The Smartest Person in the Room Is Often the One Who Listens Best

Six memorable communication and listening principles for leaders, meetings, workshops and difficult conversations

Whenever I lead a group session or give an on-stage presentation, there is usually at least one person who catches my attention before they have even said a word.

You probably know the type. Their posture is slightly closed, their eyes are alert and they seem to be carefully examining every sentence for the one detail that may not be entirely correct. While most people are trying to understand where the story is going, this person appears to be preparing a case for the prosecution.

Sometimes it is the smartest boy in the class. Sometimes it is the smartest girl. Quite often, it is simply someone who wants the rest of the room to notice how intelligent they are.

There is nothing wrong with critical thinking. In fact, I would rather speak to a room full of independent thinkers than to seven hundred people who politely agree with everything I say. A group in which nobody challenges anything is not a workshop. It is a fan club, and fan clubs rarely produce better ideas or decisions.

The problem begins when critical thinking turns into critical listening. When somebody is no longer listening to understand, explore or learn, but only to find the sentence they can attack. At that point, intelligence no longer opens the conversation. It closes it.

The man in Moscow who already knew the answer

A few years ago, I was invited to Moscow as a keynote speaker at an event attended by around seven hundred entrepreneurs. I spoke about fear in entrepreneurship, how fear influences our decisions and how entrepreneurs can learn to manage it or even use it as valuable information.

The response was warm. There was loud applause, people came up to me afterwards and I later received the highest rating of all thirty speakers at the event.

But that room also had its one person.

During the final question-and-answer session, a man stood up and told me that I had presented an interesting theory, but that it would never work in Russia. Russian culture was different, he explained, and therefore the practical ideas I had shared simply could not be applied there.

It was not really a question. It was a conclusion that had managed to enter the question-and-answer session without wearing the appropriate clothing.

He had every right to disagree with me. Perhaps he even had a legitimate point about cultural differences. Advice that works in Amsterdam, London or Barcelona cannot always be copied unchanged into a Russian business environment. Culture influences how people experience leadership, authority, vulnerability, failure and fear.

But that was precisely why his response was such a missed opportunity. He did not ask which parts of the approach might need to be adapted. He did not explain which aspects of Russian business culture would make the principles difficult to apply. He did not explore whether I had encountered similar resistance in other countries.

He simply declared that it would never work.

The door was closed before anyone had examined what might be behind it.

Several hundred people in the audience looked visibly irritated. Not because he disagreed with me, but because his certainty undermined a conversation from which everyone might have learned something. His contribution did not create greater understanding of Russian entrepreneurship, fear or culture. It mainly showed that he had already reached his conclusion.

That is an expensive habit for any entrepreneur or leader. Markets change, people surprise us, technology develops and circumstances shift. If you listen only for confirmation of what you already believe, experience slowly becomes a prison built from yesterday’s knowledge.

There is an enormous difference between listening for what is wrong and listening for what might be useful.

Research into intellectual humility and responses to disagreement found that people with greater intellectual humility show more interest in opposing perspectives. That does not mean they have weak opinions or change their minds whenever somebody raises an eyebrow. It means they understand that being confident and possessing the complete truth are not necessarily the same thing.

The smartest person in the room is therefore not always the one who finds the first flaw. Quite often, it is the person who can remain open long enough to understand what is actually being said.

That is why I use six simple communication and listening principles.

Six communication and listening principles

The acronyms make the principles easy to remember, but the ideas behind them are serious. Together, they help you enter a conversation with the right attitude, listen more accurately, recognise your own assumptions, challenge someone without unnecessarily undermining them and bring out more of what another person has to offer.

They are not a script. The moment a communication model becomes more important than the human being sitting in front of you, it starts working against you. These principles are reminders of what to pay attention to while having a real conversation.

1. Be an OAK

Open

Authentic

Keen to learn

An oak stands firmly without needing to fight every gust of wind. That is also a useful starting point for communication. You can have experience, values and a strong opinion while still remaining open to information you do not yet possess.

Being open does not mean being gullible. Being authentic does not mean saying every thought that enters your head, and being keen to learn does not require you to pretend that every idea is brilliant. It means entering a conversation with enough confidence to admit that you may not yet see the complete picture.

The difference becomes clear when you compare two responses:

“That will never work here.”

“I cannot yet see how that would work here. What am I missing?”

The second response is not softer or less critical. It is more intelligent because it keeps both critical thinking and learning alive. It communicates a genuine concern without pretending that the concern is already proof.

