The practice of truly listening, of engaging actively, empathetically, and openly with the team — and of demonstrating this practice with intentionality — is an incredibly powerful leadership tool. But as with all powerful tools, it can be wielded irresponsibly, or even maliciously.
I once attended a management training seminar in which, for one of the exercises, we were split into groups of three and asked to role-play a particular scenario.
One person would play the role of an employee who felt they had been passed over for recognition or promotion, one would play the role of their manager fielding the grievance, and the third would be an observer taking notes about the exchange.
Randomly, I was assigned the role of manager. We were given a sheet of paper outlining the scenario, including a little history of each character, and then we launched into play-acting a meeting.
Now, I’ve always taken manager training seriously, and I’ve tried to make the time invested into it valuable. It must be said, though, that I have a bit of a cynical streak. But I try really hard to shut that down in these sorts of situations because, I figure, why bother doing it if I’m just going to be snarky about it?
As I faced this particular exercise, I was having some trouble. The setup just seemed too contrived and abstract, the notion of role-playing just too…awkward.
And then, as it turned out, we quickly got into a pretty damn authentic conversation. I began to realize that I had been on both sides of this sort of conversation, and I think the person playing the employee was tapping into similar experiences.
The thing that I had thought would be weirdest — that we were handed this random scenario with no larger context and no sense even of what the job in question was — actually worked precisely to purpose. It got us to experience the interaction directly, without all the baggage of expertise or specificity.1
So we finished the exercise, and it seemed like we had both gotten something out of it. But it really had developed into an intense conversation, and I for one was relieved to be done. The facilitator asked the room for volunteers to discuss any insights from the exercise.
To my surprise, the person in my group playing the employee raised their hand.
They said that they felt like I had really listened and understood them, that I had demonstrated care for their concerns, that I had patiently explained why the situation was the way it was — and yet they felt that I had assured them that with some clear, actionable steps, they could work their way to a better outcome.
My head swelled a little. Did I do that? Damn right I did. I’m good.
The facilitator then asked the person who was the observer in our group if they had had a similar reaction. They scoffed and frowned, head shaking, “Not at all!”
They explained that they were extremely surprised to hear the good feedback. Turning to me they said, “You didn’t tell them anything! You just did some ‘manager judo’ or something and flipped it all back around.”
To which the other person (the employee) replied, “Yeah! That’s exactly what it was like! It was really effective!” That got a good laugh out of the room and the facilitator, but left me, actually, quite confused.
I later followed up with several different folks on my team. I grabbed one of my most trusted reports, an individual who — I was pretty sure — thought that I was a good manager. I straight up asked them, “Do you think I practice something like ‘manager judo’?” They laughed and without missing a beat said, “Yeah, you’re a black belt!”
Judo-ception
I don’t think I’d ever heard the term “manager judo” before, and I don’t seem to find it in the literature. There are “judo strategies” discussed for organizations, but it doesn’t seem to really be a thing in interpersonal management or team leadership.2
So perhaps I coined it. (Or, I should say, perhaps that other management training seminar participant coined it…but they’re not writing a Substack post and I am. So there.)
Judo, the actual practice, is complex, with a rich history, cultural significance, and international presence. It’s an enormous understatement to say that I’m no expert on martial arts, so I’m ignoring all that and going with the vibes.
That is to say, to me, judo evokes a defensive hand-to-hand sporting combat technique that favors using an opponent’s energy against them. Say they take a swing at you, putting all their weight behind it — you step out of the way, grab their arm, and use their own momentum to drop them. Judo!
Is that what judo is? Well, I deeply researched it (read: I looked at the Wikipedia page) and it’s not not that. Look, I don’t mean any disrespect for this practice, I’m just grabbing onto the energy of the idiomatic use of the word and applying it to team leadership and management for my own purposes. See what I did there? Judo-ception.
In any event, this is what the observer’s critique in the seminar was getting at. That instead of solving the problems the employee was presenting to me, I’d somehow used the energy of their dissatisfaction against them, pinning them down with their own relief at finally being able to say their piece to their manager…without me having to exert any real energy at all. The observer felt that the situation for the employee hadn’t meaningfully changed — except they’d taken their swing at the boss, and ended up on the mat.
People like being listened to! But even more so, they like feeling heard.
Notwithstanding this extended analogy, I honestly don’t think of team leadership or management as combat sports.3 We are not pitted against each other, manager and team. Ideally, we’re all working together, right? We’re on the same side!
I’ve always thought of myself as practicing — or at least aspiring to practice — servant leadership (overplayed as that phrase may be).
I don’t think of servant leadership as “leading from behind,” as some might have it. Rather, I understand it as an approach to leadership and management which, among other things, is dedicated to supporting and enabling the team to accomplish their goals.
It’s about developing those goals in conversation with the team, about sharing opportunity, providing resources, removing obstacles, rewarding achievements, encouraging and protecting risk takers, and finding mutually beneficial, symbiotic growth-paths for team members. It’s about creating an environment that cultivates ambition and excellence, and discourages competition and zero-sum thinking.
And all of that starts with listening. It means you listen to the team about what they want to accomplish. If as a manager you want to help your reports get where they want to go, you should probably listen to them when they tell you where that is. If someone has a problem, you listen to their perspective on what is causing it.
I’m pretty sure it’s the only way to create the desired high-performance environment for creative professionals. And there’s an added bonus: people like being listened to!
