At some point most leaders suffer hearing loss. It is when they stop hearing unfiltered messages from the front line and messages all the way back and up the organisation that the trouble often starts. They stop hearing even the loud signals, and never hear the soft voices.

Some leaders are not interested in listening unless it is the sound of their own voice, or that sound echoed by sycophants hand-picked to make them feel good. In very simple organisations operating in an uncomplicated and unchanging environment and offering straightforward products or services, this might work for a while. Although pity the poor employees who suffer such conditions.

Leaders who own their own companies (or are allowed to act like they do) are especially prone to this kind of problem. A top-down leader-knows-best approach may have worked in the early days (when the organisation was small, simple and straightforward), but with growth, competition and new technologies, as well as changing expectations of employees, this top-down approach is likely to fail, and possibly catastrophically.

Some leaders pretend to listen, and employ devices like town hall meetings or staff surveys to gauge feedback. Too often these are merely exercises in lip service. Surveys focus on bland generalisations such as “I am excited about the future direction of Titanic Pty”, and ask the questions the leadership wants answered, rather than the staff want to ask.

Generally the results of these surveys are mediated by market research types who present aggregated data in pretty graphics. Less often is the raw, disintermediated data presented. Town hall meetings are frequently stage-managed affairs, that do not hear the soft voices in the room.

Managers can also play a filtering role. Feedback is selectively amplified or dampened according to their own agendas. Staff get labelled as “one of us” or “troublemakers” and “oppositional”. Very tempting for an ambitious manager to pass on to leaders only the palatable feedback.

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Getting the feedback mechanisms to be functional is a critical task of leaders. Too often leaders think their role is to be focused primarily on the external competitive or regulatory environment and to enact strategies that in their view address whatever opportunities or threats they see. This can lead to institutional arrogance, that the view, and therefore the views of those further up the ladder are the only ones that count.

The belief in the primacy of the promoted is a foolish, insecure attitude to leading in most circumstances and results in poor decision-making and poor performance. There seems to be a correlation between the amount of polish and varnish in the leader’s office, and the amount of varnish applied to the feedback they hear.

Soft voices, often convey messages that are incomplete, fragmented, raw, unvarnished, and blunt. However all the more reason to pay attention to them.

Dr Jim Bright, FAPS owns Bright and Associates, a Career Management Consultancy and is a Director of Ed Tech startup Become Education www.become.education. Email to opinion@jimbright.com. Follow him on Twitter @DrJimBright