Influence, Listening and the Art of Moving the Middle

Early in my career as a sustainability advisor, talking was part of the job description. Clients engaged me to bring perspective and recommendations, and my counterparts generally appreciated them. I came prepared, I communicated clearly and the feedback was on point. But there was a pattern I didn’t fully notice at the time: the further my recommendations travelled up the ladder, the less traction they seemed to find. Some executive leaders would push back, deprioritize or quietly set things aside. The work was sound. Something else was missing.

What was missing, I’ve come to understand, was a deeper kind of listening. Not just to the people across the table, but also to the pressures, priorities and perspectives of those higher up in the organization who would ultimately decide what moved forward and what didn’t. I was applying force, even if it was often just a gentle push, where gravity was needed. I was guiding people who needed to feel genuinely heard and to feel like part of the solution before they could act on anything.

The instinct to lead with answers, to fill the airspace with what you know, doesn’t fade with experience. For many, it deepens. We accumulate expertise, lived professional experience and hard-won views on what’s essential and what’s just noise. We develop a sense of the non-negotiables. And somewhere along the way, the gap between what is said and what others hear starts to quietly widen.

This is the professional hazard I want to talk about. Not the absence of knowledge, but its excess. Not a lack of conviction, but conviction deployed as force rather than gravity that pushes people toward conclusions rather than drawing them there.

The Paradox of Expertise

There is a version of mastery that closes you down. You have enough experience to relate to others, identify patterns, anticipate objections and to know (or believe you know) what the other person is about to say. You’re ready to re-explain and press harder when you meet resistance. This is force at work: the conversation becomes a delivery mechanism rather than an exchange.

But there is another version of mastery that opens you up. The deeper I’ve gone in this field, the more I can see the edges of what I really know. That’s not discouraging – it’s freeing. It replaced the pressure to have all the answers with genuine curiosity about the questions, and it changed how I work with my colleagues and our clients, with less directing and more empowerment. Less talking and more listening for what I might have missed.

This matters at every level of a career. For those early on, asking questions isn’t a signal that you don’t belong in the room. It’s a signal that you’re engaged, honest about what you’re still learning and genuinely interested in others’ perspectives. That is not a lesser form of contribution; in many rooms, it’s the most valuable one.

The Exhausted Majority

There’s a concept gaining traction in research on social change and political discourse: the exhausted majority. It refers to the large and largely quiet group of people who don’t sit at the ideological extremes. They’re often pragmatic rather than dogmatic, hold complex and sometimes contradictory views, and are increasingly worn down by the noise from both ends of the spectrum.

In the sustainability space, this group matters enormously. They are the business leaders, investors, managers and employees who aren’t opposed to what we’re trying to do, but they also haven’t been moved by us. They may care deeply about specific issues – e.g., the health of their community, supply chain cost pressures, access to clean water, risk exposure – but they haven’t connected those things to the broader frame we keep offering up as “sustainability.”

And often, we haven’t asked them to tell us what they actually care about. We’ve told them what they should care about instead, when we may just want to know why a specific issue matters to them.

The exhausted majority doesn’t need more volume. They need to feel heard and know that others understand their constraints, incentives and the legitimate pressures shaping their decisions. When that happens, we can find the shared ground where something better can be built.

This means being willing to reframe. To set aside the language and hierarchy of our own priorities and ask: what are these people trying to achieve? Which issues are they emotionally connected to, and why? That attention to what matters and why is often more durable and mobilizing than broader, and sometimes seemingly unsolvable, concepts that may be educational but are less inclined to drive positive changes.

What Servant Leadership Actually Asks of Us

There’s a version of sustainability leadership that is fundamentally about being right – about having the better argument, stronger data and a more defensible position. It’s tempting to take this approach, especially in a space where the stakes are as high as they are, and where misinformation, opinions and inertia can be downright frustrating. So, being right feels not only justified but essential to breaking paralysis.

But if we set our egos aside, the goal was never to be right. It was to be helpful and supportive of the people, organizations and communities we’re trying to move. To be empathetic enough to hold their reality alongside our own. To try to understand what they’re actually facing, not just what we believe they should be facing. And to help drive change in ways that are impactful, not only in ways that are internally satisfying.

Servant leadership is how we can build genuine followership that strengthens culture, earns the trust of employees, clients, investors and others, and begins with an orientation that we exist to serve others. Not to have our senior roles and expertise validated, but to make it possible for others to engage, act, decide and lead better. That is a very different way of leading from the one many of us have experienced or been trained in – but when we see it, we know it works. It asks something harder of us: to be secure enough in what we believe that we don’t need to defend it constantly.

What This Looks Like in Practice

None of this means softening your convictions or pretending you don’t have strongly felt and experience-based positions. It means holding them with open hands rather than clenched fists and entering rooms with questions as often as you enter with conclusions. It also means resisting the urge to rebut before you’ve fully understood, so you can advise after you’ve genuinely listened and persuade after you’ve earned the right to be heard.

It means being willing to find value in the views of people you disagree with – not because you need to agree on everything, but because real progress is almost never built on unanimity (or as I like to call it, “puppy dogs and ice cream”). It’s built on having talented and deeply engaged people who may see the world differently but share enough of a goal to move together, at least for a while, and at least on this.

Gravity, not force. It’s a different way of moving through your work and through your world – not louder, but more magnetic. Not based on certainty, but on curiosity and on helping others. And probably more capable of changing what actually matters.