Do people overestimate how well they listen?

Yes. Where studies have set what people say about their own listening beside a recording or another person's rating, the two did not match. In one, 94% of managers called themselves good listeners, and so did 94% of the managers their own employees ranked in the bottom quarter.

By Michael Cinquino, Founder and Facilitator  ·  November 12, 2026

Would you rate yourself a good listener? Most of us would, and that is the finding. 94% of 144 hospitality managers rated themselves good or very good listeners. So did 94% of the managers their own employees ranked in the bottom quarter (Brownell, 1990).

Here's why the second number matters more than the first. If only the strong listeners rated themselves highly, a self-rating would tell you something. When the bottom quarter gives the same answer as everyone else, the rating stops telling you who listens well.

The pattern holds when the yardstick is a recording. Nurses in one study rated their own effort to understand the patient as high 83% of the time. Coders listening to the recordings scored their empathy as high 31% of the time. The same 12 nurses, in the same recorded patient sessions: 25 of 30 sessions self-rated high, 10 of 32 scored high (Östlund and others, 2015).

It holds for trained professionals too. In a study of 140 licensed addiction professionals, how skilled they said they were was unrelated, the authors' word, to the skill coders heard on their tapes (Miller and others, 2004).

I do not read this as people being dishonest. From the inside, listening feels like paying attention, and most of us are paying attention. What the other person receives is something else: whether you said back what they told you, whether you asked before you answered, whether you stayed when it got hard. Those can be heard on a recording. They are hard to feel from your own chair.

So who should rate your listening? The person you were listening to, or a recording. In a review of 664 findings on listening at work, it was most often the people being listened to who rated the listening (Kluger and others, 2024).

This is why I built Heard. It scores a real conversation from what was actually said: how you listened, the empathy you showed and how you stayed with a hard moment. Heard: Who Really Listened is free to download for iPhone, and Heard for Meetings™ is for work calls.

If you want to see the gap in your own team, book a free discovery call at cdlab.io/book.

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