What if the reason people feel unheard at work has nothing to do with what they’re saying and everything to do with how we listen?
In workplaces everywhere, people are speaking but far fewer feel truly heard. Leaders expect clarity, confidence, and polished answers, while employees are often thinking out loud for the very first time. The result is frustration, misalignment, and missed insight. Not because people lack ideas, but because the space to fully articulate them rarely exists.
In this episode of Breaking the Chain, Nathaniel Chapman sits down with Oscar Trimboli, a global listening expert based in Sydney, Australia. Oscar’s work is grounded in a research database of over 35,000 workplace listeners and hundreds of in-depth conversations exploring how people communicate, what often goes unsaid, and why listening is one of the most misunderstood leadership skills. He’s also the author of How to Listen, where he challenges the idea that listening is passive arguing instead that it’s a skill that shapes culture, trust, and performance.
Throughout the conversation, Nathaniel and Oscar explore why most people believe they are good listeners, yet only a small percentage of people actually experience being listened to. They unpack the gap between how fast people think and how slowly they speak, why leaders often get frustrated when ideas aren’t fully formed, and how unfinished thoughts can be misunderstood, mislabelled, or dismissed too quickly in the workplace. Oscar shares powerful metaphors and practical insights that reveal how listening is less about having the right response and more about creating the conditions for clarity to emerge.
The episode also takes a deeper look at leadership during change. Oscar challenges the tendency for organisations to talk endlessly about the future while overlooking the past. When effort, identity, and history aren’t acknowledged, people disengage not because they resist change, but because they don’t feel heard. It’s a perspective that reframes resistance as a listening problem, not a people problem.
This conversation isn’t about becoming a perfect listener overnight. It’s about becoming slightly better in the next conversation and recognising how that small shift can transform meetings, relationships, and leadership impact over time.
If you lead people, manage change, or want to build more human and effective workplaces, this episode will invite you to rethink what it really means to listen and why it matters more than you think.
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