening: paying attention, maintaining eye contact, not interrupting, reflecting back what someone said, and asking follow-up questions. None of these behaviours are meaningless, but they’re often treated as proof that listening has happened.

That’s where things start to get dodgy.

You can look attentive, validate someone’s perspective, and carry on exactly as planned. You can host a town hall, run a “listening session”, collect survey responses, and leave the underlying conditions untouched. At that point, listening starts to function more like optics than understanding.

A lot of what gets called listening at work is simply containment dressed up as care.

There’s another layer here, too. We’ve tied listening to a narrow set of visible cues, and those cues don’t reflect how attention actually works for everyone.

For many neurodivergent people, listening doesn’t look especially tidy. Some people focus better while moving, doodling, or working with their hands. Others avoid eye contact because it’s distracting or overwhelming. Some need time to process before they respond. Others may not respond in the moment at all, but are taking in far more than it appears.

I’m thinking here of someone I know who used to bring markers into meetings and create beautiful spiral drawings while listening. To some people, it probably looked like a distraction. In reality, it was part of how they stayed focused and present.

When we define listening by how it looks, we end up rewarding people who perform attention in familiar ways and misreading those who don’t. That’s one of the reasons active listening can fall short. It privileges a narrow version of engagement that doesn’t actually tell us whether someone has understood, processed, or will carry anything forward.

Fierce listening asks more of us

This is where the phrase started to open up for me. “Fierce listening” seems to point to something deeper than attentiveness. It carries a sense of responsibility.

It asks more of the listener. It asks what you’re willing to hear, what you’re willing to sit with, and what you’re willing to carry forward once something has been said. It asks whether anything changes as a result.

That’s a very different approach to listening.

In many organizations, the burden is placed on the speaker to be clear, calm, and constructive enough to be heard. Employees are expected to package hard truths in ways that are easy to receive. Fierce listening shifts more of that weight back where it belongs. It suggests that the harder work often sits with the person or institution holding power.

That feels like a much more honest place to start.

This idea has deeper roots

This isn’t a phrase I want to strip down and repurpose without context.

While “fierce listening” appears in contemporary writing, the idea stems from Indigenous ways of knowing and relational practice, where listening isn’t separate from responsibility, ethics, or community. Listening isn’t just about hearing words. It’s about understanding relationships, place, and what must be carried forward.

Indigenous scholars and knowledge holders describe listening as an embodied and relational act, one that involves the whole person, not just attention but spirit, memory, and accountability. As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes in As We Have Always Done, knowledge and understanding are inseparable from relationship, land, and lived practice.

There are also teachings and traditions that frame listening as a practice that requires setting aside one’s own assumptions and reactions to truly hear what is being shared. That alone challenges how quickly many organizations move to interpret, defend, explain, or respond.

I’m still learning here, and I want to be careful not to flatten something that carries this kind of depth into a leadership talking point. If anything, the value is in letting these perspectives challenge how limited our dominant models of listening have become.

Organizations are fluent in the appearance of listening

Most workplaces aren’t struggling to create opportunities for feedback. They’re struggling with what happens after.

There’s no shortage of mechanisms. Surveys, forums, open-door policies, consultations, engagement sessions, Q& A formats, advisory groups. Many of these are well-intentioned. Some are necessary. None of them, on their own, demonstrates that listening has occurred in any meaningful way.

Listening isn’t proven by asking. It’s proven by what changes.

And that’s where things often break down.

Because real listening surfaces things that are inconvenient. It surfaces gaps between stated values and lived experience. It surfaces capacity issues, unclear direction, misalignment, and harm that has been normalized over time. It surfaces things that can’t be solved with a better message or a more polished FAQ.

This is where communication often gets pulled in to fix what listening failed to address early enough.

Not always, but often.

This connects directly to quiet leadership

This also connects to something I wrote previously about quiet leadership.

In that piece, I argued that leadership is often misunderstood as visibility, volume, or certainty, when in reality, much of the work of leadership is quieter, slower, and less performative. It involves paying attention, creating space, and being willing to hold complexity without rushing to resolution.

Fierce listening sits directly inside that.

It doesn’t require someone to be loud or charismatic. It doesn’t depend on saying the right thing in the moment. It asks for patience, discernment, and the willingness to stay with what’s difficult rather than reach for control.

In that sense, fierce listening feels deeply connected to the kind of leadership many organizations say they want, but don’t always know how to recognize.

Internal communication reveals the gaps

This is one of the reasons internal communication work is so often underestimated. At its best, it isn’t about distribution. It isn’t about making messages clearer or more engaging. It’s about revealing where communication systems are out of alignment with lived experience.

When leaders say people matter, but decisions arrive without context, people notice. When organizations say they value transparency but information flows through informal channels rather than shared ones, people notice. When communication is fragmented across too many channels with no clear source of truth, confusion isn’t a failure of attention. It’s a failure of design.

Underneath all of that is listening.

Not whether information was shared, but whether insight was actually taken in and allowed to shape decisions, timing, sequencing, and leadership behaviour.

Fierce listening names that gap. It draws attention to the difference between collecting input and being changed by what you hear.

Listening isn’t neutral

We often treat listening as inherently positive, but it isn’t neutral.

Listening can be generous, but it can also be extractive. It can be used to gather information without any real intention of acting on it. It can be used to create the appearance of inclusion without shifting underlying conditions. It can be delayed, filtered, or selectively applied.

Over time, people notice the difference.

Research on organizational listening continues to show that many employees don’t feel genuinely listened to, and that this directly affects trust, engagement, and willingness to speak up. When people are repeatedly asked to share their experiences without seeing meaningful responses, listening stops functioning as care and becomes a source of erosion.

At that point, the issue is no longer communication; it’s credibility.

What I’m taking from this

I’m still early in this phase. I’m still reading, still thinking, still learning what it asks.

But I know this much. “Fierce listening” has more integrity to it than much of the language we’ve normalized around listening at work.

It doesn’t let the listener off the hook. It doesn’t confuse attention with accountability. And it doesn’t pretend that hearing someone is the same thing as honouring what they’ve said.

In a moment where many organizations are asking for trust they haven’t fully earned, that feels worth taking seriously.

Not as a concept to adopt, but as a standard to be measured against.

Further reading

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