One of the most underdeveloped leadership skills is not vision, communication, or decisiveness.
It is listening.
That may sound obvious, but most of us confuse listening with hearing. Hearing is passive. Listening is not. Listening is a discipline, and like all disciplines, it must be practiced, protected, and cultivated over time.
In leadership, what we listen to and what we ignore quietly shapes the kind of leaders we become. What we pay attention to matters, because attention is not neutral.
In psychology, there is a concept known as attentional capture. It describes the way our attention is drawn toward what is loud, moving, emotionally charged, or threatening. In other words, we do not naturally notice what is most important. We notice what is most salient. Over time, that matters. What consistently grabs our attention begins to shape our instincts, our reactions, and eventually our decisions.
Leadership environments are full of noise. Enrollment and financial metrics demand attention. Emails multiply quickly. Crises interrupt our well-planned calendar blocking. Opinions compete with feelings and facts. In that kind of environment, listening does not happen by accident. It has to be intentional.
This is where leadership often begins to drift. Not because leaders stop caring, but because they stop listening deeply. In my experience, it is easy to only hear the loudest voices. It is easy to only respond to the most urgent pressures. If I’m not careful, I can find myself wanting to react to what is visible and immediate, while missing what is forming quietly beneath the surface. The thing beneath the “thing.”
Scripture consistently presents wisdom as attentiveness. Jesus regularly withdrew from crowds, not because He was avoiding people, but because He understood something we often forget: discernment requires the elimination of distraction (Luke 5:16). You cannot listen well when everything is shouting.
Leadership failures are rarely the result of a single bad decision. More often, they are the result of long seasons of misdirected attention. When leaders stop listening to God, to trusted community, and to the quieter realities around them, they begin to lead from assumption rather than understanding.
This is why listening must be treated as a discipline rather than a personality trait. Some people are naturally more talkative.
Hi, I’m some people, especially when it involves my passions!
Others are naturally reflective. But honestly, disciplined listening is not about temperament. It is about intention.
At its core, listening trains leaders to slow down. It forces us to distinguish between what is loud and what is true. It helps us notice patterns rather than isolated moments. And perhaps most importantly, it humbles us. You cannot listen well and remain self-centered at the same time.
There is also a moral dimension to listening. Leaders who fail to listen tend to rely on position, authority, or expertise to carry them, but that’s for another post.
I was selected as the next president of Manna University five and a half years ago. From the fall of 2020 to the summer of 2023, I did a lot of reading, reflecting, and research on my soon-to-be new job. I attended workshops, networked within biblical higher education, found mentors like Dr. Mike Rakes and coaches like Dr. Larry McKinney.
All that work helped, but not as much as the moments where I sat across the table from faculty, students, staff, and partners and listened. I can say with certainty that most of my activity as president (2023-present) was a direct result of making intentional space to hear from God and His people.
Listening requires resisting the temptation to perform. It feels good to be rewarded for having quick answers and confident responses. But speed is not the same as wisdom. In fact, wisdom develops slowly, after competing inputs have been weighed, and quieter truths have been allowed to surface. This process happens behind the scenes. What the team sees is my decisiveness. What they often don’t see is the long journey of thinking deeply, listening attentively, and discerning prayerfully that allows me to lead with speed.
In biblical leadership, listening is not a preliminary step before action. It is part of faithful action itself. The leaders of the early church listened to scripture, to the Spirit, and to one another before making decisions that would shape generations. They did not rush to resolution. They submitted themselves to discernment (Acts 15).
At Manna University, we care deeply about forming leaders who can listen well. Not just to lectures or content, but to God, to context, and to people. Leadership that cannot listen will eventually fail, no matter how gifted or driven it may be.
In a world filled with noise, leaders who learn to listen will stand out not because they speak the loudest, but because they lead with clarity, humility, and discernment.
Dr. Carlo A. Serrano, President