OAK is particularly important for experienced entrepreneurs and leaders. The longer you have worked in a field, the more patterns you recognise and the faster you can judge a situation. That experience is enormously valuable, but it also brings a risk. You may stop looking because the situation resembles something you have seen before.

Experience helps you see faster. Sometimes it also makes you stop seeing too soon.

I wrote about this tension more extensively in Curiosity: Why We Would Rather Be Right Than Ask Questions. Curiosity is not about blindly believing what another person says. It is about remaining interested long enough to discover whether your first conclusion was complete.

Before entering an important meeting, workshop or difficult conversation, ask yourself: what could I learn here, even if I ultimately continue to disagree?

That question alone can change the way you listen.

2. Use LSD

Listen

Summarise

Dig deeper

This is the only form of LSD I routinely recommend in a boardroom.

Most people believe they listen because they remain silent while somebody else speaks. Silence certainly helps, but it is not proof of listening. You can sit completely still while internally preparing your rebuttal, thinking about an email you forgot to send or wondering why the other person has already used the phrase “low-hanging fruit” four times.

Real listening requires more than waiting politely for your next opportunity to talk.

First, listen to what is being said, but also try to understand what matters underneath the words. What is this person trying to solve, explain, protect or prevent? Is the stated objection really about the proposal, or is there a deeper concern about responsibility, control, recognition, money or trust?

Then summarise what you believe you have heard. You might say:

“If I understand you correctly, you are not against the plan itself. You are worried that we are moving too quickly and that the team is not ready. Is that what you mean?”

A good summary is not a trick designed to corner someone. It is a check. It gives the other person an opportunity to say, “Yes, exactly,” but also, and often more usefully, “No, that is not quite what I mean.”

Only then do you dig deeper. You ask what makes that particular concern so important, whether the person can give an example or what would need to change before they could support the proposal. Sometimes the most useful question is simply: “What have I not asked you yet?”

This connects with something I describe in Why Communication Fails: Meaning, Listening and Being Truly Understood. Communication is not proven by what you said. It is proven by what the other person understood. LSD also turns that around: listening is not proven by your silence. It is proven by whether you have accurately understood the meaning behind someone else’s words.

Summarising before responding may feel slower, but it often prevents twenty minutes of discussion about something the other person never meant in the first place.

3. Remember VERA

Verify

Explore

Request clarity

Avoid assumptions

Human beings are remarkably good at filling in missing information. Unfortunately, we usually fill the empty spaces with material from our own history, fears, preferences and expectations.

A colleague says, “I am not convinced,” and we hear, “Your plan is poor.”

An employee asks whether a deadline is realistic, and we conclude that they are resistant to change.

A business partner becomes quiet during a meeting, and before they have said another word, we have created an entire explanation involving disagreement, irritation and possibly betrayal.

Sometimes our interpretation is correct. That is precisely what makes assumptions so convincing. They are accurate often enough to feel like facts, but inaccurate often enough to damage communication.

VERA slows this process down. You verify what you believe you heard, explore what the other person means, request clarity when words are vague and avoid treating your interpretation as reality until you have enough information.

This is important because confirmation bias influences how we select and interpret information. Once we suspect that someone does not support us, we start noticing the sigh, the critical question and the moment they looked away. We are less likely to notice that they complimented the idea five minutes earlier or that their concern only relates to the timing.

We begin with a suspicion, selectively collect evidence and finish with the satisfying conclusion that we were right all along.

Instead of saying, “You clearly do not trust the team,” VERA encourages you to ask: “When you say the team is not ready, what specifically have you seen that concerns you?”

The difference may appear small, but the first sentence defines another person’s reality for them. The second invites them to explain it.

Asking what someone actually means is also the beginning of finding the question behind the question. People do not always immediately express what is really troubling them. Sometimes they cannot yet find the words. Sometimes they are testing whether it is safe to say more. Sometimes they are talking about the deadline while the real issue is whether they still feel included in the decision.

Clarity is usually less dramatic than assumption, but it is considerably more useful.

4. Leave your BAG at the door

Biases

Advice

Guesses

We all bring a BAG into a conversation. It contains our biases, the advice we are eager to give and the guesses we have quietly promoted to facts.

You cannot become completely unbiased by reading an acronym on a poster. If personal development were that efficient, the coaching profession would be in serious trouble. But you can become more aware of what you are carrying and prevent it from determining the entire conversation.

Biases influence which information we notice and which explanations immediately feel credible. Advice makes us solve a problem before we fully understand it, while guesses fill the spaces where better questions should have been.

