CNBC.COM
Good listening goes beyond occasionally lending an ear. Done well, often and with intention, it can play a role in your future success.
Listening has helped some prominent company leaders, like Lowe's CEO Marvin Ellison, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan and billionaire businessman Barry Diller — the former head of Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox — reach new levels of success, the trio said in interviews for episodes of CNBC's "Leaders Playbook," a series that aired in January.
Actively incorporating what they heard from their staff, their consumers and their own intuition helped them solve problems and gain competitive advantages, they each said.
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Hearing what people have to say can make you more persuasive, says Alison Wood Brooks, an associate professor at Harvard University and the author of 2025 book, "Talk: The Science Of Conversation And The Art Of Being Ourselves." If you remember what people say and ask thoughtful questions, you can build trust, genuine relationships and gain influence when you need to unite a team toward a specific goal, she says.
Here, the three CEOs detail how different types of listening have helped get them ahead:
Listening to your team
Before taking the helm of the home improvement retailer in 2018, Lowe's CEO Ellison visited multiple of the chain's locations over a 30-day period, working among associates — listening to their insights and learning the lay of the land, he said.
Ellison worked at the pro desk, where specialists assist professional contractors and tradespeople, unloaded trucks and learned about pricing and placements on the sales floor. He prioritized gaining firsthand knowledge of his employees' day-to-day experiences — including what was working and what wasn't, he said.
"I did all these random things. I was taking notes. I was having lunch with associates," said Ellison. People Now, seven years into the job, he still makes time to talk with store associates in person and listen to their feedback, he said.
In the C-suite, Ellison sees lots of "fancy presentations" about what's going on in the company, he said. But talking to customers and associates in person helps him really understand it, and it strengthens the connection between him and his employees, he added.
"The [CEO] title is intimidating, but people are people, and after about five minutes of conversation, people relax and they start to just be themselves," said Ellison.
Listening for great ideas
Diller, the chairman and senior executive of IAC and Expedia Group, spoke about the value of listening while brainstorming with others, especially when searching for a breakthrough idea.
The billionaire executive enjoys "creative conflict" group brainstorming sessions, where team members passionately argue about their ideas and deliberate on them until they reach a decision, he said. These sessions can be "loud and argumentative ... and somewhat brutal," but "I think it's a great environment" for ideating, said Diller.
Effective listening during a creative conflict session requires you to "force naivete," Diller said: You can't actively hear new perspectives if you're cynical about other people's ideas. And you can't solely rely on your own instincts to parse out a great idea, he added.
"It's not like you listen and you wait for that one thing to clang into your head. It's that process — you hear things that, if you're listening, they either convince you this way or that way," said Diller. "And at some point through this process, you are convinced because you've been able to listen, hear and put that against your own instincts ... I just think it's a good process."
Listening to your audience
Mohan started at YouTube as its chief product officer in 2015, and became its CEO in 2023. His leadership superpower, he said: regularly asking for feedback from creators, many of whom use and interact with his platform on a regular basis.
"I always say to my product teams here that if you really want to understand fundamentally how our product works, go talk to creators," Mohan said. "They will give you feedback at an extremely detailed kind of minutia level."
Mohan himself has built personal relationships with some of those video creators, and personally listens to their thoughts on details "as small as our thumbnail-picking technology," he said. He likes to ask for their opinions on potential features or "ideas that are not fully baked to get their feedback early," he said.
"That spirit of entrepreneurship that comes from creators really permeates the culture at YouTube as well," said Mohan. YouTube staffers can chime in with ideas or constructive criticism at multiple levels within the company, he said.
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