But even more so, they like feeling heard. Alas, these are not quite the same things.
In a perfect candy-colored world of HR fantasy, all you’d have to do for people to feel heard would be to have a conversation with them. In the real world, we know this is…insufficient. Listening to people is critical! Helping people to feel like they’ve been heard is also critical!
There are any number of paradigms of listening practice out there, like “active listening,” “empathic listening,” “open listening,” and “critical listening.” I don’t necessarily subscribe fully to one or another, but I’ve tried to adopt techniques from many of them. They all basically share two key goals: listen better, and demonstrate listening better.
Can employing the techniques of active, empathic, open, or critical listening get a little performative? Sure, especially when first learning to practice them. But erring on the side of over-expression in the sincere pursuit of better communication seems like a risk worth taking to me, given the potential rewards in terms of team health, morale, motivation, and productivity.
Because feeling heard can be wonderful: comforting, dignifying, revitalizing, empowering. Good communication is a vulnerable affair, and a quality listening discipline can foster trust and confidence. It demonstrates respect, and creates an opportunity to get deeper, quicker.
Which is all great! Except when it’s not. Because it’s also, of course, prone to exploitation and manipulation. Sigh.
The stark reality is that all of those tools and techniques to convince someone that they are being heard — even while you actually are hearing them — are exactly the tools and techniques you would use to convince them they’re being heard even if you have no intention to listen at all.
In other words, these are precisely the behaviors you would exhibit if you intended to gaslight someone into believing the things they said mattered. If you intended to let them “get it off their chest” and then go about your day as if you’d been told nothing, but wanted them to feel the warm glow of having been heard, well…this is how you’d do it. Don’t.
Employing these techniques and practices as a manager in order to fool folks into believing they’ve been heard is a priori perfidious; it’s bad management, and just frankly obnoxious human behavior.
Besides, exploiting the tools of good communication turns out to be an especially efficient way to destroy trust and light your own credibility on fire.
Don’t do it!
So back to that management seminar and The Judo Feedback™.
Here’s the thing about that exercise: it was play-acting. There was literally nothing I could actually do for the “employee” who came to me. 1) They didn’t really work for me, 2) they didn’t really have the problem they were presenting, and 3) the entire thing didn’t really exist!
The best I could do, play-acting my part as a manager, was to employ those techniques that demonstrated I was listening and that they had been heard. That’s how servant leadership works: you listen.
So as we began the exercise, I thanked them for bringing their concerns to my attention. I established that the conversation would be a safe space, and I acknowledged that it would be emotionally charged. I committed to being present for what they had to say.
I assured them that I was glad to have a frank conversation with them, and that I respected and appreciated their advocacy on their own behalf.
I made eye contact. I didn’t interrupt. I asked detailed follow-up questions. I shared a vulnerable and relatable anecdote from my own career.
I asked them to describe the world as they’d like to see it, once this issue was addressed. I asked, what did they imagine me doing to help them achieve their goals? What kind of support would be most meaningful for them?
Based on their answers, I committed to help them find opportunities to demonstrate the skills they thought were being overlooked. I committed to schedule a regular 1:1 so they could have direct time with me and hold me accountable for my commitments. And I proposed a more formal system of feedback, to ensure that we were in better sync on goals, achievements, and growth.
Fake, fake, fake, fake, fake.
But! Those are all things I might have done and said if the situation were real. And importantly, I’d like to think I would have then followed them up with those actions. The best I could do here, though, was to make my “employee” feel heard.
And from the employee’s point of view…it worked! They felt heard! They said so to the whole class!
But from the observer’s point of view, all they could see was the artifice. All they could see was exactly the behavior they would see from a manager who wanted to manipulate their employee into feeling like they had been heard, without actually listening to them — and there was no way they could think it was anything other than fake. Because it was fake!
Watching me feign all that sincerity, their gaslight radar must have been flashing red-alert. How could it not?
When they offered their critique, they obviously didn’t mean “manager judo” as any kind of compliment. Still, it was probably the most generous way they could have described what they saw — I’ll bet they wanted to say something much worse.
But when I later relayed the story to my direct report, and they humorously confirmed that indeed I practiced “manager judo,” they did mean it as a compliment (if, well, a somewhat sarcastic one).
We talked about it a bit further. They said their experience on my team had been that I seemed largely authentic and sincere. I did listen in a way that made them feel heard, and importantly, it seemed like our communication mattered: the listening consistently turned into actions, or changes in behavior, or new opportunities.
I don’t want to give the impression it was a fawning conversation; they did point out plenty of ways in which I could improve (fair enough!). Nonetheless, I had enough credibility that they weren’t constantly worried they were being gaslighted.
But as soon as they’d heard the phrase “manager judo,” and that image had formed in their mind’s eye, they’d known exactly what it meant. They didn’t think it was actually happening on our team (and it wasn’t), but they realized that if it were, they’d know just what it would look like.
A fine example of why it pays to turn off the cynicism. Sometimes, it turns out, the people designing these things actually know what they’re doing!
I’m kind of conflating “leadership” and “management” a lot here. For the record, I believe strongly that these are different endeavors. However! For the purposes of this essay, I think the principals I’m discussing apply quite seamlessly, if not quite identically, to both.
Of course…they do sometimes feel a little like combat sports. But no!