Premature advice is particularly common among leaders, consultants and coaches because helping and solving are part of the job. When somebody shares a problem, experience quickly begins searching for an answer. Sometimes that is exactly what the other person needs. At other times, advice answers a question they never asked or solves only the most visible part of a much deeper problem.

It can also communicate something you did not intend: I am more interested in showing you that I know the answer than in understanding what you are experiencing.

Before responding, it helps to distinguish three things. What do I actually know? What am I currently assuming? And has this person asked for advice, a different perspective or simply enough attention to organise their own thoughts?

Leaving your BAG at the door does not mean abandoning your expertise. It means putting your mental luggage down long enough to see what is already in the room.

This matters even more when there is disagreement. As I explain in Why Facts Don’t Change Minds: The Harder You Argue, the Less They Listen, we rarely approach information as neutral observers. We are extremely talented at finding arguments, facts and experts that support what we already wanted to believe. We sometimes think we are investigating, while in reality we are shopping.

Your BAG does not only contain assumptions about the other person. It also contains the story you are already telling yourself about why you must be right.

5. Show CARE

Curious

Authentic

Receptive

Engaged

OAK and CARE may initially appear similar because both involve openness and authenticity, but they operate at different levels. OAK describes the attitude with which you enter a conversation. CARE describes how your presence is experienced by the person sitting opposite you.

You can ask technically perfect questions and still make someone feel interrogated. You can repeat their words accurately while your tone, facial expression and impatience communicate that you would rather be somewhere else. Communication is never only about the method you use. It is also about the emotional climate you create while using it.

Showing CARE means being genuinely curious about the answer, honest in your response, receptive to information that changes the picture and visibly engaged in what is happening. It means putting away your phone, allowing the other person to finish and responding to the point they actually made instead of the point you had already prepared to answer.

For leaders, this is closely connected to psychological safety. Amy Edmondson’s work at Harvard Business School shows why people need to feel able to raise questions, concerns, mistakes and ideas without unnecessary fear of humiliation or punishment. Psychological safety is sometimes misunderstood as creating a permanently pleasant atmosphere in which nobody can be challenged. It actually supports more honesty, not less. Teams need psychological safety to have candid and productive conversations, especially when the work is complex and people depend on one another.

CARE does not mean you must agree with everything. It means disagreement does not require you to make the other person smaller.

A leader can say, “I do not agree with your conclusion, but I want to understand how you reached it.” That sentence preserves both clarity and connection. It allows a serious difference of opinion without turning the conversation into a contest in which only one person is allowed to retain their dignity.

People rarely offer their best thinking to someone who appears to be waiting for them to stop talking.

6. See the STAR

Strengths

Talents

Abilities

Resources

Many conversations inside organisations are organised almost entirely around deficiencies. What went wrong? Who failed? Which skill is missing? Why is progress too slow? Who has not delivered what was promised?

Those questions sometimes need to be asked. Leadership is not the art of complimenting a sinking ship on its attractive deckchairs. Problems require honesty, responsibility and sometimes confrontation.

But if you only look for deficiencies, you miss the material from which solutions can be built.

STAR asks you to look for the strengths, talents, abilities and resources already present in a person, team or organisation.

What works when these people are at their best?

When have they handled a similar situation successfully?

Which capability has not yet been used?

Who possesses experience that has not been invited into the conversation?

What trust, knowledge, creativity, relationships or resilience can the group draw upon?

This is not about positive thinking or pretending that weaknesses do not exist. It is about preventing the problem from becoming the only interesting thing in the room.

Research into strengths-based leadership and work engagement suggests that helping employees recognise and use their strengths can support engagement and performance. That makes sense. People generally contribute more when they are not treated as a collection of shortcomings waiting to be repaired.

A manager who looks mainly at deficiencies may ask, “Why can’t this team handle change?”

A STAR-oriented leader asks, “When has this team adapted well before, and what was different then?”

Both questions address the same problem, but the second one begins searching for something that can actually help solve it.

Seeing the STAR in someone does not mean ignoring poor behaviour or weak performance. It means recognising that lasting improvement is rarely built solely from criticism. People need to understand what must change, but they also need to see what they can use to make that change possible.

What the man in Moscow could have asked

Let us return to the man in Moscow. He may have had a serious cultural objection and I may not have sufficiently addressed it during my presentation. The point is not that he should have accepted everything I said because the rest of the audience applauded. Seven hundred people agreeing with something does not automatically make it true.

But instead of declaring that my approach could never work in Russia, he might have asked:

“Which part of your approach would need to change before it could work within Russian business culture?”

That question would still have challenged me. It might have exposed a weakness in my thinking or forced me to make the practical application clearer. Perhaps someone else in the room could have contributed an example I had not considered.

