Can you really listen as a CEO? The difference between hearing, understanding and acting

Hans Smellinckx
13 hours ago
3 min read

Intro

If you ask most CEOs whether they listen to their people, the answer is always:

“Of course. My door is always open.”

But when you talk to employees, managers or even customers in those same SMEs and scale-ups in Belgium or the Netherlands, you often hear a very different story:

“We say things, but nothing changes.”
“They’ve already decided before they ask.”
“We only get questions when something goes wrong.”

In “100 Days to Make Your Mark as a CEO”, I treat listening as a strategic instrument. It’s how you calibrate your picture of reality in your first 100 days – and beyond.

Why listening is a strategic CEO skill

As CEO, you are always making decisions with incomplete information.

You can:

rely mostly on reports and dashboards,
or use your first 100 days to listen deeply to the people who live the reality every day.

Good listening:

reduces blind spots,
builds trust,
reveals where your strategy will hit resistance,
and surfaces ideas and risks you will never see from a spreadsheet.

In a SME or scale-up context, where the distance between CEO and teams is often small, your listening behaviour has a huge impact on culture.

The three levels of listening

1. Hearing: passive, polite, but limited

Signs you’re only hearing:

you already know what you want to say while the other is still talking,
you mainly pick up points that confirm what you think,
meetings end with “OK, thanks for sharing” and nothing more.

People walk away thinking:

“I said my thing. It doesn’t matter anyway.”

2. Understanding: curious, open, probing

Understanding starts when you genuinely want to see the world through the other person’s eyes.

You ask questions like:

“Can you walk me through what happens on a bad day?”
“What are we underestimating from your perspective?”
“If you were in my role, what would you do here?”

You listen not only for content, but also for:

emotions (frustration, fear, pride),
patterns (recurring obstacles),
contradictions between your image and their reality.

People walk away thinking:

“They really tried to understand what it’s like for us.”

3. Acting: visible follow-up and decisions

Listening becomes powerful when it leads to visible action.

That doesn’t mean you say yes to everything. It means you:

summarise what you heard (“I heard 3 main points…”),
communicate what you will do with it:
- “We will change X by Y date.”
- “We won’t change Z now, and here is why.”
- “We’ll explore this in more depth with this person/team.”

People walk away thinking:

“I see what happens with my input,even if it’s not always the answer I wanted.”

This is where trust grows.

Using your first 100 days as a listening engine

In “100 Days to Make Your Mark as a CEO”, I suggest using the early phase of your 100 days – especially days 1–30 – as a listening tour.

For a CEO in Belgium or the Netherlands, that could include:

1:1 conversations with each member of your management team;
small group sessions with frontline staff (sales, support, operations);
key customers in your core segments;
strategic partners or suppliers.

A few practical tips:

No slides.Keep these meetings conversational.
Ask consistent questions.So you can compare answers across groups.
Capture themes, not every detail.You’re looking for patterns and systemic issues.
Circle back.Share what you heard in a townhall or memo:“Here are the 5 themes I heard most often, and here is how we’ll address them.”