​
​The Leadership Letter by Phil Hayes-St Clair

The ultimate sign of respect
​What Ray Martin did differently

READ ON PHILHSC.COM • 7 MINUTE READ • 28 OCTOBER, 2026

Fifteen years ago, I drove up a farm driveway as the sun was setting. There was a long queue of vehicles stretching ahead of me towards the homestead. More than 150 leaders from government, big business and farming had been invited to contribute to a national strategy on making farming more sustainable.

At check-in, I was handed keys to a cabin. Nobody mentioned I’d be sharing it. By the time I found my quarters, my roommate was fast asleep, so I quietly entered and went to bed. The cabin had no curtains and no blinds. When the sun came up, we both woke, and soon after, my roommate started asking me what had brought me to the farm.

His voice was unmistakable. It was the award-winning Australian journalist, Ray Martin.

I’ve thought about that morning many times since. I don’t remember the questions he asked or my answers. What stayed with me was how he listened. He extended his curiosity to a relative stranger at dawn and he gave me his complete and undivided attention. If there was ever an example of the old adage that people remember how you make them feel, this is it.

Ray was almost certainly the most recognised person on the property. He had spent a career being listened to. He had every reason to fill the quiet of that early morning with his own stories, yet he chose to spend it finding out about mine.

Status usually works the other way. The more senior people become, the less they tend to hear. It’s rarely intentional. More often, they are computing more information, switching context more often and trying to be as efficient with their time as possible.

15 years later

I’ve been thinking about that morning again since my third conversation with Julian Treasure on my podcast (coming 31 October 2026 - subscribe here).

Julian has spent his life on sound. He started as a drummer, where playing well means listening to every other instrument at once while doing something complicated yourself. He went on to build a 150-person magazine publishing company, then founded The Sound Agency, an audio branding business that helped companies understand how they sound. He has given five TED talks which he estimates have been viewed around 170 million times. His talk, ‘How to speak so that people want to listen’, has been watched roughly five times more than his talk on how to listen better.

We are far more interested in being heard than in learning to listen.

For years he had wondered why the companies he worked with didn’t listen and one day he had a revelation that was elegantly simple. They were full of people who didn’t listen. Put enough of them in one building and you get an organisation that doesn’t listen either.

During our conversation, I asked Julian why getting promoted seems to make people worse listeners. He offered three reasons. First, we tend to promote the extroverts, the dominant voices who lead meetings and speak far more than they listen. Second, the role itself pulls people in the wrong direction, because senior people are expected to know things and tell others, rather than ask questions and stay curious. And then there’s ego. Listening is humble work, and people who have grown used to being the centre of attention can find it hard to give that attention away.

Then he described what listening signals to the other person. When he is listening to someone, he said, he is telling them, “You’re more important than I am at this moment.”

That is why I believe listening, in a busy and distracted world, is the ultimate sign of respect. Attention is a frighteningly scarce resource. Every notification, every meeting and every unread message competes for it. And when you give someone all of it, you are telling them they matter more than everything else in the world at that moment. People feel that.

Almost everyone thinks they’re a good listener

Ironically, almost everyone thinks they’re a good listener while almost nobody has been taught how to listen effectively. Few of us treat listening as a skill, so few of us practise it. Julian offered several ways for leaders to find out where they stand and three of them have become what I think of as three tests of respect.

1. The bad news test: When did someone last bring you bad news? If the answer is a long time ago, Julian suggests you should start to worry. He told me about an organisation run by what he called a ‘dragon leader’, someone who bit the head off anyone arriving with anything other than good news. People became so frightened that they invented good news and hid the bad. When bad news reaches your desk, it’s evidence that people trust you to hear it.
2. The recorded meeting: With everyone’s permission, record a meeting and listen back. Count how much you spoke, how many questions you asked, how often you interrupted and whether anyone left a pause after someone else finished. For a bolder version, Julian suggests sitting through a meeting where you say nothing at all and hand the chair to someone else. Once you stop driving the room, you may be surprised by who speaks up and what they know.
3. The playback: After an earlier conversation with Julian, I started asking one question at the end of instructions and problem-solving conversations: ‘Play back what you heard’. It has become a default for me, at work and at home. Julian’s point is that when you speak to 50 people, 50 different messages land, because each person listens through their own filters. Asking for the playback closes the loop. It also saves people from spending a week on something you never meant to start.

There are limits in listening

Listening is a generous act, and it doesn’t require you to agree to everything you hear. You can give someone your full attention, understand why they hold their view and still disagree with it. In my experience, the leaders who listen best are often the ones most able to deliver a firm no, because the other person knows they have been heard first.

You also won’t be able to give everyone your complete attention every time. Some days are too full. The aim is to notice when that happens and to make sure the people and moments that matter most get all your attention.

I doubt Ray Martin remembers that morning. He had no reason to think a conversation with a stranger before breakfast would matter. Fifteen years on, his curiosity and interest are the clearest memory from those days on the farm.

Every conversation this week will have an impact

How people feel (and how productive they are) after that conversation is up to you. Whether you listen fully or walk into the room distracted, it’s time to ask yourself one question: when did someone last bring you bad news?

See you next Wednesday,

Phil Hayes-St Clair
CEO Coach

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