His criticism would not have disappeared, but it would have developed into something from which everyone could learn.

That is the difference these six principles can make. They do not remove disagreement, criticism or difficult questions. They improve their quality.

Sometimes people confuse good listening with being nice, passive or agreeable. It is none of those things. Good listening allows you to disagree more precisely because you first understand what you are disagreeing with. It also helps prevent the kind of conversation in which two people spend half an hour defending themselves against statements neither of them actually made.

A strong communicator does not avoid conflict. They make the conflict more honest, more accurate and more useful. That is also the difference between assertiveness and aggression in leadership. Assertiveness communicates a position clearly. Aggression needs the other person to submit.

How to use the six principles in a real conversation

You do not have to recite all six acronyms before every meeting. That might improve your listening while raising understandable concerns about your wellbeing.

The principles work best as a natural sequence. Before the conversation begins, try to be an OAK and put down your BAG. Enter with the intention to learn something and recognise the assumptions, advice and conclusions you are already carrying.

During the conversation, show CARE and use LSD. Be genuinely present, listen to what is said, summarise what you believe you heard and ask the next question that helps the conversation go deeper.

When confusion, irritation or tension appears, remember VERA. Verify your interpretation before reacting to it. Explore what the other person means and request clarity about words that can be understood in different ways.

When the conversation needs to move towards a solution, look for the STAR. Do not only identify what is missing or going wrong. Search for the strengths, talents, abilities and resources that can help create movement.

This approach works in board meetings, workshops, coaching conversations, performance reviews, presentations and conflicts between business partners. It also works at home, where assumptions can become even more powerful because we think we already know the person sitting opposite us.

The context changes, but our human tendency to interrupt, assume, defend and advise too quickly remains remarkably consistent.

The smartest person does not need to prove it

The smartest person in the room is not necessarily the one who finds the first flaw, speaks the longest or uses a question mark to hide a small speech.

It is often the person who can hold a clear point of view without closing the conversation. Someone who listens carefully enough to discover what others have missed, including what they themselves may have missed. Someone who can challenge an idea without needing to humiliate its owner and who is curious enough to allow a good answer to change their mind.

Before your next meeting, presentation or difficult conversation, ask yourself:

Am I listening to prove what I already know, or am I listening to discover something I do not?

That small difference can change the quality of a conversation. Sometimes it can change the quality of a decision, a team, a business partnership or a relationship.

If you are preparing for a difficult conversation, dealing with a leadership challenge or trying to understand why communication keeps getting stuck, you can read more about my approach to executive coaching for entrepreneurs, founders and leaders. You can also use AI Ben as a conversation partner to examine your assumptions, sharpen your questions and organise your thoughts before entering the real conversation.

Frequently asked questions about listening and communication

What are the six communication and listening principles?

The six principles are Be an OAK, Use LSD, Remember VERA, Leave your BAG at the door, Show CARE and See the STAR. Together, they encourage openness, active listening, clarification, awareness of bias, genuine engagement and a strengths-based approach to communication.

What is the difference between hearing and active listening?

Hearing means receiving sound and recognising words. Active listening means deliberately trying to understand the speaker’s message, intention and underlying concern. It normally involves giving full attention, summarising what you heard and asking questions that clarify or deepen the conversation.

Does good listening mean agreeing with the other person?

No. Listening means accurately understanding a perspective before accepting, rejecting or challenging it. You can listen respectfully, ask sincere questions and still reach a completely different conclusion. In fact, understanding the other person usually makes your disagreement more precise.

How can leaders listen better during meetings?

Leaders can improve listening by delaying advice, asking open questions, summarising before responding and verifying assumptions. They also need to create enough psychological safety for employees to raise concerns, admit mistakes and disagree without automatically fearing humiliation or punishment.

Why are assumptions dangerous in communication?

Assumptions replace missing information with our own interpretation. Because confirmation bias makes us notice information that supports what we already believe, an untested assumption can quickly begin to feel like a proven fact. Verification and clarification interrupt that process.

How do you disagree without undermining a group conversation?

Explain what concerns you without immediately presenting your conclusion as the only possible truth. Ask what you may be missing, identify the specific part you disagree with and explore whether different conditions would change the outcome. Constructive disagreement adds information to the conversation. Undermining behaviour mainly adds a verdict.

How can I prepare for a difficult conversation?

Write down what you know, what you assume and what you hope the conversation will achieve. Prepare two or three genuine questions and consider which of your own emotions, biases or expectations might influence how you listen. The purpose is not to script the entire conversation, but to enter it with greater clarity.